Wildlife and Countryside Link

In 2025, Wildlife and Countryside Link’s work to promote EDI internally has included:

• EDI reporting to the Board, including on recruitment, and on progress towards the Route Map and The RACE Report.
• Further developing our inclusive recruitment practice, including sharing interview questions with candidates in advance.

• Wildlife and Countryside Link manages and coordinates an EDI Working Group, which is attended by both our member organisations, and organisations from the wider environmental sector. The group meets every 2 months, to come together to discuss issues and experiences that those working to progress EDI in our sector are facing, to share ideas and inspiration, to create and share resources, to support one another, and to hold ourselves accountable.
• Link also continues to drive the sector’s work to deliver our Route Map Towards Greater Ethnic Diversity in the Environment Sector, which has over 50 signatories.
• In 2024-2025, we have delivered our ‘Small eNGO Ethnic Diversity Support’ scheme, or ‘SEEDS’.
• With funding secured from Natural England, we worked with the consultancy Full Colour to deliver a programme of targeted support for a cohort of 10 small organisations within Link’s membership to equip them with the confidence and competence to deliver the Route Map. The programme successfully delivered 1-2-1 advice sessions, training and resources, as well as setting up a ‘buddy’ system and building a small community of support.
• In 2025, we are also running another round of benchmarking for our Route Map work, to understand where the sector has made progress, and where barriers and challenges are still being felt. We will use the findings from this benchmarking progress to target next steps, in terms of where we focus our work with the Working Group, and where it may be possible to develop further targeted interventions.

Compared with 2024:

1. Increase the diversity of candidates for jobs toward socially representative levels.
2. Increase the diversity of participants at Link events (Wild Summit).
3. Increase the number of Link members involved with our EDI group

• Wildlife and Countryside Link will continue to participate fully in The Race Report, and will also report this back internally at Board level.
• We will also continue to work with DSI as a partner.
• We will also track and report on our progress collectively as part of the sector via our Route Map benchmarking survey.