Our values of equity, hope, understanding, expertise, commitment, passion, and openness underpin everything we seek to achieve.

Following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, we made a firm commitment to become a truly anti-racist organisation.

In the weeks and months that followed the murder of George Floyd, Rethink had honest – and at times painful – conversations with employees, people severely affected by mental illness, and partners across the health and social care sector. In 2021, we made a firm commitment to become a truly anti-racist organisation after commissioning a report by Oxytocin Learning.

What does this mean to us?

It means putting equity at the heart of everything we do. It means campaigning for better mental health support for people from racially minoritised communities, working with them to co-design the services they need, and challenging the inequities that underpin poor mental health. It also means evolving into a truly inclusive and anti-racist workplace. 

We seek out and listen to the experiences of those affected by racism and ensure they have a platform. We will lend our support and our voice to the work of organisations tackling racial inequality and we will continue with our efforts to ensure a truly anti-racist workplace internally with insights and interventions embedded into our processes.

Our progress so far

Our latest Anti-Racism Progress Report is an open, honest and frank assessment of the progress we have made and the distance we still have to go.

It is not a list of everything we have done over the last two years. It's a look at the key activities and the foundational changes we have made to becoming a truly anti-racist organisation.

Below is a summary of our progress report, but you can read the full report here:

Anti-racist leadership and governance 

• We have created a robust and appropriate anti-racist leadership and governance framework to support the implementation of our anti-racist strategy and plans. 
• We recruited an Associate Director for Race Equality in February 2022 to co-produce the Race Equality Action Plan with its three workstreams: 
• Embedding strategic oversight and implementation of the Race Equality Acton Plan. 
• Enabling our ethnically diverse colleagues to thrive and progress in an anti-racist workplace. 
• Providing our minoritised service users with the optimal support where and when it is needed. 

Anti-racist employer 

• Since our People and Organisational Development team created a strategy focusing on employer brand and inclusive recruitment, we are encouraged to see our overall ethnic minority workforce has increased over the last few years from 11% in 2021 to 15% in 2023 to almost 19% in 2026. 
• Our ethnicity pay gap currently sits at 10.9% mean / 5.5% median for our 2025/2026 reporting.  
• We will continue to collect this data and intensify our efforts to close the gaps in our ethnic minority representation at all levels in our workforce. 

Mutual mentoring 

We ran our mutual mentoring programme from January to June 2023. Mutual mentoring is a collaborative, non-hierarchal developmental relationship where both parties are responsible for mentoring and actively supporting each other’s development. 

The two main objectives of the programme were to: 

1. Educate our Executive, Director and Associate Director groups of the lived experience of the ethnic minority co-mentors. 
2. Provide the ethnic minority co-mentors with career mentoring and advice through conversation and career plans. 

There were three briefing sessions with the participants - at the beginning, middle and end of the programme, and the participants were supported with a comprehensive mutual mentoring toolkit. 

Anti-racist campaigner and service provider  

We’re deeply committed to addressing the long-standing inequalities that racialised communities have faced within mental health services in the UK. For too long these communities have experienced disproportionate challenges in accessing care, feeling supported and achieving positive outcomes. 

At Rethink, we’re actively working to change this by using our influence to push for meaningful change. We do this through a mix of advocacy, policy work and research, including: 

• Providing recommendations to the government on the Draft Mental Health Bill. 
• Co-creating the Black Mental Health Manifesto in partnership with other charities and organisations. 
• Improving how we collect data to better understand and support the people who use our services. 
• Implement our Advancing Mental Health Equalities Plan to take forward the actions that apply to mental health trust and mental health providers through NHS England’s Patient and Carer Race Equality Framework (PCREF).  
• Investigating the gaps in support and the increased discrimination faced by Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller communities. 

We believe that tackling these inequities head-on is crucial to creating a more inclusive and effective mental health system for everyone.  

Looking ahead 

We’re really encouraged by the positive feedback we’ve received from our racially minoritised colleagues, as well as our external partners and stakeholders. Their support and input have been key in helping us stay on track and keep moving forward. 

That said, we know there’s always more work to do. We’re committed to making continuous progress because real change is an ongoing journey. We’re ready to adapt and grow, especially when faced with new challenges, to ensure we’re always creating a more inclusive and welcoming environment.