Our commitment to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

How we create a diverse and inclusive organisation

At Active Gloucestershire, we believe that equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) are fundamental to our mission. We’re passionate about creating a welcoming and inclusive environment where everyone feels valued and individuals can thrive. Here’s how we do it:

Diverse and inclusive recruitment: We aim to attract candidates from all backgrounds, ensuring our recruitment processes are accessible, fair and unbiased. We are proud to be an organisation full of diverse thinking, backgrounds and experience but we recognise we must do more to be representative of the communities and sectors we serve.
Ongoing learning and training: Our team co-designs the learning and training programme we offer, fostering a culture of curiosity, respect and understanding. We provide our team with multiple opportunities to discuss and reflect on what they’ve learnt and encourage them to explore different types of learning opportunities, including lived experience and formal training.
Community engagement and partnership building: We work closely with individuals and organisations from across Gloucestershire to ensure our projects meet the needs and reflect the perspectives of a diverse range of groups and communities. We collaborate with various communities, organisations and experts by experience to increase our knowledge and continually seek ideas and good practice to bring back in-house.
Inclusive policies: We have policies in place that encourage and promote equality and aim to prevent discrimination. These policies are reviewed regularly to ensure they remain effective and relevant.
National accreditations for local action: constantly striving to be a better organisation for new and existing staff, we have signed up to a number of national codes and schemes that we believe will strengthen our processes and improve our culture. Examples include:
- supporting Sport England’s plans to tackle inequality in sport and physical activity by adhering to the highest standards of the Tier 3 Code of Sports Governance and supporting outcomes set out in the new 10-Year Strategy
- the Race Equality Code
- the Disability Confident employer scheme
- the Inclusivity Works scheme
- the Healthy Workplaces award
Inclusive communication: We strive to ensure terminology across all our communications, is up to date and inclusive. We recognise that best practice around inclusive language is continuously evolving. We therefore welcome feedback on our communications, so please get in touch if you think we can improve.
Anti-racism commitment: Racism has no place in we can move. As a backbone organisation for this movement, we are committed to being anti-racist and encourage people to educate themselves, embrace difficult conversations and continue to strengthen community bonds in order to create an inclusive and active community. We know that our county’s diversity is one of its key strengths. To this end, we will work with our team and partner organisations to support, advise and guide affected communities, and reassure them that sport and physical activity is a safe space for all – one that embraces and celebrates the diversity of the people who live here.
EDI Champions: Our team is full of passionate EDI advocates. We have a dedicated EDI champion on our Board who is actively involved in our EDI governance and wider thinking around EDI. We also have a staff EDI champions group that comes together once a month to learn, share and take action around the EDI agenda and help shape a culture of respect, inclusion and belonging across our organisation.
Wellbeing initiatives: We prioritise wellbeing and have an internal wellbeing strategy co-created by staff; this is full of initiatives and opportunities staff can access including weekly wellbeing hours, additional birthday leave, annual volunteering days, team wellbeing sessions, an employee assistance programme (EAP), flexible and hybrid working, team lunches and walks along with opportunities to celebrate individuals and champion their interests.

Learn more about our commitment to EDI by reading our 2024/25 Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan.

Our Diversity and Inclusion action plan

Our Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan 2024/25 outlines our organisation’s main EDI goals and the steps we’re taking to become a more inclusive workplace. Our three core ambitions are listed below.
1. Ensure our workforce is more diverse and representative of the county and the priority groups we work with: We aim to have a diverse team and Board – one that reflects the communities we serve and enables us to bring new ideas and diversity of thinking to our work.
2. Build a safe, inclusive and supportive workplace: We’re committed to building a workplace where staff feel they belong, can be their best selves and thrive.
3. Ensure equality, diversity and inclusion is an organisational priority: We’re integrating EDI into everything we do, from governance to daily operations.
Our DIAP is an internally focused document that outlines our long-term equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) ambitions and the steps we will take to achieve them over a 12 month period. Although the plan is mandated by Sport England, we recognise that tackling inequality lies at the heart of our work and is fundamental to delivering our strategy and that in order to do this, we must first embed sound equality, diversity and inclusion practices within our own organisation.

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How we nurture talent

At Active Gloucestershire, we love to see our team grow and thrive. Here’s how we support our amazing staff.
- Professional development: Supported by their line managers, all staff are offered opportunities to learn and grow through structured training and development opportunities such as courses, programmes and workshops and unstructured personal development opportunities including watch parties, a book club, outreach visits and volunteering days.
- Mentorship programs: Our mentorship programme provides guidance and support to help team members reach their full potential.
- Career pathways: We actively support our staff to achieve their career goals by encouraging them to articulate their ambitions, map out their career paths and explore career-aligned training and development opportunities.
Small changes that make a big difference

At Active Gloucestershire, we believe that everyone has the right to be who they are and to feel safe and supported in expressing this. As part of our ongoing commitment to embedding inclusivity across our organisation, we have started to make small changes that we know will make a big difference.
1. Use of pronouns
We encourage team members who are comfortable doing so, to state the pronouns they use in emails and meetings.

