Carers Trust’s Anti Racism Statement

Carers Trust is committed to becoming an anti-racist organisation. This commitment extends across every aspect of our work, from supporting our network of local carer organisations to our wider work that impacts carers.

We know people from minoritised ethnic communities in the UK are disproportionately impacted in providing unpaid care to friends and family. In addition, they  are also less likely to be able to access services to support them in their caring role.

The reasons for this are complex. But we are clear that the reasons for this inequality of access to services for carers include prejudice and racism. Such prejudice is society-wide and includes racism within the workplace.

Despite the recent attacks on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI), we remain committed to creating positive change. Carers Trust recognises its own working cultures need to become more inclusive, representative and equitable. This  is why we are so committed to changing that culture.

To create a culture of anti-racism and allyship in the long-term, Carers Trust has established an Anti-Racism Steering Group to drive our anti-racism work through the organisation. This group meets regularly with staff from across Carers Trust.

It delegates responsibility to relevant colleagues to lead work to make all aspects of our work inclusive and anti-racist. This ranges from communications and recruitment to diversity within our team, culture, policies and programme design.

Our Anti-Racism Steering Group has set up an anti-racism roadmap, plotting goals and setting targets to measure our progress. The roadmap puts equity and inclusivity at the heart of everything we do.

This includes the design of our future  programme work. This work is creating services designed to reach and benefit carers from minoritised ethnic communities, as well as creating an inclusive and anti-racist workplace.

Examples of our anti-racist work to date include:

  • Rolling out our 3-year Making Carers Count programme, aimed at improving access to our services for all under-represented communities of carers, including carers from ethnically minoritized communities, and we continue to build learning from this programme into our programmatic development and delivery.
  • Challenging racism wherever we find it, such as in our statement on the August 2024 riots.
  • Embedding equality impact assessments into our programme design cycle and ensuring that the needs of minoritised ethnic communities are explicitly reflected in our approach to programme design and delivery.
  • Committing to developing a further equity and inclusion programme during 2025/26 that builds on the learning from Making Carers Count and seeks to reach more underserved carers.
  • Ensuring that equality, diversity and inclusion is a core element of all programmes we take forward at Carers Trust, by building this into our decision-making framework to determines what programmes we develop.
  • After a full end to end review of our recruitment processes we’ve made changes to support inclusive recruitment practices.  These include sharing questions in advance of interviews with all candidates;  sharing interview guidance with candidates; and using a wider variety of job boards to advertise our roles in order to attract a candidates from all communities.
  • Within Triangle of Care initiative,  work is underway to adopt the Patient Carer Race Equality Framework (PCREF). 
  • Other examples from across Carers Trust Network include recent presentations at the Adult Care Worker Forum on anti-racism work from Camden Carers and Northamptonshire Carers Centre