As discussed, this year we underwent a comprehensive review process, to ensure our strategy was still fit for purpose. We still believe that these issues address the most important challenges at Nesta and beyond. They also continue to resonate with staff, and we have built expertise and experience in working on these challenges.

Our recommendation is to recommit to the goals we have set out and, in many cases, to recommit to the targets as well – with a greater focus on some elements within each goal (such as senior leadership diversity) and the intersections between them.

With this in mind, we’re keen to ensure all of our goals meet the above criteria, so we’re making some small changes:

1. Additional targets for senior leadership: We are setting ourselves a sub-target – to achieve at least 25% representation of people from minoritised ethnic and lower socioeconomic backgrounds across Nesta, including at the senior leadership levels. Currently, ethnic representation at our most senior levels is at 13%, and 19% of senior leaders are from a lower SEB. Given lower rates of turnover and greater recruitment challenges for more senior positions, this is a highly stretching ambition that we expect will take years to achieve.
2. Aligning our EDI and strategy processes: We have decided to align our future EDI strategy review with Nesta’s broader three-year strategy review points (2024, 2027 and 2030). This will help support a coherent organisational approach, reinforcing the key enablers set out above. If we are successful in meeting some targets before 2027, we will push ourselves to overachieve on the targets and sub-targets, and double our efforts on areas where we are not delivering as well.
3. Adapting our mission-focused goal: To ensure our EDI goals and Nesta’s wider strategy work in tandem, we are refining our mission-focused goal to be more specific and reflective of how we deliver impact as an organisation. Instead of just ‘considering and measuring the impact of our work on minoritised and disadvantaged groups’, which we have found too vague for how we innovate in practice, we are sharpening our commitment to:

Nesta’s mission work actively contributes to delivering an inclusive transition towards net zero, fairer long-term health outcomes, and equitable early learning for children facing economic disadvantage, and actively mitigates the most important unintended consequences of our work.

Each mission is now spend considering what potential unintended consequences of our work pose the greatest risks to minoritised communities, and how we could mitigate against this. Our sustainable future mission is introducing a new area of focus on fairness, and our healthy life mission is continuing to do economic modelling to ensure our recommendations to introduce mandatory targets for the largest food retailers would not increase the price of food for consumers, for example.

Our revised goals are that by 2027 we will:

• Goal 1: Have eliminated our gender and ethnicity pay gaps and our gender and ethnicity progression gaps, at all levels of the organisation.
• Goal 2: At a minimum, be representative of the UK on the following characteristics: ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation and gender.
• Goal 3: At a minimum, be representative of the UK for staff from more disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds.
• Goal 4: Have a culture where everyone feels they belong and are included at Nesta, irrespective of their background.
• Goal 5: 25% of our investees and 50% of our suppliers will be led by people from minoritised and disadvantaged groups.
• Goal 6: The majority of our innovation missions’ endowment funding will be spent on activity to improve the circumstances of people from minoritised and disadvantaged groups, and will not widen inequalities.
• Goal 7: Nesta’s mission work actively contributes to delivering an inclusive transition towards net zero, fairer long-term health outcomes, and equitable early learning for children facing economic disadvantage, and actively mitigates the most important unintended consequences of our work.
• Goal 8: We will be actively using our platforms to raise the voices of minoritised and disadvantaged groups, and contributing to a wider movement for more equitable, diverse and inclusive practices.
• Goal 9: We will take an empirical and creative approach to embedding equity, diversity and inclusion throughout our work. By 2025, we will have generated evidence supporting five ways of working that effectively address issues of discrimination and exclusion.

As discussed above, there are some top priorities within our EDI strategy for the next 12 months, and we will be focusing most of our effort on these areas. This includes:

1. diversity of talent at top levels of the organisation
2. socioeconomic diversity and inclusion
3. inclusive practice in our project lifecycle
4. learning, inclusion and belonging.

Though we will spend most of our time on the four priorities set out above, we do expect to make headway on our other goals as well, like supporting our employee resource groups, adopting and embedding newly developed EDI principles in our new Mission Studio, continuing to ensure diversity across our speakers (when we host or when we speak elsewhere), and publishing more of our insights and learnings externally.

As ever, we’re always keen to learn from other organisations. If you’re interested in learning about anything we’ve covered in this report, please reach out to: [email protected].