Charity leaders are being urged by anti-racism campaign group Charity So White to ask themselves “hard questions about the biases you hold” when making decisions around redundancies.

The group warns that a wave of redundancies and budget cuts across the charity sector “are already disproportionately impacting Black and Brown staff”.

Young Global Majority staff in the lowest grades are “most likely to be impacted by redundancy”, Charity So White warns.

It has issued guidance to charity leaders on how they can tackle biases and racism when deciding on cuts.

“As restructure and redundancy processes rip through the charity sector, we want to look at how charities are failing to live up to anti-racist values and defaulting to white supremacist notions of whose work is most valuable and most worthy of retaining,” it said.

Advice includes urging charity leaders to “reflect on how systemic oppression is impacting your judgement”.

This includes looking at how racism, ableism and sexism has impacted their decisions.

Charity leaders are also urged to undertake an equity impact assessment when identifying roles at risk of redundancy.

“Build anti-oppressive practice into your decision making at the earliest stages of the process,” said Charity So White.

This is needed to “both to protect your Global Majority staff from systemic racism within the redundancy process and to protect the organisation from potential disputes down the line when systemic racism shows up within the process”.

Charities also need to have “safe spaces” for staff from global majority and marginalised backgrounds to raise concerns, which leaders need to act on.

Also when global majority staff are made redundant charity leaders need to be aware they will face racism in their search for another role and to offer support, such as with CV writing and to allow time within work for job hunting.

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