Equality Diversity Inclusion

Equality, diversity, inclusion

We are firmly committed to recruiting the best colleagues regardless of age, ethnicity, religion or beliefs, marital status, gender, sexuality or disability and to supporting customers from similarly diverse backgrounds.

All newly appointed colleagues receive an induction, during which they will learn about our PRIDE values, our expectations of how they should treat our customers and our commitments in relation to how they will be treated.

We also provide our customers with a range of accessible information on how to deal with hate, mate crime and racism. Our Safety campaign in 2018 involved PCSOs from the community talking with our customers about how, together, we can tackle these issues.

We are proud of our record on diversity in our workforce. A quarter of our staff are from the BAME community. We continue to provide a range of development opportunities, like the `Well-Led’ and `Lead to Succeed’ management course – completed by 96 colleagues from across all sections of the organisation. We subscribe to a number of programs which enable us to open up employment opportunities for everyone in the community through our apprentice scheme, Disability Confident Leader program, Investors in People and others.

Our dedicated Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Group are working through an action plan to ensure Advance firmly embeds best EDI practice into policy decisions, recruitment, training and daily interactions with colleagues.

While we are not a campaigning organisation, we do carefully choose and respectfully comment, on a range of issues that we see as injustices for the people we support. However, we often find that the words and sentiment are much more powerful coming from someone who has lived experience of a situation. You can find articles highlighting our involvement in national equality, diversity and inclusion campaigns and stories by individual colleagues on our website news pages.

We value diversity and welcome applications from everyone interested in working at Advance