SignHealth
Winner – Board Diversity and Inclusivity
Who they are
SignHealth is the deaf people’s health charity; it provides award-winning mental health and social care services in sign-language, and is the UK’s biggest employer of deaf staff. SignHealth has main delivery sites in London, Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham. Its frontline services are delivered by a 50/50 deaf and hearing team, and its DeafHope domestic violence service is delivered entirely by deaf staff. SignHealth delivers advocacy, outreach and residential care for deaf sign-language users with complex support needs. It operates the UK’s only national IAPT psychological therapy service, and the only Deaf Domestic Abuse support service.
What they’ve achieved
In addition to achieving a more equitable gender balance on the board, SignHealth has also achieved a board that is largely representative of those it serves, with four deaf trustees and three hearing trustees. The charity has clearly demonstrated its commitment to diversity and inclusivity by overcoming a number of practical and cultural barriers to both recruiting and including input from deaf trustees and ensuring that trustees bring a variety of experiences, perspectives and skills to the table – board members hail from Scotland to London and several places in between, and represent different racial backgrounds, age groups, and professional fields. More importantly, the organisation has been able to harness the power of these different voices to improve the health and wellbeing of its service users. It has driven change within its own organisational culture (more discussions about ‘we’ or ‘us’ rather than ‘they’ and ‘them’), through its committment to recruiting more staff with BSL2 training and the appointment of a deaf receptionist at headquarters. In the process, the charity has increased its reputation within the third sector and gained influence within communities for disabled people in the UK, as well as building trust with its service users. It is also now better able to develop strategies that more broadly challenge institutional discrimination and lobby for specialist services.
Why they won
SignHealth presented evidence that it was making a strong commitment – and investment – in diversity and inclusivity on the board, and had a clear vision for how those changes would help the charity achieve its mission and change outcomes for its beneficiaries. A governance review and board audit in 2017 identified diversity gaps. The board demonstrated its resolve in addressing these gaps by rewriting its Memorandum and Articles of Association, stipulating that the charity must never have fewer than three deaf trustees at any one time, and setting targets for diversity in other areas like age, geographic background, gender, race, etc. The board also recognised that recruiting diverse trustees wasn’t enough, so they invested £3,000 per annum in practical support for deaf trustees to help them understand their roles, fulfil their responsibilities and guarantee their voices would be ‘heard’. The board also took steps to ensure both hearing and deaf trustees can understand one another, recognising that both parties may need concepts, expressions, signs, terms, and even experiences explained to them. Judges perceived a real sense of forward momentum and saw definitive evidence of improving diversity and inclusivity.
