Bristol Race Equality Strategic Leaders Group

Introduction

Bristol’s Race Equality Strategic Leaders group was established in 2015 to champion the Bristol Manifesto for Race Equality. The group meets on a bi-monthly basis to discuss how all public sector city partners can work together to improve the opportunities and experiences of racially minoritised individuals and take an action centred approach to making a difference for Bristol’s communities. The group has developed award winning programmes and products, and more current developments have been semi-finalists of the EU Capital of innovation award (2024) for work on race equality.

The group was initially set up in response to the Bristol Manifesto for Race Equality – “Batook’s Blueprint”, to bring together all public sector organisations in the city to work collaboratively to tackle the endemic issues that the Manifesto raised. The aim of the group is to ensure a collective approach to tackling race inequality across Bristol by identifying opportunities and addressing issues through transparent approaches.

One of the key outputs of the group to date has been to transparently display how agencies are performing in terms of the diversity of race within organisations. The value of producing this detailed piece of work has been to facilitate partners working collaboratively through shared challenges by implementing partnership initiatives, sharing learning, resources and good practice as well as implementing innovative programmes to address key priorities in ensuring greater diversity and equality within each organisation. The full list of partner agencies can be found here.

This detailed and transparent approach has been a first of its kind on a city wide and multi-agency basis, resulting in the group winning the prestigious ‘Transparency Award’ at the 2018 Global Equality and Diversity Awards. Crucially the group have built on this success to ensure even more data outputs with mapping of trends, performance and wider city engagement which has now resulted in action plans aimed at making a positive difference to race equality across all organisations.

Many other race focused projects are also being progressed and monitored by the group to ensure continued impact. One excellent example showing the progress of the group is the highly impactive national ‘Race and the City’ Conference. This is now held on an annual basis and is attended by leaders from across the Country and also supported by the Cabinet Office’s Race Disparity Unit. You can watch a previous Conference film below.

Further details on the outputs delivered by the group to date can be found here.

Supporting the group is the ‘Race Equality Practitioners’ Group’ who help drive the operational responses to a range of matters including collectively looking at increasing representation of racially minoritised communities in the workplace at all levels across the public sector.