In mid-November, I had the opportunity to sit down with Berkeley Wilde, The Diversity Trust’s Founder and Chief Executive, to learn a bit more about the origins of our organisation, impactful moments along the way, and where he sees the Trust going in the future. Being a newer member of the organisation, this was a valuable opportunity for me to find out a bit more about The Diversity Trust and how it has developed over the past decade.
To start, I asked about the how the organisation came about 11 years ago, and what the motivations were to set up The Diversity Trust. Berkeley talked me through his background and life prior to setting up the organisation. His career began in the 1980s, working in HIV and sexual health, with a primary focus on prevention. At this point, his background was in activism and academia having studied social policy, sociology and psychology, his work then a combination of social and health promotion. After spending just under 10 years in Bristol, he moved to Brighton working on a project with the Department of Health. Out of that he had an opportunity to go and work in Brussels with the European Union and European Parliament, he was inspired by different ways of working he saw that spurred him on to explore training, which he’d always been interested in. He credits his development of facilitation skills to his mentor at the time, who he delivered training with back then.
When his contract in Brussels came to its end, he was faced with having to make a quick decision between pursuing opportunities from applications he’d submitted elsewhere or taking the leap of setting up his own consultancy. As I’m sure you can guess from the fact that you’re sat here reading this interview, Berkeley chose the latter, setting up his consultancy in 2004, with a focus on Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion. However, at this point, the consultancy was called “Minotaur Communications”. The choice of this name was the product of a combination factors. One, being Berkeley’s own feelings about navigating these issues, which he describes as a feeling of being trapped in a maze. The other, a little bit of fate, destiny, or happenstance, whichever way you’d like to interpret it. One day, Berkeley was on a train, and saw someone diagonally opposite him reading a book called “Minotaur”, moments later he then looked out the window, and there was a train carriage just outside named “Minotaur” – and so it was settled. He practiced under this name as a sole trader for about 8 years.
In 2012, the organisation was officially incorporated. Feeling the name wasn’t quite the perfect fit, the organisation was rebranded as “The Diversity Trust” on July 12, 2012 by Berkeley and colleagues Derek Froud, and Gary Austin. The new name felt more appropriate for an organisation aiming to make the world a better place, and achieving a balance between business and values.
I asked about his goals for the organisation at that point compared to where we are now. He shares that he never anticipated employing people, but that as the organisation has grown, particularly rapidly over the past 3-4 years, there had been both a need and an opportunity to bring more people into The Diversity Trust community. Despite the name change, and the growth of the organisation, Berkeley feels that the values have always remained consistent. The importance of centring lived experience, intersectionality, being fluid and flexible, and collaboration have always been at the heart of the organisation’s values. Berkeley says like a seed, they have been nourished and grown throughout the years and hopefully are something we’re known for. Recognising diversity as an enricher of both the organisation and our work.
Initially the organisation was much more focussed on LGBTQ issues, but this has grown tremendously. Berkeley marks bringing in Russell Thomas in 2015 as a key moment where the organisation was able to bring a focus to issues surrounding race, with Russell becoming a Non-Executive Director of the organisation. The growth of the organisation has been accompanied by an ever-broadening focus on more equalities related topics, such as neurodiversity and menopause awareness.
Berkeley and I discuss how the values of the organisation facilitate us having such a diverse team. For example, flexibility being a core facet allows individuals to contribute in ways that suits them, in their own needs as well as their other responsibilities, such as childcare arrangements. “People’s skills are brought in any way that they feel able to work with…. while also encouraging and supporting people to try things they’ve not tried before.”
In many ways the organisation’s goal has changed over time, while always aiming to influence social change, initially, a large part of the motivation came out of the need to work and support himself. Now the organisation is so much bigger and there are so many people both directly employed and self-employed working for the Trust. With that growth comes a platform that has so much potential. Now, we’re known because we work intersectionally, and are often a point of contact for organisations when they’re thinking about their diversity goals. Although training interventions are of course important, “it’s about the whole system, the whole system changing, so individuals feel like they can be who they are, be their authentic selves, feel safe, you know, feel valued,” Berkeley says. Part of that mix is the potential for us to be thought leaders, putting our stories, opinions, and ideas out into the world, he gives the example of recent work we’ve published on Menopause Awareness. In many ways we’re doing it anyway, with our training, but there’s potential to be doing much more. He acknowledges this might not be the best way, but it’s worth experimenting with. The organisation’s is structured in such a flexible way that there’s an ability to try out new things meaning we’re able to adapt to new opportunities where they arise. This is illustrated by the shift to digital during COVID-19 lockdowns, having piloted delivering digitally in 2018.
2020 was a notable year for the Trust, as well as of course the world at large. The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns led to shift to delivering primarily online. Berkeley marks the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 as a hugely significant moment for the Trust. This moment transformed into a movement as a wave of global consciousness and self-reflection on issues of race and racism took place. Individuals and organisations were faced with this deep moment of confrontation with their long-term complacency, and even disregard of racism still being an issue. In July 2020, while on holiday between the two lockdowns, Berkeley was working every day to keep up with the huge inundation of emails and requests flooding in as many organisations acknowledged this was something they needed to address. The demand went up 1000% within weeks and with that the organisation grew too. Sartaj, Mina, and Gina all were brought onboard to help the organisation adjust to this growth.
