GoodGym and diversity

GoodGym has a long term goal to be representative of the communities in which it operates. Here, GoodGym's CEO Ivo Gormley writes about how and why we need to do better in working towards this goal.

Our organisation has a goal of creating better connected communities. It is not possible for us to do this without being inclusive of everyone who lives in those communities. For us to be successful in this goal we have to improve. We have made attempts to improve our diversity but they have not gone far enough, for example attempts to improve our recruitment processes have not led to significant change. Linked at the bottom of this message you’ll see the goals and actions we are committed to, to make improvements.

I am confident that as an organisation, the goal of improving our diversity is important to us. There is huge will for us to improve across the GoodGym community and every staff member is committed to pushing forward improvements. We recognise as a team that this is not something that just one part of our organisation needs to take forward and that the whole GoodGym community needs to be involved and this needs to be built into everything we do for the long term. GoodGym is about making connections and creating community. It must be central to our work and we are making a commitment for this to be the case.

The issue of diversity and GoodGym’s lack of it, has been on our radar for at least three years and has been discussed extensively at our annual meetup for at least the last three years. Sadly, overall we haven’t made a lot of progress. We’ve known for some time that we are not achieving our goal of being representative of the communities in which we operate and we must make more steps to change this.

Thank you to everyone in the GoodGym community who have facilitated sessions at shindig, put forward ideas for how we can improve and expressed their views on this issue. I’d also like to thank the central team who have helped to keep the issues of race and diversity at the forefront of our minds and who have facilitated discussions, challenged our thinking and helped us to make concrete commitments, and to our trustees for holding us to account and challenging our thinking.

We are sharing these plans not to claim that we’ve cracked it or that we have all the answers, but to share progress and invite further comment, discussion and ideas.

Over the past months we have made significant steps in the right direction and we will continue to add to this plan. We know that we will not be able to solve this immediately and it will take continued and concerted work over the long term to make the significant change that we need to see.

Read the goals and actions we are committing to here.