As an organisation we stand in solidarity with the Black people in the United States and others around the world that are protesting the brutal oppression that they face.

At Forum our mission is to catalyse systemic change towards a truly just, sustainable and resilient world. The imbalances of power and structural inequalities we continue to see are the legacy of centuries of racism and colonialism. We understand that to fulfil our mission with integrity, we must work to understand and address these root causes and the systems of oppression that we ourselves indirectly uphold. This will need long-term action at every level of our systems.

Critically, we must also work to examine our own organisation. We are a part of the nonprofit sector, and the sustainability field at large, both of which are over-represented by white people and people of privilege.

Our own actions to date, while well-intentioned, have been wholly inadequate in the face of these challenges, and we have serious work to do to address this. As we have learned from our work on the climate crisis, good intentions alone do not create the future we all deserve to live in.

For many months now, committed individuals from Forum’s UK, US, Singapore and India offices have contributed to a growing conversation about power and privilege and raising awareness of racism and other forms of oppression in relation to our work on sustainability challenges, as well as our internal operations and governance. It is the beginning of a journey that requires multi-level change, starting with changing our mindsets as individuals, becoming aware of the biases that we hold, enabling representation and diverse voices, and working with our partners and wider community to do the same.

As a first step, we commit to Charity So White’s three calls to action for leadership teams in our sector:

• Prioritise candid and honest conversations about racism.
• Publicly acknowledge racism within the sector and within their organisations.
• Commit to tackling institutional racism within their organisations and in the sector.

We know we have a long way to go. What we can do now is commit to doing better, to be humble as we do so, and to learn from our inevitable failures along the way. We must accelerate our pace of action as we examine how power, inequality and racism play out for us at an individual level, at an organization level, and throughout our work with our partners, our collaborations, and the School of System Change.

We are on a journey, and we challenge our partners and fellow non-profits across all sectors to join this journey with us.

To be silent is to be complicit. We commit to ending silence on racism, and to doing better. 

We stand in solidarity. We have a lot to learn. We commit to doing more.

Dr Sally Uren OBE

Chief Executive

Forum for the Future