a cartoon image of a man sitting cross legged reading a book.This month, we launched a brand-new Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Roadmap, which was designed to help museums to reflect on EDI in their setting and identify actions to embed EDI in their processes.

The Roadmap emerged from our recent project – Rebuilding the Foundations: Gloucestershire’s Museums –  which provided participant museums with support to develop their thinking on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. This included bespoke support from a specialist EDI consultant and specialist training sessions, which helped the museums to develop their awareness and understanding and feel readier to take action.

As part of this process, the road map was developed to support an organisation-wide approach to change. A whole-organisation journey towards awareness and understanding is a vital first step towards developing and putting in place plans for increasing accessibility, achieving more representative volunteer involvement, developing programming and new work with collections.

The roadmap includes a series of stages, each with prompts to help you consider your organisation’s position and help you get started.

There are eight steps along the roadmap:

The Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Roadmap, displaying each of the eight stages with colourful cartoon illustrations.

Stage One: Evaluating your organisation

The first step is to understand the position of your museum in relation to your Equality, Diversity & Inclusion ambitions. During this phase of the process, you should ask key questions about the diversity of your organisation and your audiences, and how these relate to other contextual factors, such as the local area.

Stage Two: Accessibility

Stage Two involves considering how accessible your museum is to current and potential visitors and volunteers. You will need to review your information online and in print, your building, practices, exhibitions, commercial offer and the spaces you are working in.

Stage Three: Raising awareness and trustee confidence

Stage Three asks you to consider the role of your governing body, and how they will ensure they are aware of the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion agenda to be able to undertake the transformations you require.

Stage Four: Developing your EDI statement

Once you have a strong grasp of where your organisation currently is, you should consider developing an EDI Statement which will underpin all your work, from recruitment to outreach.

Stage Five: Remodelling volunteer recruitment

Ensuring that you are advertising, recruiting, and inducting in an inclusive way is imperative for your success. You may want to use the Volunteer Recruitment Cycle produced as part of Rebuilding the Foundations. This will help you plan for inclusion at every stage of volunteer involvement.

Stage Six: Your policy

It’s now time to formulate and formalise your EDI processes into a policy document. It’s recommended that you review your policy annually in the first three years, and every 2-3 years after that.

Stage Seven: Trustee recruitment

To ensure that your organisation remains inclusive, it’s as important to have representation at trustee level as it is at every level of the organisation. How will you recruit and retain a group that is diverse?

Stage Eight: EDI impact across all activities

The final stage is to consider the impact that a vastly improved approach to EDI can have across your organisation, including education, outreach, engagement, collections and exhibitions.

Then, you can go back to Stage One and see what you can do next. Your actions will have made further progress possible!

Download the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Roadmap now and start your EDI journey.

Building on the way we developed this roadmap out of conversations with Gloucestershire museums, we are hoping to continue to consult widely on its useability. Please consider sharing your comments with SWMD as you explore it with your stakeholders and governing bodies – thank you for your time in doing so.