Changing the Culture: Building Inclusive Practice Across Gloucestershire’s VCSE Sector
Cate Hemingway, Head of Learning and Development at Gloucestershire VCSE Alliance, on changing the culture and building inclusive practice across Gloucestershire’s VCSE sector
Happy New Year and welcome to the first edition of the Inclusion Newsletter for 2026 from the team at Gloucestershire VCSE Alliance, which you can subscribe to here.
Our Inclusivity Matters newsletter marks an important step in our shared commitment to changing the culture of our sector, moving beyond good intentions to everyday practices that make inclusion real. Across Gloucestershire’s voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations, we are seeing more people asking deeper questions about how to create spaces where everyone feels they belong. That cultural shift, from policy to practice and from words to action, is what this work is all about: all done with passion and inspiration.
Our recent Building an Inclusive Organisational Culture post-conference check-in and chat facilitated by Lucy Smith from Inclusive Change captured that energy perfectly. The event gave participants time to reflect on what they had learned and to translate those insights into practical commitments for change. The conversation was open, honest, and action oriented. People spoke about reviewing recruitment processes to make them more accessible, simplifying language in communications, revisiting induction materials, and making inclusion a standing item in leadership conversations. Each commitment, large or small, quick win or long-term, represents a step in changing organisational culture from the inside out. Culture doesn’t shift through statements alone; it changes when people decide, day by day, to do things differently. This spirit of thoughtful reflection and practical action is exactly what will sustain the sector’s long-term progress.
That same spirit of cultural change was evident in the success of our recent Intersectionality Training Course delivered by Cleo from Mission Diverse. Participants explored how the overlapping aspects of identity, such as race, gender, disability, sexuality, class and faith, shape experiences within workplaces and communities. Many reflected on how easily systems and habits can exclude people without us realising, and how understanding intersectionality helps us design services and policies that respond to real lives. The feedback was powerful: people left the sessions not only with knowledge but with motivation to question assumptions, change language, and rethink decision-making processes, with many describing it as a “turning point” in how they view inclusion, both personally and professionally. Cultural change starts with awareness, but it grows through reflection and action, and this training helped to spark both.
We are also proud to celebrate the first cohort of Inclusion Allies, trained and supported through Inclusive Employers’ Allyship Programme. These allies are now active champions of inclusion, already helping to embed equity within their teams and wider networks by modelling curiosity, empathy, and accountability. They are supporting colleagues to speak up, challenging exclusion when it appears, and ensuring that conversations about diversity and equity are woven into everyday organisational life. The impact is visible: stronger relationships, more confidence to call out bias, and a growing sense that inclusion belongs to everyone, not just those with “EDI” in their job title. This is culture change in practice: a shift from individual responsibility to collective ownership and action.
Looking ahead, we are excited to announce our forthcoming EDI Trustee Training programme for strategic leads of VCSE organisations. Trustees and senior leaders play a vital role in shaping the values, tone, and priorities of their organisations, and this training will focus on how inclusive governance can drive cultural change from the top. Through practical workshops, shared learning, and reflection, trustees will explore how to embed equity and inclusion into decision-making, recruitment, and organisational strategy. By strengthening inclusive leadership at board level, we can build more responsive, representative, and resilient organisations that truly reflect the communities they serve.
As we look ahead, the Gloucestershire VCSE Alliance will continue to nurture this momentum. Future Check-In and Chat sessions will provide space for organisations to revisit their commitments, share learning, and stay accountable to the changes they’ve pledged to make. We will also introduce simple tools such as the EDI Toolkit and further training opportunities and resources to support this work, helping teams to track progress and celebrate success as inclusion becomes embedded in organisational culture and service design.
Changing culture is not a quick fix; it is a sustained effort built on shared learning, reflection, and persistence. The progress we’ve seen across Gloucestershire shows that when organisations come together with openness and intent, inclusion stops being a separate project and becomes part of who we are. Thank you to everyone contributing to this shift; you are helping to build a stronger, fairer, and more connected VCSE community for our county.
The next Inclusion Allies programme begins on 5 March 2026. Find out more about it and book your place here.