THE BLUEPRINT ALLY STATUS AND WHY IT’S JUST THE START OF OUR JOURNEY
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Ellie Thompson
04 Feb 2021
We believe that we’ve always been on a positive D&I journey, but the Black Lives Matter movement became an inflection point for us – strong decisive action on race and ethnicity became an urgent requirement for our business and our industry.
Back in May 2020, as the world took to the streets in protest, our CEO, Louie St Claire, shared a personal and honest LinkedIn post on our D&I journey. This included the mistakes we had made and what we had learnt. We needed to take the opportunity to better understand how we could improve – individually and collectively. Our response has been to spend the last nine months looking inward, scrutinising the structures we had in place, reflecting on where we can be better and putting in new initiatives to ensure we do that for the long-term.
We didn’t do it alone. Following discussions with former Black, Asian, Mixed Race and Ethnic colleagues and in partnership with current ones we created a ‘Taking Action’ group, a group of individuals from across our agency with whom we share our initiatives and milestones to hold us to account.
It was with them that we decided to undertake The Blueprint application. We knew this wouldn’t be easy; in fact, at times, we would need to face the downright difficult head on, understand and accept our own failings and work hard to close the gaps we currently have.
But we also knew that to be better, it was something we needed to do. And it would be worth it.
Going through The Blueprint process has been an extremely rewarding experience for our agency. It gave us the framework and the focus to better understand what was already working well and what we needed to change. And it’s fair to say, we have already become a better and more inclusive workplace simply by applying.
So, today we couldn’t be more thrilled to receive The Blueprint Ally Status and to sign up to their 23 commitments. We know we have a lot of work still to do and that this is part of our journey, not the destination. But it reflects our commitment to change and our desire to have a long-term positive impact, not only on our own team, but on the industry more broadly.
It’s about becoming a better agency – more welcoming, more inclusive, and more diverse. That means every single one of us who works here striving to understand, talking about, and addressing issues connected to race, diversity, and inclusion in the workplace.
Expect more updates from us as we continue along this journey. Our goal is to drive long-term change, and we know that to do that we need to be transparent, honest and most of all, committed.