Agenda Alliance's anti-racism journey (so far)

Race Equality Week 2024 runs from 5-11 February 2024, with a theme of #ListenActChange. Below, Agenda Alliance CEO, Indy Cross, shares how she has approached anti-racism work as a leader of a charity that recognises and aims to address the impact systemic racism has on women and girls.

Race Equality Week is co-ordinated by Race Equality Matters (REM), founded in the wake of 2020 to tackle ‘race equality’ in the workplace. According to REM, this year’s theme reflects their findings that “only 25% of the REM community believe their organisation focuses on action, change, and impact, and not just words.”

A core value of Agenda Alliance’s work is to be intersectional. Our work is centred around the fact that most disadvantaged women and girls experience multiple types of intersecting needs, which can only be resolved when looked at across services, sectors, and systems.

This means we also need to acknowledge the structures of oppression different women and girls face, understanding that racial discrimination is a key factor.

Racism is deeply embedded within our public services. Since the murder of George Floyd in 2020, public consciousness of the racism that exists within our criminal justice system has thankfully increased, but the conversation can’t stop there. Systemic racism impacts Black, Asian, and minoritized women and girls in contact with the NHS, social care, mental health and other support services, as well as badly affecting young women and girls in our schools. Racial discrimination is also a key driver of poverty, which is at the root of many of the challenges the women we work with face.

As Agenda Alliance’s work focuses on systems-change, understanding and responding to this racism is not only morally right but central to our purpose. We must strive to be anti-racist and intersectional across all our work, including research, member engagement, policy influencing and working with women and girls, so that women and girls with experience of racism are actively engaged, represented and heard, and we can achieve effective change.

The theme this year is spot-on: we all cannot just talk about racism in the workplace without being honest about what’s being done and how we are working towards changing things. That includes Agenda Alliance. 

At Agenda Alliance, we’ve been able to enact some change that I feel proud of. We now have seven women of colour on our Board. This required white women on our Board to engage in these conversations openly and with heart. Those women gave up their power and stood down to make space for other women. Given 51% of the charity sector do not have a single ‘minority ethnic’ woman on their board, this is really meaningful - and it gives me greater confidence in our decision-making. I really believe that there needs to be a shift away from getting more women of colour in junior roles, to starting from the top – put us on your Boards.

We also initiated a process of anti-racism work (funded by Esmee Fairbairn Foundation), which we began in 2022 with Martha Awojobi (Founder and Director of JMB Consulting), involving the entire Board and staff team. The approach is one which aims to foster strong foundations for us to have ongoing, reflective, internal conversations about our anti-racist practice, rather than an expectation we can simply learn a set of 'approved’ steps to follow. 

We began with a series of workshops to uplift internal understanding of what racism actually is. We have also spent time looking inwards, and discussing where these dynamics can show up in ourselves, Agenda Alliance’s culture and practice, our external facing work, and our governance. The next stages involve us collectively designing our anti-racist vision, and emerging with a structured road map for ongoing work, with clear ways of embedding anti-racist practice at all levels of our organisation.

It is important to acknowledge while we are on (a lifelong) journey, we might get things wrong. Just because I am a woman of colour, it doesn’t automatically mean I know how to solve racism in the workplace – and nor should that responsibility fall solely to me. As a leader of this organisation, I have the power to implement change and shape priorities, in comparison to times in my career where I haven’t been in a position to call things out. The charity sector has plenty of work to do in this area and my role now offers me the opportunity to connect with other leaders in the sector, build solidarity, and try to influence change.

I trust that my team is dedicated to anti-racism and intersectional practice. I see them make concerted effort to continually learn, and consider the needs of Black, Asian and minoritised women when designing their work, co-producing with women, collaborating with services and beyond. However, we also name and acknowledge that we are currently a predominantly white team, which shapes and limits our organisational viewpoint. As an alliance, we must make sure we are meaningfully engaging with, listening to, and advocating on behalf of a diverse set of member organisations, and make sure we identify where there are gaps. We have to be attuned to where we have the potential to do harm, and be willing to recognise feedback as an offering that supports us to grow.

We need to do more work to attract Black, Asian and minoritized women to apply for roles at all levels of the organisation and create an organisation where they can thrive. We have introduced initial changes to our recruitment process, but this is long term work: more must be done to combat the structural factors that continue to shut Black, brown and minoritised women out of certain spaces.

Our consultation process with Martha will come to an end this summer, but our work as a team and board won’t end there. Real change for Black, Asian, and minoritised women can only be achieved if the sector comes together to share learning, mistakes and achievements – and I am looking forward to the next steps in that journey.