How our new strategy supports equity, diversity and inclusion

The more honest move, and the harder one, is to be clear about what we are not going to do.

Our new strategy makes this easier. It says NCVO's value lies in convening, enabling, protecting and amplifying civil society, rather than in trying to do everything ourselves. On most things that is simply good sense. On equity, diversity and inclusion it is closer to a principle.

Our strategy is built around three things we want to strengthen, resilience, connection and influence, and four drivers that do the strengthening: a stronger and more representative membership; better use of data, evidence and AI; sharper advocacy and influence; and deeper partnerships.

There is no separate driver for equity, diversity and inclusion, and that is the point. It is not a workstream to be parked in one place. It runs through all four, and it presses hardest on three: how we connect, how we use evidence, and how we use our influence.

Our role is to listen, not lead

The expertise is already in the sector. The organisations led by and rooted in the communities that meet the sharpest end of inequality, disabled people, the global majority, LGBTQ+ people, those in poverty and others no short list will ever quite capture, are not waiting to be told how to do inclusion. They have been doing it, often for decades, usually with less money and less attention than the work deserves.

The organisations most fluent in the language of inclusion are not always the ones best at it, and we should be honest enough to place ourselves among those still learning. So the question for a body like ours is not how we become the authority on equity. It is how we listen to those organisations, connect them to each other and to the people with power, and make them harder to ignore.

This asks for some discipline. There is always a pull towards being seen to lead, towards putting our own name on the work; amplifying other people is less visible and less flattering, but on this subject it is the only credible thing to do. It raises a tension worth naming. The first of those drivers wants a more representative membership, one that reflects the breadth of civil society. Good.

But representation is not the same as speaking for. The risk, always, is that we carry voices we have only borrowed and call it inclusion. The honest version of representation is making room, not standing in the space.

Amplifying isn’t stepping back

There is a fair objection to all of this. It can sound like a careful way of announcing that we will do nothing; that "we will amplify others" is what an organisation says when it is quietly stepping back. In a climate where inclusion is increasingly treated as an opinion to be debated rather than a condition to be met, that worry deserves a straight answer.

The honest answer is that this strategy sets our intent, not yet our methods. It tells you where we mean to stand before it tells you every step we will take, and we would rather be clear about the direction than pretend we have worked out all the detail. But the direction itself is a choice, and not a soft one.

It means listening in a way that changes what we do, so that the insight of equalities-led organisations shapes what we carry to government rather than being gathered at a distance from it.

It means using our platform and convening power to carry their work further than they can reach alone, and to stand with them when the climate turns. It means holding ourselves to the same questions we ask of others, including the uncomfortable ones about who leads NCVO and who is paid what.

What it does not mean is appointing ourselves the experts. The expertise sits with organisations that have earned it; our job is to defer to it, make the case for it and carry it further, not to talk over it.

Using evidence with humility

Evidence is a part of this that we could do well, and it needs its own humility. Data can flatten as easily as it reveals. The smallest groups disappear into aggregates; the categories we count by are choices, not facts, and someone is always rounded down to zero. "We measured our diversity" can quietly become a substitute for changing anything. So the work is not only to produce the numbers. It is to be honest about whose experience the numbers can and cannot hold.

Building resilience where it’s needed most

Resilience, which sounds like the comfortable word, is the uncomfortable one. The strategy is honest that the equalities-focused, community-led organisations are often the most financially fragile and the most digitally excluded.

The parts of civil society doing some of the most important inclusion work are frequently the least resourced to survive the year. If resilience means anything for equity, it means noticing who is most exposed, and resisting the instinct to spread our support evenly when the need is not even at all.

And resilience is not the same as endurance. It cannot mean helping organisations absorb inequality more gracefully, or learn to survive conditions that should not exist.

The systems that produce these inequalities are not weather; they are made, and some of them are ones we are part of and have benefited from. If the word is to mean anything here, it has to include the work of changing them, not just the work of withstanding them.

AI can widen existing inequalities

AI raises the stakes on all of this. It will not create fairness; it inherits whatever is already there, learning from an unequal world and then repeating it faster, more cheaply and more confidently than before, usually without announcing itself.

The organisations least able to invest in these tools are already on the wrong side of the digital divide, so the gap widens at both ends. The question is not only whether a system is biased, but who gets to use it and who gets used by it.

Our job is to help the sector go in with its eyes open, and to make sure the excitement about the tools does not become another way of building old inequalities into new infrastructure.

How we’ll know if we’ve succeeded

This is not a programme with a tidy set of deliverables, and it is not a way of quietly stepping back either. It is a clearer idea of where our part of the work begins. The least useful thing we could do is turn equity into one more thing NCVO claims to own.

The most useful is to make sure the people already doing it well are listened to, counted properly and far harder to overlook, and to let ourselves be measured by the same standard we ask of everyone else.

Because the how is still to come, this is also an ask. We would rather work it out with the sector than present it finished, so if your organisation is already doing this work, tell us where we could be genuinely useful, and tell us where we would do more good by getting out of the way. Both answers help.

If this strategy works, you will not measure it by how much we say about equity. You will measure it by whether the organisations doing this work are stronger, better heard and harder to ignore than they are today, and by whether we asked the same hard questions of ourselves as we asked of everyone else.