TOGETHER FOR FOOTBALL

2023—2025

OUR EDI (EQUALITY DIVERSITY INCLUSION) MISSION AND AMBITION

The Football Foundation is the charity of the Premier League, The FA and Government. We deliver outstanding grassroots sports facilities, more and better locations to play, transforming lives and communities where it’s needed the most. This ensures everyone has a place to play regardless of gender, sexual orientation, cultural heritage, background, disability or place.

Currently the four priority audiences that we aim to reach through our funding are: women and girls, people with disabilities, lower socio-economic groups and people with diverse ethnic backgrounds and cultural heritages.

Our ambition is to embed EDI principles at the heart of what we do to bring about meaningful change to the way we operate. In doing so, we’re determined to be an inclusive and diverse organisation that understands and makes a positive impact to the communities we serve.

To help lead this change we’ve committed to ensuring that all facilities we fund provide equal access to women and girls. We continue to work hard to support our funding applicants and beneficiaries to co-design facilities and programmes together with diverse groups of people from their local communities.

I’m proud to be a leader and EDI advocate within the Football Foundation and to be the EDI representative on the Board. And I’m glad to see our commitments and intentions firmly outlined within this strategy. There’s still so much we need to do to make everyone feel welcome and safe, and feel a sense of belonging on the pitch and side-lines; in clubhouses, sports halls, terraces, and within our own workforce.

Listening and learning from others, as well as challenging our own approaches and assumptions within and outside the Foundation will be essential in ensuring we progress in this area of work. The issues we face are complex and some of the barriers are long established. Our approach needs to be agile enough to adapt and react to changes within society. Of course, we believe in fair play, but this goes beyond fairness, the benefits to diversity and inclusion are widely proven- not only is it the right thing to do it’s also going to help us achieve better outcomes.

To achieve our goals, we must move forward as a united team, together for football.

Karen Taylor Independent Board Member

That’s why our aim is to invest in and develop facilities which feel safe, welcoming, and inclusive; facilities that attract diverse communities and promote a sense of belonging. It’s also why I’m proud to lead the Football Foundation and proud of all the work we do to support and sustain grassroots sport.

This isn’t the beginning of our work on Diversity and Inclusion, we have strong foundations from which to build on, this strategy is designed to take us further, to improve our processes, remove the barriers that still exist and change the game for everyone.

Robert Sullivan CEO