TLC (Talk, Listen, Change)
Winner – Board Equity, Diversity and Inclusion
About the Charity
TLC (Talk, Listen, Change) is working to build a society where people enjoy good emotional wellbeing and personal resilience, supported by positive relationships in all areas of life. The charity works with children, young people and adults who have dangerous, complicated, risky or no relationships with others – or a negative relationship with themselves. Services include counselling, mediation, domestic abuse support services and community development projects. Last year, TLC worked with more than 4,500 people across Greater Manchester, delivering more than 13,500 sessions of support, and helping more than 96 per cent of service users positively work through feelings of depression and hopelessness, and feelings of failure or having let others down.
Charity number: 512710 | www.talklistenchange.org.uk
Social Services | England – North West | 26-100 paid staff | 101-499 volunteers
What the Board Achieved
The board led the charity through a major change in 2017, disaffiliating from a national federation in order to allow the charity to focus on widening resources to the local community, evolving into TLC. The professional skills and experiences of the board supported the charity through the mission-critical work of taking this step legally and efficiently. However, once TLC was up and running with its new charitable remit, trustees looked around the table and self-assessed how representation on the board could be improved, to better reflect the community the charity aimed to support. As a number of trustees were simultaneously nearing their service term limits, the board seized the opportunity to make meaningful changes.
The board solicited the support of TLC’s Head of Business Intelligence to draft an ideal board profile, representative of the charity’s service users, and used it to set recruitment targets – developing partnerships with the Housing Diversity Network and others to help them specifically recruit trustees from BAME backgrounds, under the age of 40, and/or with lived experiences similar to those whom the charity aims to support, even seeking candidates without any prior experience serving as a trustee. TLC worked hard to make the application, interview process, and induction period accessible and inclusive. Relying on its organisational expertise and senior staff team, the board developed an induction and mentorship programme for new board members, helping them develop the confidence in themselves and the relationships with other trustees that would allow them to make meaningful contributions to the board. As a result, TLC not only filled its trustee vacancies, but expanded the board in order to ensure it had the diversity of skills and experiences to accurately represent, understand and support the charity’s beneficiaries. Modelling values of equity, diversity and inclusivity was paired with intentional strategies to increase diversity and improve inclusivity among staff and volunteers, and has informed the charities work to understand, reach and support service users from all walks of life.
What Inspired Our Judges
Judges described the narrative TLC has developed around the issue of diversity as ‘bravely different’, appreciating that the charity is very intentional about its approach to diversity and demonstrates a sincere commitment to equity and inclusivity with consistency between what the board is modelling and what the charity itself is trying to deliver. These values are evident at the board level and beyond, allowing the organisation’s expertise in relationship management to support and celebrate diversity on the board and elsewhere, with a culture of equity and inclusivity embedded into everything the charity does.
Practical examples in the entry helped judges understand how principles of Equity, Diversity and Inclusivity are upheld at the board level and inform the board’s approach to governance, with a focus on continuous learning and improvement that allows them to overcome challenges, implement change, and meet their charitable objectives. They felt that a particular stand-out section of the entry was the way TLC is actively looking for people from the BAME community, under 40 and with no previous trustee experience – a very intelligent and proactive decision to make.
