Ensuring that our employees and the people we support from LGBTQIA+ communities feel safe and supported at Innovate Trust is a priority. This includes protecting our employees and the people we support from discrimination, prejudice, and hate crimes.

Our commitment to our LGBTQIA+ community is important to us at Innovate Trust. We acknowledge how integral gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation is to an individual’s sense of self and feelings of belonging. Therefore, we aim to celebrate and embrace the diversity and intersectionality of our identities at work.

At Innovate Trust, approximately 14% of our employees identify as LGBTQIA+. We are committed to becoming more representative as an organisation. This means ensuring our employees feel supported through inclusive recruitment, training, and employee networks.

International day against homophobia, transphobia, and biphobia

Today is International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia (IDAHOBIT). This year’s theme is “Together always: united in diversity.” IDAHOBIT is a day to draw attention to the violence and discrimination experienced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and intersex people. This also includes all of those with diverse sexual orientations, gender identities or expressions, and sex characteristics.

We see IDAHOBIT as an opportunity to educate ourselves about the realities of discrimination faced by LGBTQIA+ people. Therefore, we are signposting to a project called ILGA-Europe that tracks and rates the legal and policy situation of LGBTQIA+ people in Europe. Their annual index provides a country-by-country analysis of the legal rights and protections of LGBTQIA+ people.

This campaign is important to us as an organisation. We are committed to ensuring that our employees and the people we support from LGBTQIA+ communities feel safe, supported and celebrated at Innovate Trust.

Definition Not Applicable

Over the past year, we have been working with our employee network, the Definitions Not Applicable Network. The network aims to ensure that LGBTQIA+ employees can feedback to the organisation. Enabling us to understand how to support employees to the best of our ability.

All Equals Charter

We are gradually implementing actions from our LGBTQIA+ Inclusion Action Plan. This plan was created on the Getting Started Programme with the support of Manchester Pride’s All Equals Charter. The All Equals Charter is a set of values, principles and commitments that we must adhere to. This is in order to ensure the inclusion and prevention of discrimination against LGBTQIA+ people, both employees and the people we support. We aim to ensure that we are accountable and have a clear action plan to tackle LGBTQIA+ inclusion within the organisation. We will update employees on our progress and seek to include them in our work.

Our commitments

Our organisational statements highlights our commitment to Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion at Innovate Trust. These statements help us achieve our goals in an ethical manner through both words and actions.