• Gender identity: While we cannot be sure of a person’s gender and would normally avoid assumptions,
we talk about people’s perceived gender because we are analysing the impact of those content
choices. It's important in this report to be able to talk specifically about Black men, South Asian
women, and other specific identity categories that we are seeing throughout communications content
across the UK charity sector. In some cases, we won't be right about a person’s identity (for example, a
South Asian woman might identify as a man, non-binary, gengerqueer etc) but we are analysing the
representation and portrayal of these different categories across the content.
• Images and text were analysed in the context of the whole message and the relationship between the
aspects of the messaging. Therefore, what may appear as minimising in one organisation might look
more positive in another depending on the story, context and viewpoint.
• Missed opportunities: where mentioned, this refers to any missed chances for an organisation to take
an anti racist or racial justice perspective in the media (or their communications/channels).
• Sector summaries: As the 30 charities were based on a pre-existing list, some sectors are more heavily
represented than others. We want to avoid creating unfair conclusions about sectors to write
summaries where there are less than two organisations, so we have only provided sector summaries
where there are two or more organisations represented in the sector.
• As mentioned in our introduction, we have kept the sector names used by Harris Interactive for
consistency and clarity. The only two exceptions are the ‘Overseas’ and ‘Elderly’ sectors. We have used
‘International’ for the former as a more everyday word, and to avoid colonial connotations, while we
have replaced ‘Elderly’ with a more age-inclusive term, ‘Older people’.
Opening thoughts
• This work is not intended as a judgement but as a tool to help organisations gauge where they and
various other organisations and sectors are on their anti- racist journeys.
• The resurgence of interest in the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 is seen by many as a watershed
moment in the ways in which societies and communities around the world understand and talk about
race, racism and white supremacy culture. Thus, we refer to June 2020 as a key date for widespread
organisational pledges, commitments and renewed focus within the charity sector in addressing racism.
• Most trustees were appointed post June 2020 across races and genders, (especially Black women and
South Asian men and women), which for some charities signals a renewed focus on anti-racism, while
for others it can appear to be a superficial response to perceived external pressure over this time (part
of a reputation management exercise). In organisations that appointed trustees of the Global Majority
after June 2020, we noticed continued instances of white-centred narratives and trivialisation of Global
Majority communities in their content.