Be the Change: How to tackle racial inequalities in health and care charities

With unacceptable statistics, like Black women are four times more likely to die around pregnancy than White women, and Black babies are almost three times more likely to die than White babies – still now, in 2023 – the need for effective action could not be stronger.

That is why, a few years ago, we created an inclusion action plan to do our bit to try to narrow the gaps in racial inequalities by driving improvements in our recruitment practices, organisational culture, influencing activities and work with people with lived experience.  

A key part of that plan was convening our members to learn from each other, so we organised a series of four members-only roundtables for focused, pragmatic and open discussion in the following areas: 

1. How to effectively diversify Boards of Trustees and staff teams. 
2. How to establish and maintain inclusive organisational cultures. 
3. How best to work with people with diverse lived experience in insight and influencing activities. 
4. How to ensure inclusive service delivery. 

This report, Be the Change: How to tackle racial inequalities in health and care charities, highlights the main learnings in each of these areas, and draws out general advice from all these conversations. It is by no means a comprehensive guide to tackling racism within either the health or voluntary sectors. But we hope it will give colleagues in the health and voluntary sectors ideas for what they could do, alongside practical tools to take action.  

Please do read and share this report with your colleagues, teams and organisations, and further afield within the charity and health sectors. Our hope is that if we work together to pool our resources and talent, we can turn the tide on racial inequalities in both the health and voluntary sectors. 

If you would like to read this report in an alternative format, please get in touch.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank those National Voices members who participated in our Be the Change roundtables, sharing their valuable insights with us, and especially those who led and facilitated these important but difficult discussions. 

The roundtables were funded by Pfizer UK. Pfizer has had no oversight of the roundtables or editorial input on the report.