Our team were thrilled to attend the Diversity Trust Annual Meeting and Away Day on 14 October. Our Executive Director Berkeley Wilde shared some of the highlights of our work over the last year and the incredible impacts we have had with employees, consultants, clients, partners and friends of the trust.

“We held our first in-person event since the pandemic in September last year, with our annual meeting and away day, here at St Luke’s Community Centre. Having spent nearly two years talking to each other online it was so lovely to see people in real life and to meet people for the first time.

We held our second annual Bi Visibility Day Event with Dr Nikki Hayfield at UWE Bristol. Nikki always brings incredible depth of knowledge on the subject of bisexuality research. The feedback after each event we run is extremely positive.

We also held information events on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on marginalised communities and produced a fact sheet with colleagues across the NHS.

We hosted an information event on Chem Sex with our partners at Brigstowe, the Eddystone Trust and Unity Sexual Health.

We cohosted an event with Southern Brooks on dementia awareness within communities.

In October Russell, Aaron and Jacob all started working with us. Russell as the Director of People, Culture and Strategy, Aaron as a trainer and community development worker and Jacob as our youth and community worker. Jacob works really closely with El and Pyxis and between them they’ve been running Alphabets youth project, delivering schools outreach, and our adult wellbeing sessions. We are sad to lose El, who’s recently started at University studying paramedicine. We wish him every success in his chosen path.

Also, in October we started working on a project called Inclusive Policing with Confidence. Led by SARI, with partners Babassa, WECIL and Empova. Possibly one of our most ambitious projects training nearly 3000 front line police officers over 6-months in programmes:

– raising awareness,

– having community conversations and

– running expert seminars.

The programme was a huge impact and we’ve many lessons learned.

In November, the newly developing LGBTQ+ team attended Trans Pride South West. Jacob and Aaron had only been in post for a month, but all credit to them for running our stall and promoting Alphabets and everything we do with local communities.

Also in November, I was able to make a surprise visit to our annual youth conference and it was great to support the young people’s team at the event.

In January, we welcomed Sam and Johanna on to the team. Sam has swiftly moved from being team administrator into a development role, now working alongside Joni, who we’ve also welcomed this year.

Johanna joined us on placement whilst studying an MA in Human Rights Law. Like Sam, Johanna absolutely shone, so when the placement came to an end, in March, we offered Johanna an internship over the summer until she recently left to go travelling with her partner.

In March we said goodbye to Frank who stood down from the Board. Although Frank continues to provide us with many of our beautiful designs including our annual Impact Report.

Our partnership with Skin Deep and TSL, now in its second year, led by the formidable Laura Broadbent, who champions the work we do. Thank you Laura, for everything you do. To me you are part of the team, part of the DT family. Sam led the production of a stunning Impact Report on the first year’s work. We have some real talent on board and I love to see people and their work shining.

The work with Skin Deep has provided us with added value in that we have an excellent model for other corporate partnerships which we are currently developing with companies including Cromwell, In House Recruitment and In Professional Development.

We have also started looking to the near and Far East. As our global reach and impact continue we’ve developed partnerships with organisations including the Asian Leadership Collective and the India Diversity Forum based in Mumbai.

Russell has been leading the Race & Bias Team and new courses are being developed, piloted, trialled, tested, delivered and evaluated at pace. The feedback on the team’s work continues to shine through.

The team itself continues to grow and at last head count we had 13 members of staff and over 30 consultants. Who could have imagined that?

As Russell says in his report, we are now reaching across continents: Asia, Australasia, the Americas, Europe and the Middle East.

Our disability, mental health and autism and neurodiversity courses remain popular. Thank you to Samantha, Steve and Matthew for leading these.

We started working with Emma Gersch on role play training with a really successful course delivered by Emma and Lateesha with the University of Bristol.

Across all our courses and events we delivered 464 programs, with over 13k participants, over the year!

We’ve started tendering for new opportunities and have quite a few successes recently. What’s exciting about some of this work is it’s the new areas of work we are developing, for example one project is focused on awareness raising with 4000 global managers on domestic violence and abuse. They chose our bid because we were the most intersectional bid.

As always, none of this would be possible without the amazing, talented team I have the privilege of leading. I thank each and everyone one of you. There is no I in team! Special thanks also to the Board, our lovely Chair, our sponsors and supporters, our clients, funders and donors.

You all keep us going in our mission to influence social change to create a safer, fairer, more inclusive society!”