2023 Shortlist | Become
Become
Shortlist – Board Equity, Diversity and Inclusion
About the Charity
For 30 years, Become has stood shoulder to shoulder with children in care and young care leavers, helping them get the support they need. Become is a small charity with a clear vision: that young people who’ve experienced care have the same chances as everyone else to live happy, fulfilled lives. Every day, its expert and dedicated team is making a difference to children and young people facing the greatest challenges life can throw at them. Young people are at the heart of this organisation’s work, and it is committed to ensuring their voices are heard in the decisions that affect their lives. Become works alongside young people to make the care system the best it can be, using what it learns from working directly with its service users to campaign for meaningful change.
Charity number: 1010518 | BecomeCharity.org.uk
Equality, Law and Advocacy | England – London | 26-100 paid staff
What the Board Achieved
The Become board is committed to representing those it serves, ensuring it has the expertise to deliver its vital services, and living up to its goal as a charity that empowers care-experienced people in making decisions that affect them.
The board can boast that 60% of trustees are care-experienced, 40% represent communities facing disadvantaged or marginalised groups. The board is committed to maintaining a minimum of 50% care- experienced trustees and 33% from BAME backgrounds, and is also embracing neurodiversity.
That commitment is showcased in the evolution of the board’s recruitment practices and prioritising the needs of those who have not had the experience of serving as a trustee previously. When trustees step down, recruitment is highly specific to the expertise and diversity needed on the board. Become welcomes applicants with no previous experience of governance and invites anyone interested to have an informal chat with the Chair ahead of applying (allowing potential applicants the opportunity to ask questions and explain how the board could help them to grow into the role). The charity makes a target effort to encourage individuals who have previously accessed its services to apply, and has succeeded (20% of the current board has been recruited this way, including young trustees who were accessing the charity’s services recently). Applicants who go on to apply are asked to submit a CV and answer a set of five short questions to demonstrate how they share the charity’s values and showcase their experience or skills. A care-experienced young person sits on every interview panel, and that perspective helps the board identify the candidates who are able to centre young people in their approach to decision making. New board members are offered training once they have joined the board.
In addition to focusing on diversity and representation across the board, trustees are also recruited for their diverse range of expertise from within the sector – the board includes social workers, mental health professionals, people working in financial services, and more. However, it is not enough to simply bring people from different backgrounds with diverse experiences and expertise together; and Become aims to foster an inclusive environment where each trustee is able to speak up and participate in the process. Trustees routinely participate in training sessions on unconscious bias, giving them the opportunity to learn more about the communication styles of their fellow board members and feel confident in challenging each other when needed. Meetings are conducted in person as well as remotely, to create flexibility and improve accessibility for members of the board who have competing commitments or who have different needs in accessing and participating in group discussions. During meetings, the Chair is responsible for ensuring that everyone can contribute and may, for important discussions, call on each trustee in turn to speak and share their views. Critically, trustees are encouraged to be authentic and honest during meetings, allowing board members to speak about their true experiences and be emotional. This is particularly important for encouraging young board members, who may not have much practice in speaking about their experiences in professional settings, in being able to share their honest views or personal stories of potentially traumatising experiences without feeling that their emotion is a weakness.
The board has provided leadership on equity, diversity and inclusion by embedding inclusive practice across the organisation. The same strategies used for diversifying the board have been used to inform the recruitment processes across the organisation, which has led to a higher number of staff who also have care experience. Now, both trustees and staff regularly undertake training and use feedback or reflection sessions to identify areas for improvement and ways to further embed or improve EDI throughout the organisation – one such outcome has been the staff development of a new policy for ‘Supporting Care-Experienced Colleagues’.
