Racism in the UK Charity Sector

Gharam Al-Zubi 5 January 2022

Image Courtesy of Simon Dack News / Alamy Stock Photo

On 12 February, Sahdya Darr, a British Pakistani woman, uses ‘#NotJustNCVO’ to tweet about her racist experience working at Quakers, a UK-based Charity, and many more people are reporting similar experiences.

Ever since Darr started working at Quakers back in 2017, she has received racist comments from her colleagues and manager. In 2019, the racist treatment reached a climax, shortly after the 2019 Islamophobic terror attack in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Being a Muslim, Darr was distraught and concerned for her family, as she urged them to take precaution when going to prayers. Due to feeling distressed and unsupported by her team at work, Darr complained about this issue in an email to her manager. Her manager responded by accusing her of being “abrupt” and using “a raised tone of voice.”

Consequently, Darr raised a grievance against her manager which was met with a counter-grievance, claiming that Darr supported “terrorist violence” because she shared an article about Palestine.

"No-one realised that was Islamophobic, by accusing me of supporting Hamas, the only Muslim in the team”, Darr says.

On February 2019, after leaving her work, Darr took on Twitter to talk about her experience using ‘#NotJustNCVO’, which other workers used to talk about their experience with bullying and racism in the charity sector.

Darr left Quakers in September 2020, after she filed a second grievance but felt anxious to deal with it. Darr says, “I don't feel that I received accountability for how I was treated,” she also adds, “It happened to me. And to me, that shows that that can happen to anybody in that organisation”

The ‘#NotJustNCVO’ started on Twitter after the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) published a report saying that unchecked racism in the workplace often leaves minority groups feeling “unsafe at work”.

The ‘#NotJustNCVO’ hashtag was started by Sophia Moreau, who experienced first-hand racism working in the charity sector. Moreau says, "I was tired of it being spoken about in silos. It isn't just one organisation," she says.

Other internal reports at charities also confirmed these allegations of racism. In April, an internal investigation in Amnesty International found a “culture of white privilege” where incidents of micro-aggressions and overt racist instances took place. In addition, in October 2021, the Chief Executive of the biggest domestic abuse charity in Britain, stepped down after allegations of racism were made.