There are many reasons for doing this, including showing respect, support and allyship for the transgender and non-binary community and ensuring people‘s identities are observed and respected, , limiting the risk of assumptions being made and offence being caused.

Whilst we encourage those that feel comfortable to display their pronouns, we also recognise that this is a personal decision and not all team members may wish to do so. We fully appreciate and support this choice. Adding pronouns is and always will be, an individual choice for staff and trustees at Active Gloucestershire.
1. Celebrating festivals and engaging with national campaigns
Our EDI champions group regularly discuss upcoming festivals and national campaigns that, as an organisation, we want to recognise and celebrate. Some of those we’ve enjoyed celebrating in recent years include Black History Month, Pride Month and South Asian Heritage Month.
1. Encouraging staff to champion their EDI passions and interests???
We want our team to have the space to explore the areas of EDI that resonate most with them. From neurodiversity to menopause and wellbeing to racial equality, staff are given a platform to explore their areas of interest and share their learning with the team in a way that suits them – whether that’s leading a session at a collaboration day, hosting a lunch and learn or organising a wellbeing trip or staff social aligned with their interests.
EDI Policy

Our EDI policy outlines our commitment to equality, diversity, and inclusion. We also offer a variety of resources to support our staff and stakeholders in promoting EDI.

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Hear from the team

In order to bring our DIAP to life and share our progress we’ve starting a blog series, that will shine a spotlight on some of the key priorities and areas of action that we’re working on and highlight any wins or challenges that we may have experienced along the way. We hope that this blog series will start meaningful conversations about EDI and encourage our partners and stakeholders to share their learning around EDI too.

Our team at Active Gloucestershire is passionate about making a difference. Check out their inspiring stories and experiences. You can see these below.

If you’d like to join the conversation please take a look at some of the blogs, connect to us on social media channels or reach out to the team directly.

Our EDI blog series

Often change within an organisation evolves subtly and quietly over time, but just sometimes – you can pinpoint the moment it starts.

At Active Gloucestershire, we experienced that moment just over four years ago, with the tragic killing of George Floyd. His death sent shockwaves around the world and these reverberated throughout our organisation. It forced us to explore our commitment to racial equality and more widely to equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI), it made us question the authenticity of our actions to date and how equipped we were to deliver on our mission of tackling inequality.

Since then, we have challenged ourselves to do better and have made progress in key areas across our organisation. We’ve worked to make our recruitment practices more inclusive and accessible, to develop a workplace culture that really seeks to understand and support our staff and to engage experts by experience to enrich our EDI learning. But whilst we’ve made strides in our EDI journey, we knew we had more to do to foster a genuinely diverse and inclusive organisation and embed EDI across our organisation.

So, when, in July 2021, as part of its Code for Sports Governance, Sport England mandated that all bodies in receipt of substantial public funding were to have a detailed and ambitious diversity and inclusion action plan (DIAP), we viewed this less as a compliance exercise and much more as an opportunity to understand the gaps and needs of our organisation and drive real behaviour change within our organisation.

The following blog series seeks to unpack some of our DIAP’s key ambitions and areas of learning. It is an open and honest account of our journey – highlighting the things that have gone well, in addition to some of the challenges we’ve faced along the way. We’re not experts, we’re learning as we go but hope that by sharing our DIAP, we’ll inspire others to explore their own EDI journey and take positive action.

From compliance to culture – rethinking our diversity and inclusion action plan
We started our DIAP journey in 2017 but so much has happened since then. Fast forward to 2023 and the Black Lives Matter movement ignited passionate debate within our team around our commitment to ethnically diverse communities and more widely to tackling inequality, which lies at the heart of our organisational mission.
Read more about our journey.

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A journey across continents: celebrating South Asian Heritage Month
At Active Gloucestershire, diversity and inclusion lie at the heart of both our organisational mission and our culture. We aim to foster an environment which celebrates diversity and encourages staff to champion their passions, pursue their interests and share their identity with the team.

In July, in celebration of South Asian Heritage Month, which runs from the 17th July to the 18th August, I was keen to share my own Indian heritage with the team and offered to run an informal lunch and learn session, detailing the story of my parents’ emigration from India to the UK.

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