If anyone has any questions about the following statement, please contact CAST directly.

"There is definitely room for improvement and and would love to get your thoughts on how we might do things differently next time:

• Although we didn’t ask specific questions about applicant’s ethnicity, we did prioritise organisations serving ethnic minority groups and marginalised communities through our scoring and assessment processes: “The Ops Team will review all of the scores to ensure consistency and fairness and will carry out further reviews where there is a discrepancy between the score of 2 assessors. Where there are two high scores then the Ops Team would support the decision, two low scores would fail, and those in the middle would go into a “maybe” group which the Ops Team would review to prioritise those applications from the minority areas and also the themes that are under-represented. The list will be reviewed by the Ops Team and CAST CEO to prioritise organisations led by people with lived experience and organisations serving ethnic minority and marginalised communities”
• Following the first round of Open Projects briefs, we observed that a high % of applications from digital partners were from organisations who are already within the Catalyst network.
• Working with Collaborative Future, we reviewed our comms strategy with a focus on increasing the diversity of our partners. Working with Snook we conducted a review of our Open Projects website and process, with a focus on improving the accessibility and inclusivity of the open tendering process. For this we consciously recruited partners we hadn’t worked with before and those from under-represented groups. Recommendations to improve the content and design of Open Projects have been implemented ahead of Development 2A.
• Collaborative Future provided training on Power, Bias and Privilege for members of the Catalyst core team and ran an in-depth survey/research study to understand people’s experiences across the Catalyst network -both informing current and future practice
• To widen the pool of tech experts, we worked with Collaborative Future, William Joseph Design and Ada List
• The Catalyst comms strategy has a renewed focus on bringing more diverse voices to the forefront of Catalyst’s work
• We are working with the Centre for Knowledge Equity to provide digital, design and data support to the Lived Experience Movement, and working with their team to inform future Catalyst plans.
• 6 out of 8 of the charities involved marginalised or under-represented individuals or groups in developing their digital solution. These groups were mainly their target audiences for activities that were engaged during user testing. Charities across both the Development and Discovery programme identified that they found it challenging to reach these groups during the Covid-19 pandemic.
• Across Discovery, Definition and Development programmes, 73 of the 130 grantees have over 50% of their leadership with lived experience of the issues the organisation is addressing.
• 31 or the grantees (24%) have between 90-100% of the leadership with lived experience.
• Only 10 (7.6%) out of the total of 130 organisations that were awarded through Discovery, Definition and Development do not support beneficiaries in one or more of the target groups (LGBT+, BAME, Disability)

UPDATE FROM CAST COMMUNICATIONS TEAM:

• On launch day, we sent direct messages to a selection of EDI-focused organisations via the Catalyst account. As a result, our main tweet was retweeted by UKBlackTech, 100BlackMenOfLondon, YSYS and HEAR Network. Various organisations messaged to say they would publicise the activity, and Coding Black Females replied to confirm they would share and apply.
• We’ve also run around 20 sponsored campaigns on Twitter, and each time, the list has been at least 50% EDI-focused orgs
• List is here; whether we messaged re the launch funding is shown in Column F - I think 44 orgs were messaged.

So we have done a few things and by no means is this everything we could have done and there is so much more to do , also if I have used any incorrect language then please correct me as I’m trying to constantly learn: