Lab COO Rebecca Sumner Smith shares what we did in 2024, and what we’re committing to in 2025
In February last year I wrote about our ongoing justice, equity, diversity and inclusion (“JEDI”) project. It was an exercise in sharing, and ‘thinking out loud’. At the time we committed to say more on this in future – so that’s what we are doing.
Full transparency: sharing our internal reflections
We’ve decided the most transparent approach is to simply share our internal reporting document for 2024. This can be viewed here (opens pdf). The report was prepared for our team and board, but we’re publishing it here in case it is useful for others.
The report sets out why this work is important to us, what we’re doing in our programmes and our organisation, how we’ll measure progress, and what comes next, and includes an appendix listing some of the key changes we made during 2024. (If you want to contextualise this within our work overall, you can read our 2024 in review blog here, or more general information about our work on our website here.)
In headline, 2024 felt like a year where many small steps added up to something more significant. We’ve reached a transition point, moving from being an organisation simply engaging with this work to one where JEDI is embedded in everything we do, and where all colleagues are accountable for this. We are also beginning to measure – or in some cases, better measure – the impact of our JEDI work, and for the year 2025 onwards are committed to sharing our progress and learning in a more detailed, public-facing, annual report.
The year ahead
Thanks to the foundations built in 2024, the coming year feels much clearer and more manageable. A few highlights include:
- As a team, I’m delighted we’ll be completing some training provided by the Social Justice Collective. From January to April we’ll undertake a mix of online learning, individual and team reflections, and then hold a final facilitated session to consolidate and apply the learning. This will be the first longer, structured (JEDI-related) training we’ll undertake as a whole team, and I’m looking forward to what we may discover throughout this process and beyond.
- We’re proposing we refocus our working group, whose second term ended in December, with a more specific emphasis on embedding justice and equity in our programme work. This will enable the team and board to work together – and provide challenge – on knotty JEDI-related issues relating to our charitable goals.
- Based on our work last year and the diversity survey results (opens pdf), we’ll also be focusing within our organisation on some specific areas, such as neurodiversity at work, and women’s health including menopause.
My usual caveat!
As ever – progress may be imperfect, but we are making progress. We hope that sharing our approach might encourage other organisations to do similarly, or inspire others to reach out so we can share learning and improve together across the systems in which we operate.
If that’s you, please get in touch.