Club News

Equality & Diversity Group complete inaugural meeting

A new independent advisory group to help the Club’s Equality and Diversity Programme has completed its inaugural meeting at Albion.

Five volunteers from beyond The Hawthorns have answered the call to help us fulfil our aspirations to be ever more inclusive and welcoming to all supporters and visitors. 

They will join Club officers Richard Garlick (Director of Football Administration) Rob Lake (Director of The Albion Foundation) and Jane Taylor-Kane (Club HR Officer) in helping shape Albion’s future strategies in this field.

Making up our new Equality Advisory Group are commercial manager and sports development expert Heidi Lockyer, financial services leader Shin Aujla, HR director Neil Basterfield, former Navy engineer Bruno Daniel and Karen Pay board member of one of the UK’s largest law firms responsible for Human Resources. 

You can read more about our ‘co-opted’ Baggies here. Establishing the EAG is another key feature in the Club’s efforts to achieve Advanced level of the Premier League’s Equality and Diversity Standard.

Albion currently have Intermediate Standard and you can read about the latest developments in our equality and diversity programme in the seasonal report for 2016-17.

The Baggies will continue to promote work associated with the nine protected characteristics (age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation) but moving forward have identified key areas of ethnicity and gender of both staff and supporters, disability and age for particular focus.

Foundation chief Lake said: “The first meeting was excellent. We have got a really good group who are going to play a big part in this area of the Club’s operations.

“All the members are extremely knowledgeable and are challenging to us. There will be no sugar coating - which is what we want.”