Anti-Racism Case Study: Adjusting Our Processes

Part of being an anti-racist organisation involves seeking out partnerships which support and improve the fairness of our workplace culture. Whilst we have always sought out partnerships which serve to enrich our vision and our organisation as a whole, we are now looking to work with individuals and organisations who evidentially share our anti-racist and anti-colonial values and have the thoughtful drive and experience that actively demonstrate these values.

By taking the opportunities to work with these valuable individuals and organisations, we are aware that we have the power and privilege to influence the development of effective and evidential practices within other organisations. We will endeavour to ensure that our anti-racist practices are being reflected by our partners, either by working with those who have already embedded anti-racist policies or who demonstrate a genuine, tangible commitment to doing so. Individuals and organisations may be motivated to embed these practices because of our updated procurement processes or by working with us and seeing our culture in action.

We recognise our responsibility in ensuring that the practices we are seeking to be reflected are accurate, transparent, and measurable. Although we have taken, and continue to take, well-considered steps to embed internal anti-racist culture and policies, we acknowledge and understand that we are always learning and adapting, and this forms the basis of our expectations around procurement and anti-racist practices.

We have recently added an anti-racist element to our standard procurement documentation, which includes our standard procurement interview question around anti-racism. These items will be applied to all our tender assessments. This includes a requirement for all tendering individuals and organisations to summarise their own anti-racist practices as part of proposals. We do not expect all bidding individuals or organisations to have a comprehensive suite of policies or procedures in place; rather, we want to know what tenderers are doing to show their commitment to embedding and developing their anti-racist knowledge and practices. Once in place, this will form part of all tender assessments, and we will also be introducing a standard procurement interview question around anti-racism.

We have also been assessing how our approaches to project invoicing could be amended to allow a more advantageous arrangement for our partners. For example, where an individual or small organisation would be significantly affected by the need to wait for our standard payment runs, we can look at advance payment or special arrangements. In doing so, we are looking to attract tenders from a wider range of bidders, including those who may find standard invoicing schedules to be prohibitive.