2021 Shortlist | Disability Rights UK
Disability Rights UK
Shortlist – Board Equity, Diversity and Inclusion
About the Charity
Disability Rights UK (DR UK) is the UK’s leading organisation led by, run by, and working for disabled people. The charity works to create a society where disabled people have equal power, rights and opportunity. It does this by working with disabled people’s organisations and Government across the UK to influence regional and national change for improved rights, accessibility, benefits, quality of life and economic opportunities for disabled people.
It offers advice, information and campaigning services to disabled people and member organisations. DR UK is building a movement to strengthen the collective and individual voices of disabled people’s organisations and disabled people to achieve this change.
The charity develops innovative ways of overcoming the barriers disabled people face. For example, the Get Yourself Active project pioneered the use of ‘personal budgets’ for physical activity. The DR UK website reaches one million people each year, who have access to factsheets on subjects such as housing, education, transport and finding legal advice – all written by disabled people for disabled people. The members’ advice line supports 400 organisational members including other advice agencies and disable-led organisations. The charity supports businesses to become inclusive employers, and the Leadership Programme supports disabled people in building successful careers. All of the charity’s work draws on and learns from disabled people’s lived experience. The policy work uses this learning to speak truth to power and effect long-term change. DR UK membership is reflective and inclusive of all sections of the community.
Charity number: 1138585 | www.disabilityrightsuk.org
Disability Services | England – London | 11-25 paid staff | 11-25 volunteers
What the Board Achieved
DR UK’s mission is to campaign for the rights of all disabled people to be included in every aspect of life. The charity seeks to bring the lived experiences of disabled people to everything it does – challenging policy makers, institutions and individuals to remove the barriers that exist for disabled people. The charity understands that to be successful in its mission, it needs to ensure that its trustees, staff, ambassadors, volunteers and members represent the diversity and intersectionality of disabled people in the UK.
Recognising that the organisation did not reflect the full diversity of the disabled community and was missing important perspectives in its discussions, the board made changes from the top down – updating its trustee recruitment strategy to transform the board; recruiting more diverse staff and giving staff more input into decision making; and ensuring that Equity, Diversity and Inclusion practices were embedded in all areas of the organisation’s work. Today, a majority of trustees are disabled and now represent more impairments than in the past, the number of women on the board has increased as have the number of trustees from culturally diverse communities, the average age of trustees has been lowered and trustees are representative of more varied socioeconomic, professional and even geographical backgrounds.
Changes at the board level underpinned practices across the organisation that led to greater diversity among staff, ambassadors and volunteers as well as changes to how the charity delivers its services. This included focusing on the intersection between disability and race in DR UK’s funding decisions and evaluating the diversity impact of all its projects. The result is a board that better understands the people the charity aims to support and represent. The organisation is now better equipped to fulfill its mission in supporting disabled people and advocating for meaningful change across society.
What Inspired Our Judges
Disability Rights UK has recruited a board where a majority of trustees share the lived experiences of the charity’s service users. Judges admired the striking image the entry provided of what it looks like to be genuinely inclusive, such as changing governance packs to include a narrative of financial charts or graphs for those who cannot see them, or enabling board members with chronic fatigue to lie down during board meetings. Recognising and celebrating difference on the board, informed by practical, lived experience, means meetings look very different when support for access is an integral part of the meeting design and meeting management.
Judges were impressed at the board’s leadership programme to provide training and mentorship, or other support, to those who need it when preparing to join the board. In addition, the entry articulated practical examples for how the board recruits diverse trustees and creates an equitable and inclusive environment by utilising anonymised applications and soliciting feedback from applicants on the recruitment process, which demonstrated the board’s commitment to diversity and intersectionality among trustees and across the organisation. Also of interest were the efforts of the board to review and evolve its EDI policies so that they were informed by current conversations around Black Lives Matter and gender identity.
