A statement from The HudsonBec Group: Our commitments to change

We’ve spent the past week reflecting on our practices as a company. Here we set out the changes we’re going to make.

Three weeks on from the brutal killing of George Floyd by white police officers in Minneapolis, it’s almost impossible for many of us to even comprehend the pain and anger that many in the Black community are feeling right now, both in the US and around the world.

The fact that, for many, this doesn’t represent a watershed moment, but instead is something that’s dealt with on a daily basis, only serves to deepen the anguish.

As a group of companies we have spent those weeks reflecting on our practices to assess how we can improve when it comes to representation, both internally as an organisation and externally as a voice within the creative industry.

We have had policies and procedures to help us address the imbalance of representation in the creative industry for many years now; both internally and externally. However, the starkness of the events in the USA and the subsequent global reaction have helped us understand that however good our intentions, our actions have produced little impact and actual tangible change. This simply isn’t good enough.

We must give this the urgency that it deserves. To do so, we are publishing our intentions below to ensure we are held accountable for our actions.

Our Internal Teams and Processes

• We commit to a complete reassessment of our current DEI strategy, initiatives, and ensuring our environment is inclusive.
• We commit to a complete re-appraisal and design of our recruitment processes; which were relaunched 18 months ago to remove any bias from our process, and encourage more applications from BAME candidates, but have not had enough impact on the internal make-up of our full-time teams. They must be better.
• We commit to delivering mandatory unconscious bias training for every employee in the group.
• We commit to reassessing the structure of our current DEI focussed internal team to make sure everyone is responsible. This has been in place for the last two years, but has not had the desired impact on our workforce.
• We commit to reviewing our current placement scheme for under-represented groups, to make it more specific and impactful, as well as look for ways to make sure it has more impact in the wider industry and leads to more concrete opportunities.
• We commit to educating ourselves, and staying educated — each and every one of us. We will ring-fence mandatory time booked for every employee to educate themselves on racism, and make budget available for resources.

Our work externally with the wider creative industry

• We commit to reviewing our editorial criteria and set guidelines for commissioning talent across all businesses; It’s Nice That, Anyways Creative, Lecture in Progress and If You Could Jobs.
• We commit to donating online advertising space on our biggest platform, It’s Nice That to organisations working to make the creative industries more diverse.
• We commit to continuing our partnerships with organisations creating greater access for underrepresented young creatives (including Create Jobs and Inspire the Future) but review these to see how they can become more impactful and core to our business.
• We commit to continuing our current 3-year commitment and investment in Lecture in Progress, and refocus on how to do more to help diversify the pipeline of talent coming into the industry by making free-to-access information and opportunities available to anyone.
• We commit to finding ways that we as a group of individuals can engage, educate and help the wider community. We must find ways that we can all get involved in more mentor schemes, portfolio reviews, advice sessions and more and will make sure we update on our progress.

Actions clearly speak louder than words, so we want to make sure nothing we’ve said here cannot be followed up and reviewed. We commit to continuing to analyse our diversity targets and impact on the wider community quarterly at the most senior, board level — but with more scrutiny than ever, and transparency with the wider workforce.

We will also publicly publish our progress as a group; both long and short-term. Change will of course take time, but the first of these will be at the end of September.

We commit to continuing this action for as long as we exist.

Finally, we will also be contributing financially to fundraising efforts for 70+ community bail funds, mutual aid funds, and racial justice organisers.

If you have any thoughts on how we can improve or if you have any other feedback, then please get in touch with me, Alex Bec; alex@thehudsonbecgroup.com

Thanks for reading, Alex and Will.