Equity, Diversity and Inclusion

A community foundation exists to serve its community, and so ensuring that we reflect, hear, support and work with our whole community is fundamental to our ethos and goals.

There are areas where we have made good progress on our equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) journey and other areas where we have a lot more work to do. We want to be transparent about what we’re doing and our aspirations for the future, and so below is a summary of some of the work we’ve been doing to date. We’ll keep this page regularly updated with our progress.

As always, if you have feedback or suggestions on ways we could be doing more, please get in touch with us at info@quartetcf.org.uk

Grant-making: processes and funding

In the last few years, we’ve taken a range of measures to check that our funding processes, decision-making and grant distribution are fair. In March 2024, we signed up to the IVAR commitment to open and trusting grant-making, which is helping us make our funding practices even simpler, fairer and more accessible. By signing up to IVAR we are held to account and required to report back on our progress.

Below are some of the actions we’ve taken to date.

Reviewing our application forms and guidance for some applicants

We are continuously reviewing our application forms and  guidance for applicants so our funding priorities are clear and we are open and transparent about all our requirements and exclusions. We aim to avoid wasting people’s time with unnecessary questions or rules they may not be aware of.

We are exploring and trialling ways of allowing organisations to apply for funding in non-written formats to help with accessibility and ease. If you are interested in discussing this with us, please get in touch.

Outreach

Working with our local VCSE infrastructure organisations we have been getting out of the Quartet office to meet grant seekers and have face-to-face conversations.  This is helping us to answer people’s questions and build relationships with those who might not otherwise have applied to Quartet.  Our team has also created friendly videos to answer commonly asked questions about our funding programmes. We hope this makes information more accessible by offering alternative formats, and helps people get to know our team. We are keen to hear feedback on whether these are useful.

Diversifying grant decision-making

Funding decisions at Quartet are made in a range of ways depending on the grants programme or funding pot. Many of our grants are decided by a grant decision panel, made up of  professionals with relevant expertise and people with relevant lived experience. To help get more members of the community with relevant lived and/or professional experience involved in our panels, we have set up a ‘panel pool’ of volunteers to take part in our decision-making panels.

Participatory grant-making

For some decision-making panels, the whole grant panel is made up of people with lived experience relevant to the grant programme’s theme, such as Bristol Local Food Fund and our Youth and Play Support Grants Programme. This can be a good way to delegate power over funding decisions to people who understand the issues best, especially where a grant programme is focused on a single theme or community. Participatory grant-making can be a very resource-intensive, though; it’s not always a practical option for us but is something we’re keen to do more of where we can.

Anonymous applicant survey

In 2021 we started sending applicants an anonymous online survey to get their honest feedback on their experience of applying to Quartet. The findings have been reviewed annually by our Programmes Committee, which oversees and advises on our grant-making. As a result of the survey findings, we’ve made several changes. Some of the feedback has told us that:

  • It can be difficult to find information on eligibility. So, we created a dedicated page on our website that outlines our eligibility criteria.  See here.
  • We need to be clear on the timescales for receiving a decision on an application. As a result, we are working to ensure all our grant programme webpages include information on the decision turnaround times.
  • Applicants were not always clear on the reason for being unsuccessful or why they had been awarded less than they requested. We now make every effort to explain the reasons for being unsuccessful or partly funded.

The survey results showed that first-time applicants can find applying to us more difficult, so we have increased our outreach so that we can offer new applicants more support.

Our aim is that these initiatives will help us learn and have a positive impact on the accessibility and inclusion of any applicants who may have found our application process confusing or excluding in the past.

Grant distribution

As part of our commitment to funding equitably, we conduct an annual check of the spread of our grant-making by geography and among the relevant communities in the Equalities Act. We do this to ensure that our funding is going where it’s most needed and to highlight areas where we could be doing more to address disadvantage in our area.

This exercise has helped us prioritise building relationships with relevant organisations and to investigate the wider reasons why we may not be receiving or funding applications for work with some groups.  

Our data is imperfect and so the figures below will likely under-estimate our support in each area. They also don’t always take intersectionality into account. But we think they are a useful starting point. Through our Sector Development Grant Programme, outreach sessions and more, we have been reaching out to organisations working in these sectors to understand more about their needs and how we can best support them.

