What Wellcome Trust's anti-racism struggles reveal about DEI efforts

Efforts to reverse a history of racism at Wellcome, one of largest global nonprofit funders for scientific research and global health, reveal some of the challenges many philanthropic organizations are facing as they make diversity, equity, and inclusion — or DEI — more central to their missions.

It’s been two years since many foundations and nonprofits made DEI commitments in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, a Black American, by Minnesota police. And recent reviews of those commitments have shown that some, like Wellcome and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, have fallen short of ambitious goals to increase gender, racial and ethnic diversity — both internally and in their partnerships and grant-making.

U.K.-based Wellcome is among the biggest foundations in the world, with a £38.2 billion (about $44 billion) investment portfolio. In 2020, in response to the global Black Lives Matter movement, Wellcome made a public statement committing to better address racism by developing anti-racist policies internally and providing more support to nonwhite staff and grantees.

However, a report commissioned by Wellcome and published last month shows that “Wellcome is still an institutionally racist organisation, and that we have yet to act on this with the urgency required,” its director, Jeremy Farrar, wrote in a blog post. Wellcome has not lived up to its anti-racist principles, both as a funder and as an employer, he said.

Philanthropy experts and members of the U.K.’s scientific research community have applauded Wellcome’s transparency about its anti-racism program, which has made some gains but also has had a flawed implementation, according to the report.

Wellcome staff and grantees said they found inconsistencies in the understanding of anti-racism concepts across staff and leadership, among other things. Within the organization, 25% of staff that identified as nonwhite reported feelings of being treated unfairly or discriminated against due to “an aspect of their identity,” the report found. Twenty percent of nonwhite staff surveyed also said they’d experienced racist or classist behaviors toward them or regular microaggressions.

The report also found that a disproportionate amount of the work to create a more inclusive workplace had fallen on minority staff members.

“The lack of diversity within leadership and management is seen by staff as a key impediment to progress” particularly among nonwhite staff, according to the report.

Grantees largely said they had not experienced discrimination, harassment or microaggressions directly from Wellcome but the few direct racist incidents reported were not met with “decisive or appropriate response from Wellcome,” survey results showed. Respondents also said all of those practices were pervasive in the science research and health sectors of which Wellcome “is a big part of” and that Wellcome had not sanctioned institutions it funded that had been found to be racist.

Wellcome’s report was prepared by several external firms, including The Social Investment Consultancy, The Better Org, and Lyn Cole Consultancy.

Earlier this year, the Gates Foundation issued a similar report reviewing its 2021 public DEI pledge and found that both its employees and partners thought the foundation could do more to demonstrate its commitment to diversity and inclusion, including by working with a broader array of partners that represent the communities with which it engages.

“I’m encouraged that colleagues are largely united about what kind of organization we want to be. But they are also consistent in saying that we have a ways to go,” Leslie Mays, the Gates Foundation’s chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer, wrote in an April blog post following the report’s release.

The Seattle, Washington-based Gates Foundation is among the largest private foundations in the world, with a nearly $54 billion endowment and is highly influential in global development, especially global health. So any changes it makes to staffing and partnerships — particularly in light of plans to increase its annual payout by 50% over the next four years — could have widespread impacts on grantees.

Bigger than philanthropy

The struggle to implement and execute such ambitious DEI plans has not been unique to the philanthropy sector. UNAIDS Director Winnie Byanyima told Devex in May that there had been little movement on the anti-racism action plan the United Nations adopted in 2020, though individual U.N. agencies had taken some actions on their own.

However, the difference between public institutions and foundations and other nonprofits is that there usually isn’t a watchdog agency or other third party to hold nonprofits accountable, Una Osili, the associate dean for research and international programs at Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, told Devex.

The public must rely on the philanthropic organization itself to disclose whether it’s meeting DEI goals and that’s what makes Wellcome’s transparency about its shortcomings significant and potentially a “model” for other foundations, she said.

The British Neuroscience Association also said it welcomed Wellcome’s “openness, commitment to respond, and clear action plan.” BNA is the largest U.K. organization representing neuroscientists and has issued DEI policy and guidance for the neuroscience community.

"This is a frank and clear review that makes for difficult but necessary reading for many working with and within Wellcome and the sector more generally. However, this transparency is something that we should all strive to emulate if we are to achieve meaningful change and equity in science and research," said Dr. Emma Yhnell, BNA’s committee representative for equity, diversity and inclusion, in a statement.

The findings come amid the rollout of a plan to increase Wellcome’s spending levels to £16 billion over the next decade with a focus on specific worldwide health challenges such as the health impacts of climate changes. Wellcome said it will take further actions implementing a policy to prioritize diversity when considering grant applications of similar merit by September 2023, creating of a funding pot specifically for non-white researchers and a new DEI role to lead its anti-racism work at the executive level.

“We’re working through the details of the commitments we made, including the new leadership position, and we’ll be announcing more on these actions in the coming months,” Wellcome spokesperson Aidan Warner told Devex.

Adding DEI roles to leadership is part of a larger trend within the sector, though some have cautioned that they must also be accompanied by institutional support.

Support from foundation leaders and colleagues is critical to increasing representation of women – especially those from marginalized communities – among leadership, Monica Aleman, the Ford Foundation’s international program director for gender, racial, and ethnic justice, told Devex in July.

Nearly 80% of Ford Foundation’s executive leadership is not white, and nearly 70% of these leaders are women, according to a 2021 Ford report on DEI. Not every institution will be in the same place as Ford, which has spent years focusing on equity in its recruitment, retention and programming, Aleman said.

It’s up to individual organizations to do the work, but ideally there should be more of a sector-wide approach over time that allows organizations not only to measure and track their own progress but to see how the field is doing overall, Osili said.

“This is a moment to be reflective and see what is working and what’s not,” she said. “And if the very ambitious goals that were set forth are not being matched, then what needs to change?”