Inclusivity

Aim: Ever since Scouts began, we’ve brought young people together from different backgrounds to enjoy adventurous experiences, learn new skills, and have fun.

More recently, we’ve made brilliant leaps forward to make our movement a place where anyone can belong. We make sure our LGBTQ+ young people and volunteers can be themselves, our Race Equity project is gathering momentum, and we’re starting Scouts in areas we weren’t serving before.

While we’re proud of what we’ve achieved so far, there’s more we want to do to make our movement as inclusive as possible. We’re not stopping until every young person can join, enjoy themselves and thrive in Scouts.

Goals

By the end of 2025:

• Since the Covid-19 pandemic we have opened 1,171 new sections in IMD 1-5 locations.
• We are working towards the goal of 5% of our volunteers to be from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds and are currently standing at 3.8%.

Progress a year on

We’ve worked with external independent experts to conduct research and share their insights, so we can focus our energies where we can make the most impact. This helped volunteers understand how to best engage with, and support, the least represented communities in Scouts. We’ve identified some of the ways in which Black communities may experience barriers to Scouts, and understand better ways in which we could be more appealing and inclusive to these communities.

We conducted research to understand the experiences of volunteer colleagues from Black, Asian, and minority ethnic communities within our UK Headquarters teams. The findings revealed significant scope for improvement. We’ve redoubled our efforts towards sustainable, long lasting cultural changes that’ll help us attract and retain talented volunteers from Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities.

To support volunteers to build and deliver an ambitious Programme of Work, we’ve built a strong and stable staff team, focused on four priority areas:

• Piloting Scouts in Black communities
• Supporting neurodivergent members
• Enabling culture change among our UK teams
• Making sure we support the movement to learn from complaints that come into our resolutions team

The team are working alongside volunteers to support the movement’s efforts to give young people and volunteers from underrepresented communities the chance to thrive in Scouts. For example, in November, the staff team supported 50 local inclusion volunteers from across the UK with a day of online workshops. Volunteers shared their learning about how to support different needs, such as those members with autism, as part of our focus on supporting neurodivergent young people and volunteers, through to setting up Groups in schools and hospitals.

What's next

By the start of 2025, we’re aiming to have the full Programme of Work ready to kick off, building on our current priorities. We’ll offer more online resources and a range of learning opportunities, and strengthen the breadth and reach of our inclusion volunteers. We’re hoping all of these will help more volunteers feel they have the capacity, capability, and confidence to grow Scouts in the communities we’re currently underserving.

We’ll be reviewing the experiences of neurodivergent people across Scouts, making sure we understand their needs, how we can improve their experiences in Scouts, and highlight where there’s already good practice that fellow volunteers can learn from.

We’ve started work around building a zero tolerance approach to discrimination, including zero tolerance to racism. This is to prevent harm before it’s caused, as well as improving how we respond as a movement to instances of discrimination. Throughout all our work, we’re committed to making Scouts welcoming and inclusive to all.