The founder of a new charity aiming to increase the racial diversity of sector boards has called for an end to informal trustee recruitment.
Speaking yesterday at the official launch event for Board Racial Diversity UK in London, Malcolm John said that informally recruiting trustees “inevitably perpetuates the status quo” of charity board members being largely white, older, and from more affluent socioeconomic backgrounds.
At yesterday’s event, the charity also formally launched its strategy, which is focused on recruiting 60,000 new Black and Asian trustees in order to achieve proportional representation on UK trustee boards.
The new target is an increase of 20,000 on the figure previously quoted by Board Racial Diversity UK when it gained registered charity status from the Charity Commission in November last year.
The increased aim is in light of recent research from the Charity Commission and PBE, which found that the UK would need 60,000 Black and Asian trustees to achieve proportional representation due to the growth in the population of people from those demographics from 14% in 2017 to 17% in 2025.
Currently only 8% of trustees are from Black and Asian backgrounds, while less than 3% are Black or Asian women.
The charity’s official launch also follows research from the Directory of Social Change last year, which found that most trustees feel that equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) is the governance area in which their boards are most struggling to achieve positive outcomes.
Meanwhile, John last year told Civil Society: “I feel that there’s still a very long way to go before we get proportionate representation on boards [...] on our focus area of racial diversity.
“I believe strongly that significant and sustainable change won't happen until the vast majority of charities take up more formal and open recruitment of board members, reaching out to more diverse networks, and until the culture, policies and practices within boards are more inclusive and more adapted to the needs and circumstances of more diverse candidates,” he said.
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