Estimated grant-making to relevant equalities groups (figures exclude grants made outside the West of England area)

 2021-222022-232023-24
Disabled people: funding amount£358,160£483,175£466,159
Disabled people: % of total QCF funding7%10%12%
Older people: funding amount£359,192£373,018£381,155
Older people: % of total QCF funding7%7%10%
Children & young people: funding amount£1,660,965£1,230,218£1,141,743
Children & young people: % of total QCF funding34%24%29%
LGBTQIA+: funding amount£17,000£5,000£28,580
LGBTQIA+: % of total QCF funding0%0%1%
Women: funding amount£284,624£207,242£423,970
Women: % of total QCF funding6%4%11%
Black, Asian and minoritised communities: funding amount£448,267£681,817£623,710
Black, Asian and minoritised communities: % of total QCF funding9%13%16%

Success rates

Our success rates vary from programme to programme, but on average around 60% of applications made to us in the last three years have received some or all of the funding they have requested. We are noticing a rise in the number of applications we are receiving. Without increases in the amount of funding we have to distribute, our average success rate will likely fall. We have begun to track success rates for each grant programme and round we run, so that we can be clearer with applicants upfront about their chance of success. 

Philanthropy Service and Communications

Philanthropy services

Our day-to-day work connects people who want to give with organisations that support our communities. We think this is work as much about bringing people together and building relationships as it is about grants, and this is an important strand of what we do. The organisations we support are very varied, and so are our donors. We want to work with donors from a range of different backgrounds and we recognise the need for this in our current organisational strategy. We are keen that our donors reflect our local communities and understand that this is a long-term goal that will take time and care.

Communications and events

In recent years we’ve done work to ensure that our communications reflect our values. We’ve created a language guide for our staff and trustees, which we  keep up-to-date as the most inclusive and respectful language evolves. Our aim is that the images we use in our publications are respectful, empowering and reflect communities as diverse as our own.

In 2023 we began tracking the organisations that we showcase through our events, donor visits and publications. This is helping us ensure we’re being balanced in the organisations we give a platform to.

We’re in the process of updating our website and will be looking at enhancing accessibility and the user experience as part of this update. We are mindful of accessibility needs in our online and printed communications but we know that there’s more we can do in this area.


If you think we’ve got something wrong or have suggestions we should consider, please let us know so that we can update our understanding and improve how we communicate. 

Operations

Staff & trustees

In 2023 we worked with an external consultant to run a survey that would help us monitor the diversity of our staff and trustee team, to help inform our recruitment practices and ensure a broad degree of representation among our team. The results revealed a diverse staff and trustee team in many dimensions, but lacking diversity in others. The findings have shaped our approach to staff and trustee recruitment since then, including advertising more widely. We anonymise personal details that could lead to bias in applications as part of our recruitment process, and we collect anonymous demographic information from applicants to help us assess whether our recruitment strategy is effectively reaching a diverse range of candidates.

Our staff and trustee team has changed quite a bit since we conducted our first survey. Next time we run it, we will ensure that we treat the data in a way that means we can share the anonymised findings publicly, alongside Census data for our area as a comparator, as part of our commitment to transparency.

Initiatives and training

From 2020-2021 we were part of the DEI Coalition of Funders, exploring issues around EDI in the funding sector. Following this we were involved in the DEI Data Standard and in the EDI Steering Group of our umbrella body, UK Community Foundations, and took part in Be On Board’s Aspire programme.

Our staff team has identified a list of training needs in relation to EDI, and we are working our way through these together. To date our team has received:

By April 2025 we will also have received training on LGBTQ+ Allyship and Awareness.

Accessibility audit

In September 2024, we commissioned an accessibility audit of our offices and building to ensure we meet high standards of accessibility. We’ll be implementing their recommendations as soon as possible, and we aim to begin the process of becoming  a Disability Confident Employer in 2025.

Finance and Investment

The investment managers of our £64 million endowment fund work to high ethical environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards. To date, we have focused most on divesting from fossil fuels as quickly as possible. Our next priority will be exploring our investments with an EDI lens and ensuring our investment practices have a positive EDI impact.  

We welcome your ideas and feedback on our EDI work. Please get in touch with us at info@quartetcf.org.uk or on 0117 989 7700 if you’d like to speak to someone about our work in more detail.

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