The Senior Leadership Team, will ensure regularly discussion on diversity, equality and inclusion with each other, and with staff, colleagues and service users across the Trust. The EDI Group has been set up and is where these conversations will begin. This group is made up of people from across the Trust that will consider issues of equality, diversity and inclusion across the organisation.

If you have any thoughts, comments or ideas or want to be part of the discussion, do send your thoughts through to EDI@thedtgroup.org. Ultimately, our aim is to listen and learn, and create plans that will deliver true inclusion and diversity. Separately, we / you may want to establish special interest diversity groups which focus on the needs and issues of a particular under-represented group. Let us know if you think that is a good idea, and if so, what should these groups be?

We want to make sure that we really start to build an inclusive organisation and actively monitor and measure inclusivity across the Trust. In order to do so, we need to understand our starting position and how diverse we are right now. We need to know how many people we have in the Trust, their ethnic backgrounds, gender, age, disabilities, how they identify along the LGBTQ+ spectrum and other characteristics. This will enable us to ensure that we understand and can address people’s specific needs.

We ask every member of staff to complete their profile on our HR system - MyHR - which will enable us to capture this information. The diversity section is available on the landing page of MyHR for all employees. It is accessible via the My Profile section on MyHR, by then going to the Diversity tab. Rest reassured that any reports extracted from the system will be based on total numbers and not individual, personal details.

Inclusion isn’t just about our workforce. It is also about the people we support. We want to know how they may have been affected by intolerance and injustice too. We want to understand how we can gather the same information identified in commitment 2 above, to help people in our services, in the first instance. We also want to know how we can help people who do not use our services but are part of the wider sectors within which we operate. How can we help promote equality and inclusion for these groups and campaign alongside them and on their behalf.

We will capture our collective thoughts and create an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Plan, built on our values and based on the data and input from staff, service users and trustees. We will define clear objectives and desired outcomes and measure and track our performance against the plan, so that we are able to demonstrate that the actions that we are taking deliver the outcomes that we desire.