To celebrate and mark the launch of the London's Giving Governance Resource, the Kensington + Chelsea Foundation team have shared what they have learned on their governance journey...
In our day-to-day work, the Kensington + Chelsea Foundation strives towards achieving a vision of a borough where everyone has the opportunity to live happy, healthy, fulfilled lives. Kensington & Chelsea is a borough usually associated with affluence and wealth, but it also has areas of severe deprivation, and we collaborate with others to support local projects which tackle poverty. Organisations we fund help to reduce isolation and exclusion, develop skills and employment opportunities, for residents and give children and young people to have the best chance in life.
To achieve our overarching vision, we've recognised the importance of recruiting a Board that reflects the vibrant and diverse community that we serve. At the start of 2020, while all of our Board members were either working or living in Kensington & Chelsea, they were not fully representative of the ethnic diversity of the community. We had also recognised that we had some skills gaps on the Board and we were particularly keen to recruit new members with expertise in youth work and frontline emergency response.
In recruiting these two specialist vacancies, we took the opportunity to reach out to candidates from different ethnic backgrounds and encourage them to apply. We had been advised that Black and Minority Ethnic candidates would be discouraged from applying given that our Board lacked diversity, and that we would need to be more proactive in our approaches. Therefore we researched, identified and approached people with the right skillset who would also help us to diversify and better represent the community.
We were delighted that two fantastic candidates accepted our offer to join the Board in October 2020, and they have already contributed significantly to our governance and strategic direction, including participating in our Innovation + Collaboration Fund Grants Panel, and helping us to define the parameters of our new research project.
As we develop our strategy for the next three years, we will be assessing how we can best ensure that our organisation (and the work that it does) reflects the community we serve. This will encompass our Board,our staff team, and importantly our grants panels, to ensure that a wide range stakeholders are involved in how we invest our resources.
Reflecting on this journey, Victoria Steward-Todd (Chief Executive, K+C Foundation) said:
A key learning has been that diversity and representation is an ongoing conversation for the Foundation, rather than something we can solve with one action. We need to be mindful of the need to continuously review, to be honest and clear about where we need to improve and to prioritise proactive steps to achieve that.