Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
At Big Issue Invest, we believe social equity and justice are necessary to achieve social equality which is why ‘Pushing for Social Equality’ is one of our three key strategic themes. We do not see anyone as ‘hard to reach’, and back the extraordinary organisations who can be overlooked by the mainstream.
As of 2021, 20% of our portfolio is invested into organisations directly tackling inequality in the UK and over 60% of our investments were based in the top quartile of deprivation in the UK. Many of our client’s tackle inequality through their work to improve health, education and job outcomes in deprived areas. In the coming years, we aim to grow our investments into high deprivation areas and into founders with lived experience of social challenges.
We have designed an Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Measurement Tool to support organisations that wish to accurately measure the diversity within their leadership teams and staff, as well as the groups that use their services. Without any need to share data externally, it can also calculate organisational gender and ethnicity pay gap. The tool is free to download here and is being developed further with generous support from Big Society Capital.
For more information on any of BII’s work in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, please read our Impact Report which can be found here or get in touch with us via the button below.
The current representation across our BII Portfolio as of September 2021 is:
