Diversity Action Plan
Policy in Full
PUBLIC believes that we are stronger when we have a diverse team, and that diversity drives innovation. We also recognise that making and maintaining PUBLIC as a diverse organisation requires focus and work from every team. In response to the black lives matter movement, we formed a Diversity Working Group and began work on building a diversity action plan for our organisation. We spent the summer meeting and working with each team in our organisation, to consider the actions and measures that we should put in place to improve diversity and inclusion in our company. We primarily considered our commitments through a lens of racial diversity, but through the course of our work, we naturally found that commitments to improve our racial diversity could equally be applied to other forms of diversity, particularly gender. But our work is not done – and the Diversity Working Group will continue work over time to expand this plan to include more specific actions and commitments to increase diversity through disability, neurodiversity and sexuality lenses.
We hope that by putting this plan into action, we will make PUBLIC a place where diverse communities are represented, supported, respected and heard. We will monitor our progress and ask each team to report on their successes (and failures) twice a year.
Recruitment
We will:
- Develop guidance on writing inclusive role specs, so that we increase our chances of attracting diverse candidates to our roles.
- Broaden the range of places that we advertise our roles, with a focus on those targeting more diverse candidates.
- In the UK, continue using the Applied platform to eliminate unconscious bias in recruitment, and train the PUBLIC team on how to use Applied’s features fully. We will review progress using the Applied platform and consider alternative methods (e.g. introducing a Rooney Rule) if we don’t find it delivers the outcome of a more diverse team.
- Develop guidance on how to conduct good interviews, including how to try and eliminate unconscious bias at the selection stage.
- Consider diversity when building interview panels, and try as far as possible to ensure the race and gender makeup of the panel is mixed.
- Work with Weareonetech to offer internship placements to underrepresented groups in partnership with their Talent Incubator.
- Be transparent about our progress, and publish data internally and externally on how we are doing.

Measures:
- Diversity breakdown at each stage of the recruitment process improved, including hiring.
- # of people trained in Applied and Interview technique by year end.
- Internship with Weareonetech in place.
Learning and Development

We will:
- Provide diversity training to all staff
- Provide particular training for line managers, to include guidance on how to support diverse teams.
- State our position in diversity and inclusion clearly in the onboarding and employee handbooks
- Build up our internal learning resources on the intersection of race and technology
- Build a mentoring programme
Measures:
- # of people completing diversity training by year end
- # of line managers completing training by year end
- Onboarding and employee handbooks updated.
Programmes
We will:
- Make an effort to actively engage with communities and networks of underrepresented founders to strengthen the diversity of applicants in programme funnels
- Set more nuanced applicant diversity targets than we have previously, taking into account race and gender, for founders and mentors.
- Ask D&I questions for all founders, not just the founder filling out application forms.
- Review the diversity in the applicant pool for accelerator programmes ⅔ of the way through recruitment. Where the review indicates a significant target shortfall we will increase efforts to attract diverse applicants.
- Implement bias training to aid a fair selection processes
- In the UK, there will be a specific focus on engaging with black founders, as this is a key underrepresented group where we are currently weak.
- In Germany, there will be a specific focus on engaging with muslim and female founder communities. We have access to these communities through our initial cohort (two CEOs are muslim, one female). There will be less mentors in GovStart Germany than GovStart UK, so better representation here will have to focus on very specific additions.
- In Denmark, there will be a specific focus on engaging with founders outside of Copenhagen within Denmark, and across the Nordic region, as well as female founders. Mentors will be discussed when there is a programme in place.
- Create free content (in collaboration with the Research team) around engaging with the GovTech market aimed at early stage founders, with a bias towards diverse groups (linked into the network building).
- We will conduct research to build a framework for responsible technology use. This framework will underpin an ethics review which will be conducted for all shortlisted companies on accelerator programmes, to flag any potential issues of relevance to diversity and inclusion.
- We will conduct research to better understand the barriers and challenges that founders from diverse backgrounds face, so that we can provide better and more tailored support to diverse founders in our cohorts.

- We will put together a toolkit of resources and templates for programme delivery partners to encourage diversity in the cohort selection process. We will clearly communicate the value of diversity and our expectations regarding diversity to programme delivery partners.
- We will actively explore and engage with new channels and networks to find a diverse range of mentors and speakers for programmes.
- We will review programme content to see if diversity is sufficiently and appropriately addressed in relevant subject matter, and will improve programme content in this respect where necessary.
Measures:
- Diversity of founders in the priority pool
- Diversity of founders in the wider applicant pool
- Diversity data at each stage of the application and selection process
- Mentor diversity
Research
We will:
- Make sure the research advisors are assessed in the same way as mentors, with a representative pool of research advisors.
- Embed diversity in each stage of the research process and while designing projects
- Make sure that the research we are doing passes through an Ethics Review (including the topic of research, and the sponsors).
- Include diversity metrics when conducting startup market analysis.
- Prioritise under-represented areas in our research – for example, content on a topic that intersects/disproportionately affects underrepresented communities.
- Make sure that specific communities are well-represented in a project team if that project is focused on said community

Measures:
- Diversity of research advisors
- Ethics review process established
Ventures
We will:
- Build resources to help the team better understand the intersection of race, gender and disability with technology.
- Make ethical implications, and specifically racial, gender and disability impacts, a required section in Investment Committee submissions, and a standing part of the IC meeting agenda.
- Require all proposals for future build proposals to answer the following questions:
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- Do we want to be in this space? Is there something fundamental about the area that means we don’t think we should be involved?
- Do we want to build this product? How do we do that in an ethical way?
- Are there potential abuses? How do we safeguard ourselves from that?
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- Work to build future ideation and constructive antagonism into our product development, to try to better surface, assess and eliminate potential adverse impacts on minority groups from the technology we build.
- Consider and seek to increase the diversity of the advisors we work with.

Measures:
- Resources in place and being used by the team
- Ethics check built into IC templates and IC meeting agendas.
Growth

We will:
- Add trackers to our startup CRM to make sure we are tracking relevant diversity & inclusion metrics.
- Flag to sponsors at the point of negotiation that PUBLIC has a policy of promoting diversity and inclusion in its events/programmes/research and will be actively looking to bring in a diverse cohort of participants.
- Ensure that events & programmes have ‘Friends & partners’ (free partnerships) with groups who are able to promote our opportunities, events & programmes to a diverse background.
Measures:
- Increased diversity in our network.
- At least three friends & partners for each Summit event who are aimed at engaging groups from a diverse background.
External Affairs

We will:
- Demand and provide greater diversity in the events we engage with – this includes our own events and the panels that PUBLIC representatives take part in.
- Actively seek speakers from more diverse backgrounds, and seek to continuously improve the range of representation in our speakers.
- Send recordings of events to diverse communities after the fact to widen our reach.
- Integrate diverse network building with other workstreams in this plan.
Measures:
- Improved panel/ topic diversity in our events compared to baseline
- Improved Diverse networking building measure (integrated with other workstreams) once we have baselined.