The Ethnicity and Cultural Heritage Action Plan 2025 was created to ensure that we have an active plan for making this happen – celebrating difference, raising awareness, and putting actions in place to address past imbalances relating to ethnicity and faith.
The Ethnicity and Cultural Heritage Action Plan 2025 focuses on three key pillars:
1 Awareness – Raising awareness of the societal inequities that our Minority Ethnic colleagues face in and outside of the workplace. Awareness also involves promoting and celebrating religious and cultural events that are important to our people – particularly from different faith backgrounds
2 Accountability – Ensuring that the business and key senior leaders are held to account for ensuring that progress on our I&D goals is continuously being made.
3 Action – where we have identified specific issues within the business around inclusion – particularly for Minority Ethnic people, we set out on taking direct remedial action to address these.
Our vision is to create an environment where everyone feels they can bring their whole self to work and are treated with respect and equity. Where there have been historical barriers in place, we aim to remove these through awareness, accountability, and specific actions such as sponsorship and development programmes.
Our strategy going forward is to continue to work through our 2025 Action Plan, supporting our ethnicity networks and the SLT, helping to remove barriers to progression, and challenging our leaders where more progress is required.
The firm sponsors several employee-led ethnicity and faith networks that aim to raise awareness of issues that are important to ethnic minorities. Recently we have assisted in the creation of the Hindu Network, hosted various cultural celebration events, and shared a clear action plan with the firm.
These networks are consulted directly on I&D matters to ensure that all views are considered and recognised. For example: consultation on the specific requirements of office multi-faith rooms.
We host company-wide events, both in person and online that showcase different religious and cultural celebrations – such as annual Lunar New Year and Black History Month celebrations.
We hosted the first ever Grant Thornton Film Festival 2022 in collaboration with the British Film Institute (BFI) and Filmbank Media, which celebrated racial diversity, encouraged conversation on exclusion, and reinforced the importance of representation.
Firmwide data and internal feedback on I&D performance data is reviewed each quarter, with targeted feedback to the business to ensure areas of improvement are addressed.
Grant Thornton has pledged to ensure that Minority Ethnic groups are fairly represented at all grades within the firm, with particular focus on senior key decision-making grades such as Partner and Director levels. Our Ethnicity and Cultural Heritage convenor and secondees hold the business to account by meeting with leaders regularly to ensure that progress is being made towards the agreed targets, and agreeing action-plans to improve progress where necessary.
We are in the process of creating internal sponsorship programmes targeted and catered to our Minority Ethnic colleagues. These programmes will deliver the empowering of our Minority Ethnic colleagues to have the confidence and skills to be able to progress with their career at Grant Thornton.
We evaluate internal business processes critically from an I&D perspective to continuously seek improvement as to how they can be more inclusive and work better for our people, for example, through our internal training programmes and people management processes.
As a young black man, I have faced challenges particularly when trying to navigate the corporate field. The feeling of exclusion, unfortunately, is one that I am quite familiar with.
Farhan Muhammad, Financial Services Audit Manager, shares his experience of unconscious bias and explains the steps Grant Thornton is taking to combat it in the workplace.
Legal Director and Ethnicity Convenor Cherryl Cooper tells us more about The Amos Bursary charity and her role as a professional mentor.
For Black History Month 2021, six of our people share their stories and tell us who they're proud to be.
Robert Hannah, Partner, Senior Leadership Team and Board Sponsor for Ethnicity and cultural heritage
Akin Ogboye, Director, Ethnicity, Religion and Cultural Heritage Convenor
Jenn Barnett, Head of Inclusion & Diversity, Environment and Sustainability
