Our vision is to bring thriving orchards into the heart of every urban community. We focus on working with marginalised communities in areas of urban deprivation where we can make the most difference to people’s lives.
The Orchard Project is committed to creating resilient, biodiverse orchards teaming with wildlife as much as we are to creating a diverse organisation. We need everyone’s voices, strengths and solutions to help create an equitable, resilient and sustainable society.
Within our work we use the term Black people and people of colour (BPOC) to refer to people who are ethnically and culturally diverse, and experience racism in our society. We recognise that this term is complex and generalising, through which individual identities are minimised and homogenised.
In an ideal world, we would not have a need for any terminology that attempts to group individuals with hugely varying experiences under one umbrella; any terminology is ultimately flawed.
Our EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) programme includes:
⚉ Delivering training programmes to help people get jobs in the environment sector. E.g. our CICO (Certificate in Community Orcharding) course offers bursaries to Black people and people of colour. On our most recent courses in London, BPOC students have made up 44% of our intake.
We develop talent in our student graduates by offering train the trainer courses. Tutors go on to train on our courses and can act as paid freelancers as part of our orchard aftercare work.
⚉ In addition, we have increased the number of Black-led projects that we’ve used as venues, working with local beneficiaries to provide orchard training and planting and looking after orchards in the sites
We are currently carrying out project development work with new partners who are led by people of colour, minority ethnic backgrounds or ethnically diverse people, to develop orchard programmes that better reflect need in these communities.
⚉ Our organisation is currently underrepresented in terms of racial diversity and we are working on measures to improve this. These include promoting race equity and inclusion within all new recruitment materials, a guaranteed interview scheme for people of colour who meet essential criteria and advertising through specialist diversity jobs boards, blind recruitment to overcome our unconscious biases. Our recruitment criteria is based on experience, rather than academic qualifications. We track diversity data through each recruitment round to identify where we can improve our processes and actively look for solutions to help our workforce become more diverse.
⚉ Removing economic structural barriers for people accessing our work, especially around volunteering and affordability. We have sought to address this in part through the creation of paid for intern roles when we can source funding.
⚉ Continuing to seek out ways to improve the diversity of our board, recognising that change needs be led from the top of an organisation.
The Orchard Project is signed up to the Diverse Sustainability Initiative and we recently took part in the Race Report.