We then talk about other significant moments in his Diversity Trust journey. He tells me about the incredible response to the organisation’s youth work provision.
Berkeley talks about the youth work that has been done has and the value of the space that’s been created as part of that. “I’ve had people contact me 10, 15, 20 years later, saying “that saved my life, I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the space you created.” He recalls very recently a parent writing in to say the organisation saved their son’s life. “You don’t know or appreciate the impact you’re having on individuals, it’s unseen, until someone gives you feedback like that.” He describes this as both incredible and humbling.
Next, we discuss the background of the youth work and how that came into the Trust’s umbrella of work. In fact, the youth work has been a part of Berkeley’s career for the past 28 years. While in Bristol, a future colleague called asking if he’d be interested in setting up a gay youth group. The youth group started 1995; taking 6-7 months to get started. A testament to “what life was like back then”, despite being at Bristol Pride, they didn’t have an email address and his boss was resistant to having a website! While living in Brighton, he was involved with Allsorts Youth Project, and collaborated with the mental health charity, Mind Out, to do work around youth mental health. On his return to the West Country around 2007/8, he saw a gap in youth provision, and started talking to organisations to try and address this. In 2012, when the Diversity Trust was officially set up, he also started a research program around South Gloucestershire with young people. By April 2015, the Alphabets Youth Project was set up. Jay Gregg-Harris, our Alphabets co-ordinator, is planning a 10-year anniversary celebration for the youth project in 2025.
Berkeley reflects on the balance between youth work and the other work of the Trust. “An important part of our social value story is that we’re doing specialist youth work as part of what we offer… that’s the stuff that touches people’s lives and makes a huge impact”. Of course, this work relies in many ways on the other work of the Trust, if we didn’t do the traded activity, it would be tough to stay afloat – this work in combination with grant income and donations facilitates the possibility of this incredible work.
We discussed the goals for the Trust’s youth work in future, and whether he sees it expanding. He spoke about goals of mapping where there is already provision for youth work in the South-West, and identifying gaps both locally and across the UK for potential expansion or supporting other provisions like we do in Swindon. “It should stay local, but it could have a far bigger national reach.”
Another value that comes through in this conversation is collaboration being at the Trust’s core, rather than competition. The goal is not to expand our work as much as possible, but rather to fill gaps where they have been identified and collaborate and support groups already doing similar work. “There is so much going on, there is so much work we don’t need to compete, I’ve never really taken a competitive approach”.
This conversation highlights another important value “it’s about amplifying the voices of marginalised communities”, “Now we have 11,500 followers on social media, over 100,000 people went to our website last year, we’ve created a platform where we can really say, we can amplify your voice”. Having this platform allows us to share your stories, and ties into thought leadership. It means people then come to the organisation as a point for information and resources on the topic.
While speaking of our platform, we discuss the origins of the blog and podcast. In what seems to be a common theme for the organisation “I think like everything it’s been really organic in the way it’s developed and grown”. The idea around the social content is really about, again, amplifying voices and giving a way where we can co-create and have interesting guest speakers sharing their vision and values.
Brief trials into a more corporate model and identity really came back full circle, when the team realised it wasn’t feeling in line with the organisation’s ethos. Instead, they found themselves coming back to their grassroots, around activism, campaigning and elevating the voice of communities and activists. Content creation has been an organic growth to the organisation, another benefit of it is that it reaches different audiences.
”It’s about taking something to a different audience, it may only be a tiny audience… but those people would have probably been impacted by listening or reading”. In terms of where he would like to see it go, Berkeley recalls a moment in which one of the early podcast episodes was linked to by a Government website as a resource. He says, there’s power in being recognised as having a voice and having something interesting to say, the hope is now to reach more people and increase the numbers.
Expansion is also something Berkeley reflects upon in a geographic sense. While the organisation started regionally within the West Country, especially from the George Floyd era onwards, The Diversity Trust started to become more UK-wide, and then even international. Despite this expanding growth, the principle of “thinking globally, acting locally”, borrowed from the climate movement, is core to the organisation.
We round off by discussing the people who keep the organisation going and whether there’s a specific approach Berkeley takes to creating engagement within the team?
Again, this is something that has developed quite naturally, “I think it’s quite organic; I think it’s about drawing on people’s skills, and knowledge, and experience”.
He suggests, maybe what we can do a bit more of, is to have more conversations about what more would you like to do, what’s missing for you right now, and try to create more opportunities. We round off discussing the benefits and downsides of having an in-person space to interact, while costs generally prohibit us having a permanent space, having more in-person meetings throughout the year, would allow potential for more face-to-face interactions among staff. There are currently four company-wide meetings planned in 2024, two in-person and two online which provides a wonderful opportunity to see if this is something we can continue more of!