Our diversity consultancy work built on existing good practice in the area. This included Barnardo’s work on race, as well as its commitment to working with disabled children and young people from deprived communities.

Our task was to broaden the approach into other protected characteristics, including gender, sexual orientation, religion and belief.

We introduced a cross-cultural appreciation of diversity to the senior management team.

Our consultants delivered a facilitated course to the Regional Director and her senior management team. This highlighted a shared analysis of equalities, and its impact on the design and delivery of Barnardo’s services.

We then rolled out a bespoke one-day course to each project team in the region, supported by subject-specific events including an all-staff conference on LGBT equality for young people.

The project demonstrated improved service delivery to a range of protected groups.

As a result, Barnardo’s asked us to apply our regional work to their national training programmes. We developed a 12-month programme for their learning and development professionals, making sure that equalities were integrated into all their mainstream training activities.

Our diversity projects since have included custom-built courses for:

• The marketing and communications team at Barnardo’s Head Office
• BME professionals in Wales
• The project team dealing with Barnardo’s children who returned to find out more about their childhoods.

We have also designed and run a series of workshops – ‘The Extra Mile’ – introducing Barnardo’s teams to the concept and impact of unconscious bias at work.