Cancer Research UK launches its new equality, diversity and inclusion strategy

The world’s leading cancer charity, Cancer Research UK, has today launched its first charity-wide Equality, Diversity and the charity’s commitments and setting out the immediate actions that it will take to improve, accelerate progress and change. This new EDI strategy brings focus to Cancer Research UK’s efforts to promote equality, diversity and inclusion and is a key priority for the charity in its fight against cancer.

The overall vision of the charity’s EDI strategy is to create a charity where everyone feels like they belong, benefits from and participates in the work it does. The strategy will touch on all aspects of the charity’s work.

Michelle Mitchell OBE, Cancer Research UK’s chief executive, said: “At Cancer Research UK, we all share a common mission of beating cancer, and beating cancer means beating it for everyone.  We’re the largest independent funder of cancer research in the world, providing health and patient information to millions of people each large organisation, employing thousands of people and supported by many thousands more volunteers. We believe we have a clear responsibility to diversity and inclusion in all of these areas.”

The EDI plan lays out a comprehensive programme charity will be held accountable for the delivery of them.  It aims to:

The charity’s EDI strategy is also underpinned by the following principles:

Michelle Mitchell continued: “I have a long been committed to EDI, and so I’m thrilled that we’re taking this step forward as a charity. We have made significant progress over recent years, but we have much further to go. We are publishing this strategy in the spirit of transparency, so we’ll publish our progress each year and we’ll be open about where we can improve.

“I’m personally committed to leading this change for our charity. I am firm in my belief that taking the actions set out in this strategy will make Cancer Research UK a stronger and higher performing charity, and will enable us to make faster progress against our ambition of reaching 3 in 4 people surviving cancer by 10 years or more by 2034.”