Equality, diversity & inclusion

Creating a truly inclusive workplace at Royal Voluntary Service

We want to build a culture where all our people can be their authentic selves and feel proud to belong to the Royal Voluntary Service community.

Royal Voluntary Service has an important role to play in building strong and connected volunteering communities. We want to ensure volunteering is available to everyone and that we can reduce barriers to access and create dynamic and flexible volunteering opportunities, so there is a role for anyone who would like to get involved to support others in their community.

Our Inclusion Plan confirms our commitment to inclusion and outlines our key objectives for making Royal Voluntary Service a more diverse and inclusive organisation. It builds upon what we have already achieved and pledges to further address inequality for our people and communities, backed up with purpose and action. It has been developed from listening to our staff and volunteers; their valuable feedback provides the basis of our inclusion aims and objectives.

Our Inclusion Plan is for everyone; it commits us to work together and live our core values - our Stella Values - to build a diverse and inclusive culture, with the aim of creating a great place to work and volunteer.

Our EDI ambition

It is our ambition to embed equality, diversity, and inclusion across every area of the organisation to create meaningful, long-lasting cultural change. We know this aspiration will require a change in approach, so we have created a robust framework for the next three years which combines accountability, leadership, and behavioural change.

We want to build a culture where all our people – volunteers and staff – can be their authentic selves and feel proud to belong to the Royal Voluntary Service community.

Key drivers that shape our Inclusion Plan are:

We are building an inclusive culture in which individual difference and the contributions of our volunteers and employees are recognised and valued.
We take a zero-tolerance approach to discrimination, bullying and harassment, including but not limited to all the protected characteristics as defined in the Equality Act 2010.
We provide resources and training to all employees and volunteers to ensure they are fully aware of equality, diversity, and inclusion issues and their responsibilities in these areas.
We embed equality, diversity, and inclusion into our policies, procedures, and everyday working practices.
We ensure the importance of equality, diversity, and inclusion is communicated throughout the employee and volunteer lifecycle.

The four pillars of our inclusion plan

Pillar 1: Building a culture of belonging

We will develop and support our people to be culturally aware, and make sure that every new person joining Royal Voluntary Service understands the behaviours we expect and the opportunities they can benefit from. We will embed inclusion into our governance and our policies, and improve our physical and digital spaces, to make sure everyone can access Royal Voluntary Service in an inclusive and open way.

A volunteer supporting a man in a wheelchair to get around a hospital

Pillar 2: Valuing difference

We will create a workplace where our staff can speak up and suggest new, innovative ways of achieving our aims and goals. Our leaders (trustees and executives) will be empowered to talk about Inclusion, and our volunteers and staff will be too. Visible and invisible differences will be supported and celebrated, and our people will be trained effectively so that everyone understands why inclusion is relevant to them and how they can contribute.

Community shop volunteer serving customers

Pillar 3: Inspiring our communities through inclusive volunteering

We want to motivate more people to volunteer but to do this we need to empower our people to become more open and confident in embracing diversity through our volunteering opportunities. We will therefore develop opportunities that are accessible and flexible to ensure we reduce any barriers faced by those in our communities who are motivated to volunteer.

A Royal Voluntary service volunteer serving lunch to older people at a lunch club

Pillar 4: Delivering excellence through inclusion

We will embed inclusion in every area of work to allow us to achieve excellence. We will develop our practices in recruitment and selection, procurement, communication, performance management, and governance, and in every service and department. We will increase transparency and accountability both internally and externally by publishing our inclusion work and decisions.

A Royal Voluntary Service Volunteer in a wheelchair

Work so far

Since 2022 we have dedicated specific resource for our Inclusion work and have been focussing on building our EDI foundations. This work has included: