Advancing Equity: Mustard Development Agency's Commitment to Anti-Racism and Inclusion
The Mustard Development Agency is built upon a fundamental and unwavering commitment to promoting equality and diversity. Our constitutional objectives explicitly include removing barriers to accessing services based on grounds such as age, sex, or sexual orientation, and directly addressing and tackling poverty among minority ethnic families. This commitment extends beyond mere compliance; it is about actively challenging systemic inequalities and fostering an environment where every individual in Wales can thrive, free from discrimination and prejudice.
We recognize that deep-seated, systemic barriers often impede progress for diverse communities in Wales. These barriers manifest in various forms, including experiences of racism in everyday life, when accessing services, within the workforce, in gaining jobs and opportunities, and due to a lack of visible role models in positions of power. The Welsh Government itself acknowledges that it is "a long way from being representative and appropriately serving the communities of Wales in our organisation" and is committed to weaving anti-racism through all its policies and practices.
Our commitment to advancing equity is multifaceted:
• Dismantling Systemic Barriers in Public Services: The Welsh Government's "Anti-racist Wales Action Plan" serves as a crucial framework for our work, outlining a comprehensive approach to making Wales anti-racist. This plan sets a bold ambition for the Welsh Government to be an "exemplar employer", aiming for 20% of its recruits to be from ethnic minority backgrounds by 2026, and to promote ethnic minority staff at levels exceeding their population share. The goal is not just to increase numbers but to improve the actual experiences of working within the Welsh Government, with robust policies to facilitate progression and clear processes for calling out racism.
• Beyond its own workforce, the Welsh Government expects all public, third, and funded private sector organizations to demonstrate a strong commitment to anti-racist values and behaviors, ensuring representation at all levels, and maintaining accountability. This includes participation in all decision-making groups, meeting the minimum requirements of the Equality Act 2010, providing culturally sensitive and appropriate services (including translation and interpretation), and ensuring robust complaints policies for racial harassment that satisfy ethnic minority groups. Mustard Development Agency's work aligns directly with these expectations, pushing for accountability and best practice across sectors.
• Prioritizing Intersectionality: We understand that individuals hold multiple identities, and these identities intersect to create unique experiences of disadvantage. For instance, the NHS Wales Women's Health Plan highlights that factors like race, socioeconomic status, and experiences of domestic abuse disproportionately affect women from minority ethnic groups due to "long-standing structural inequalities". This intersectionality is critical to the fair delivery of services, and the Mustard Development Agency advocates for an approach that considers how these various aspects of identity combine to impact health and well-being. BAME women, for example, have reported feeling "less 'heard' when speaking with a healthcare professional". Our initiatives strive to ensure that services become fully accessible to the full diversity of ethnic minority people, acknowledging and addressing these complex needs.
• Leveraging Data and Research for Informed Action: Effective anti-racism requires robust evidence. The Welsh Government is committed to boosting its use and understanding of data and evidence to underpin anti-racist policies and measure progress. This includes developing a Race Disparity Evidence Unit Plan and an Ethnicity Data Map to identify gaps and ensure data is readily available across all policy areas to better reflect decision-making for ethnic minority communities. We believe that lived experience, captured through co-production and qualitative evidence, is valued equally to other sources of evidence.
• The Mustard Development Agency, consistent with this principle, emphasizes conducting research and collecting data on women's health issues in Wales to inform better decision-making and resource allocation. This approach allows us to understand the specific health needs and challenges faced by women in different communities, leading to more targeted interventions and effective programs. Similarly, the Welsh Government is improving workforce data quality and introducing a Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES) for NHS and Social Care, underpinned by a culture where staff can confidently provide ethnicity data and speak up against racist discrimination.
• Fostering Cultural Competence: A cornerstone of anti-racist service delivery is cultural competence. The "Cultural Competency Toolkit" developed for mental health professionals in Wales emphasizes that services are often not delivered to BAME communities in a way that meets their needs, with studies suggesting they fare less well in mental health systems. It highlights the importance of understanding the influence of beliefs, social experiences, and expectations of individuals from different ethnic and migrant groups on their use and experience of services.
• The Toolkit provides essential knowledge, skills, and attributes for developing cultural competence, including the ability to recognize and combat racism, racial, and other identity stereotypes and discrimination among individuals and institutions. It offers practical tips for communication with diverse patient populations, addressing non-verbal cues and the concept of "acculturation". The Mustard Development Agency promotes the integration of culturally competent models of care provision, ensuring that service providers are equipped to address the diverse needs of all communities, including language and interpretation needs.
• Embedding Accountability and Continuous Improvement: The Welsh Government is establishing and resourcing an Anti-Racist Wales Action Plan Accountability Group and an Internal Challenge and Support Group, supported by experts with lived experience, to monitor and ensure progress across the plan. Senior leaders are required to have performance objectives related to anti-racism. This commitment to accountability extends to publicly funded Culture, Heritage, and Sport organizations, which are required to adhere to anti-racism performance requirements and collect baseline data on ethnic diversity, especially in leadership and on boards. Similar accountability measures are being embedded in social care.
• The Mustard Development Agency aligns with this by advocating for constant monitoring and evaluation of impact. We support the continuous improvement of policy-development processes to create anti-racist approaches across all aspects of policy creation, emphasizing that policymakers need increased knowledge, skills, and behaviors important to anti-racism. This includes reviewing and revising Equality Impact Assessments to take a specifically anti-racist approach.
• Tackling Hate Crime and Discrimination: The Welsh Government views community cohesion, hateful attitudes, and hate crime as a continuum, emphasizing that to effectively tackle hate crime, the underlying hate-based attitudes and the "apparent normalisation of overtly racist language" must be addressed. The "Hate Hurts Wales" campaign aims to raise awareness of the impact of hate crime on victims from ethnic minority communities and motivate bystanders to act in an anti-racist way. The Mustard Development Agency supports such initiatives, recognizing that everyone shares the responsibility to call out and eliminate hate crime and hateful attitudes. This also involves promoting understanding of workers' rights and employers' responsibilities to challenge prejudice and tackle workplace discrimination, bullying, and harassment.
By combining direct support with a strategic focus on comprehensive equality, the Mustard Development Agency is dedicated to fostering an equitable and just society in Wales. Our work is a continuous endeavor, recognizing that achieving anti-racism requires ongoing commitment, systemic change, and the amplification of diverse voices at every level of society.
