The RRI looks at workforce data for national governing bodies (NGBs) and key leadership groups: the board, the senior management team, the professional coaches, the paid players and the officials.
What we do, by looking at these key leadership positions, is create a top-down approach for diversity.
The NGBs that have diverse leadership will be more aware of the lived experiences of ethnically diverse people and how to open talent pathways to be more inclusive.
The RRI was conceived by the Sports Monitoring Advisory Panel (SMAP), a group of black athletes, coaches, retired sports people and administrators that regularly hold the sports sector to account over their Black Lives Matter-inspired pledges.
SMAP was indeed born out of the Black Lives Matter movement and gathered momentum during the pandemic to ensure sport becomes progressively more inclusive, rather than making tokenistic gestures and promises.
The current SMAP is made up of Densign White, who chairs the panel, Darcy Bourne, Maggie Alphonsi, Devon Malcolm, Ama Agbeze, Kadeen Cox, Chris Ramsey, Alexandra Rickham, Fiona May and Rodney Hinds, plus Kevin Hylton and myself acting as special advisors to the panel.
Setting these targets and meeting, or exceeding, them will not only bring in lived experiences to contribute to decision-making, but it will also establish role models and improve visibility of ethnically diverse people in sport.
Seeing people who look like you in leadership positions will only increase the perception that the sport is there for you to play, too.
The RRI and target-setting also allows sport to chart their progress, by telling a story of how the sport has improved and moved on to be more inclusive.
For organisations, it allows transparency and works to win the trust of the public - a collective who are often used to ambiguous targets where anything and everything that is 'diverse' is grouped together.
And it’s precisely that lack of precision that ultimately leads to a lack of diversity.
Sports should look to be reflective of the national population as much as possible, not the sporting population.
And in that sense, the county and regional formal sport set up should reflect the local population.
Because being reflective of the status quo will only perpetuate it and most sports are not yet inclusive enough. But target-setting will help grow it.
So a sport may be predominantly white but by bringing in people who are ethnically diverse, the ripple effect will occur over time.
A great example of using targets is Basketball England, the only NGB to earn an overall A Grade on the RRI so far.
Basketball England took brave, demanding action to achieve this and to be a more inclusive sport for Black and other ethnically diverse communities.
Key steps taken by Basketball England included:
- reviewing policies with an external partner
- developing an equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) committee
- employing an EDI manager
- improving the reporting process for racial discrimination
- adopting an openly anti-racist posture
- promoting anti-racist resources
- quintupling the integrity team so capacity was not an issue.
This resulted in the staff growing from 12% to 25% ethnically diverse in three years, while the board held at 30%. It also resulted in the sport being 34% ethnically diverse.
These actions prove that use of data, setting targets and challenging yourself to meet them will develop a more inclusive and diverse sport.
