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Our Inclusion Pledge

Allsorts Youth Project is committed to creating an organisation that is inclusive, safe, and understanding, built on the ideas and experiences of our wonderfully diverse LGBTQ+ community.

By making sure we listen to you, the young people and families at Allsorts, we can make sure that our services are tailored to meet your needs, and feel welcoming and fun for everyone. We do not claim to be all-knowing experts on how LGBTQ+ identities intersect with other identities or experiences. But we are growing and striving to create spaces where all LGBTQ+ children, young people, and their families feel safe, heard, and supported. Our pledge to you is that we will;

‍Keep Learning

‍We will keep learning and be open to change. As an employer, Allsorts provides mandatory training for our team in a wide range of areas surrounding diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB). We clearly communicate to staff, volunteers, and trustees that we are building a culture that challenges and changes practices to ensure we are as accessible as possible to all LGBTQ+ people, and we encourage feedback on these topics throughout the project.

‍Strive for Change

‍We pledge to put our learning into practice as we strive for change. Allsorts’ understanding of DEIB is an ongoing process that requires conscious attention. We will provide discussion sessions for staff, volunteers, and trustees to reflect on their insights and professional experiences within Allsorts’ spaces, ensuring they are contextualised, shared, and built upon. We know that, societally and organisationally, we have a long way to go, but we are committed to ongoing learning and to developing spaces where all LGBTQ+ children, young people, families, staff, volunteers, and trustees feel welcome, heard, and free to be themselves.

Statement on Anti-Racism

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Allsorts Youth Project has, for many years, fallen short on its responsibilities to provide spaces in which young LGBTQ+ people of colour feel represented and understood. As a result, we understand that young people of colour and local LGBTQ+ PoC communities have been reluctant to engage in our spaces.

To counter this, we have consulted with a range of stakeholders to identify what needs to change at Allsorts. This is an ongoing, fluid process that requires thorough reflection, learning, training, and the development of appropriate support structures. Those structures and training sessions should change and grow in response to feedback from the experiences of PoC young people, staff, volunteers, and trustees.

PoC service users and staff often leave the most ‘well-meaning’ organisations because the policies in place to support them are simply not enacted in practice. Also, being one of the ‘only representatives’ of a minority group in any organisation can result in feeling invisible and unheard, or being made to feel totally responsible for all issues and work associated with that identity. As LGBTQ+ people, we know this only too well, which is another reason why we are committed to becoming an anti-racist organisation.

We have made important progress, but we acknowledge there is still a way to go. In order to create an anti-racist organisation, Allsorts has adopted the eight principles from the Home Truths: Undoing racism and delivering real diversity in the charity sector report to ensure that;

  • A clear Anti-Racism Action Plan is in place and available to all staff and volunteers, outlining the outcomes we aim to achieve, how we will achieve them, and when we will know we're on the right path.

  • Our commitment does not falter

  • Everyone within the organisation is held to account - everyone has a responsibility to ensure anti-racism across the project.

  • Outcomes are measurable

We are committed to creating safer spaces for LGBTQ+ PoC who are current or prospective service users, employees, volunteers and partners. Therefore, we will;

  • Aim to employ a workforce and board of trustees that reflects the diversity of our community/society, in order to create a more welcoming space for PoC service users and volunteers

  • Aim to ensure representative support for young people within our service

  • Ensure that all of our staff, volunteers & board members undertake mandatory annual anti-racism training, delivered by an external trainer, to equip the team with the skills, knowledge, and understanding to work empathetically with PoC children, young people, and adults.

Allyship & Resources

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At Allsorts, we value allyship alongside inclusion. An ‘ally’ is someone who supports people who are discriminated against, despite not belonging to that group themselves. We run allyship workshops in our groups to help our young people and their families better understand intersecting identities within our LGBTQ+ community.

If you are interested in learning more, please read our ‘Unboxing our Identities’ resource, which was written to inform and highlight what life may be like for someone who is a person of colour and LGBTQ+.