Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

Ensuring a varied representation and contribution to projects

Catalyst is committed to eliminating discrimination and encouraging diversity amongst our workforce, our partnership network and the projects we are involved in. We recognise the strength great diversity brings to projects and organisations to achieve better outcomes and how it helps organisations to ensure varied representation and contributions to projects.

This starts with having an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion policy in place to outline your organisation's commitment. We appreciate that not all organisations might have this in place when signing up for Catalyst project/service and therefore this is not a key requirement. We strongly encourage organisations to develop a policy if this is currently missing. A basic Equal Opportunities template to get you started can be found on the NCVO website or you can use the template we have created.

Please consider how you can currently perform on the points below and how you can improve on them for this project. This will be a great step towards being a stronger ED&I organisation.

• Encourage open conversations about affinity biases;

• Create an environment in which individual differences and the contributions are encouraged, recognised and value;

• When recruiting, training and promoting, ensure you have clear, objective criteria so that you always made decisions based on merit and aren’t influenced by bias;

• When assembling project, user participation as well as research groups, ensure they represent as wide a range of people from across our society as possible, with different ethnic, social and religious backgrounds, mixed genders, mixed sexual preferences and mixed abilities;

• Encourage group decision-making