(5 minute read)
Published: 4 August 2025
Written by: Sufina Ahmad, Director
Over the last few years, our blog has been one of several ways in which we have shared updates every month about different aspects of our work here at John Ellerman Foundation. The topics we tend to explore in our blog relate to our grantmaking, our investing, our impact, our reflections on philanthropy, and updates relating to our staffing and Board. One of the topics that we have explored on multiple occasions in our blog relates to our work on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
Why does DEI matter to us
When we first began our work on DEI back in 2020/21, we did so because we felt that increasing our understanding of DEI and our own DEI practices within the organisation presented an opportunity for us to be a more transparent, accountable and effective charitable grantmaking organisation. Back then, just as now, our DEI work was also driven by the fact that, like some of our peers, we realised that the failure to prioritise and improve DEI practices within institutional philanthropy and the wider charity and philanthropic sectors has led to the inequitable distribution of funding, as a sector. This failure manifests itself primarily through the sector’s non-diverse staff teams and Boards, and the ways in which the sector’s funding practices, processes and cultures disproportionately disadvantage marginalised groups – among the very groups we seek to support through our funding.
We have been supported to develop and evolve our DEI work with support from sector bodies, like the Association of Charitable Foundations, feedback and insights from relevant applicants and grant-holders, the Foundation Practice Rating (which assesses charitable foundations like ours on diversity, accountability and transparency), insights and expertise from our staff and Trustees, and the research relating to DEI that informed our former strategy for 2022 to 2025 and our current strategy for 2025 to 2030.
We feel that DEI must be applied to all that we do, which can be summarised as: the management of our underlying endowment; our grantmaking; our recruitment, retention and progression of staff and Trustees; our internal and external communications; and our analysis of the derivation of our wealth through our History Project. We are pleased that we have made progress in all these areas and some of our key highlights include:
- Our history: In May 2023, we produced ‘John Ellerman Foundation: A Historical Review’ which can be accessed in full on our website, by clicking here. It provides the most comprehensive historical overview of the history of the Foundation and its antecedent charitable trusts, and it presents clear insights into the philanthropic, business and personal inclinations of John Reeves Ellerman, 1st Baronet (Bt.), Order of the Companion of Honour (C. H.) (1862–1933), Annie Winifred (Bryher) Ellerman (1894–1983), and John Reeves Ellerman, 2nd Bt. (1909–1973). The latter was our founder. We also supported the development of the Origins of Wealth Toolkit, produced by the Association of Charitable Foundations.
- Our investing: We continue to consider and evolve, year on year, the ways in which we can use our Investment Policy and our influence as an asset owner to promote corporate activity which furthers our aim and challenge corporate behaviour that is poorly aligned to our aim and values, whilst also generating financial returns to sustain our grantmaking activities.
- Our grantmaking: We have adopted the DEI Data Standard in our grantmaking and acted on the ideas and measures relating to diversity in the Foundation Practice Rating. This has resulted in arrange of changes, including publishing our DEI Data Standard data annually in our Annual Report and Accounts, adding guidance about accessibility and inclusion in our application processes, and making our website more accessible by commissioning and implementing the findings of a website accessibility audit.
- Our reporting on DEI: We report on our progress on DEI in our Annual Report and Accounts, at sector events, and through blog posts like this. We also ensure accountability on DEI through our publicly available DEI Policy and our Recruitment Policy.
Our progress over the last 12 months
Every year staff and Trustees develop a DEI Accountability Plan that we work to. Over the last 12 months, the key activities that we have been working on are as follows:
- Learning: We participated in training on neurodiversity and are now regular members of the Trauma Informed Grantmaking Community of Practice. We also produced an internal language guide for staff and Trustees, in response to Trustees and staff wanting support and assurance on the language and terminology to use relating to protected characteristics.
- Accessibility: We updated our application guidance to include accessibility information for applicants in our funding guidelines and our website, and we now provide information to applicants on what will be covered in second stage visits before the visits take place. We continue to work on ensuring that PDF documents on the website are accessible and can be read properly by screen readers.
- Governance: We set up and ran our inaugural Board Shadowing Scheme. The Scheme supported three people from diverse backgrounds with lived experience of poverty to participate in our governance processes for six months, as active observers and contributors (i.e. without the ability to vote on decisions).
We set up the Scheme so that we could receive new perspectives and learning, and to support the diversification of Trustee boards within charities, especially in the trusts and foundations sector – with statistical data from the Association of Charitable Foundations, Reach Volunteering, Getting On Board, Young Trustees Movement and Action for Trustee Racial Diversity showing a lack of diversity on charity Boards. Our Scheme also meant that individuals who might not consider Trustee roles were able to gain meaningful Board experience. We completed a Learning Review of our Board Shadowing Scheme, which can be read in full on our website by clicking here.
What we will be working on in the next 12 months
The next 12 months will be about continuing to embed our existing DEI work, as summarised above. However, in our latest DEI Accountability Plan, we also agreed to work on the following:
- Finding trainings and speakers on DEI for staff and Trustees.
- Collating our staff and Trustee DEI data annually (previously we were collating this data every two to three years).
- Working on making our external publications more accessible, by ensuring they include summary versions of the information being shared, e.g. the strategy has a two-page summary, the Annual Report and Accounts has a timeline version of the activities that took place in the year, and we produce blogs about our publications and these offer summarised versions of their content. Other options could include an Executive Summary, infographic-based summaries, and easy read versions of the documents.
Some final thoughts
DEI work will always be an area of our work that requires and receives ongoing attention and effort. We are fortunate that we have clear processes in place to support our DEI work across all that we do at the Foundation, and that we have activities that we are working to on an ongoing basis. We feel that our work in this area has made us a better organisation, and we are motivated to continue our DEI work in ways that are meaningful and impactful.