It’s been a busy few months for Birmingham 2022 and we are pleased that, despite the challenges that the global pandemic has brought, we’ve been able to make a great deal of progress.

One area we’ve been focusing on recently is recruitment, as we’re doubling the size of our workforce this year. Since the start of the year, we’ve already added more than 100 new team members.

It’s been more complex to bring onboard new staff during a global pandemic but our internal team and our official recruiters, Gi Group, have really delivered.

One particular job that we’ve had lots of interest in is our newly created Head of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) position.

It’s a crucial role for us as the successful candidate will provide proactive leadership, expertise and direction for all EDI activity across the organisation, so I’m delighted that we’ve had so many applications. We’re hoping to appoint someone very soon.

We’ve also recruited a Lead Community Engagement Manager, the first core member of the hugely important community engagement team that we’re building, to ensure that there’s an effective flow of information out to all of the communities across the West Midlands.

There are lots more jobs currently advertised on our website and we’re also now advertising roles on some diversity job boards and portals too, and sharing our jobs bulletin with even more community representatives, to ensure that we’re reaching a wider pool of candidates, as we ramp up our search for new staff.

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport has been recruiting too and recently advertised the vacancy on our board for a non-executive director, so in the next few weeks, we should have a new board member, appointed by the Secretary of State, to welcome to the Birmingham 2022 team.

This new member will follow the recent addition of Sandra Osborne QC, who joined the Birmingham 2022 board at the end of July, when one of our partners, the Commonwealth Games Federation, nominated Sandra to replace Dame Louise Martin.

At our board meeting in August, the current members of the board discussed Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and a paper presented to them outlined our five key priorities:

  1. Developing a workforce reflective of the West Midlands
  2. Delivering a highly accessible and inclusive Games
  3. Creating a fair, supportive and open culture throughout Games delivery
  4. Connecting communities to the Games through engagement and participation
  5. Educating and developing our shared understanding on issues of inequality

These priorities were officially backed by the board and they are now being used to underpin the full EDI plan which we’re developing, and which will be finalised and published later in the year.

As a company, we’ve also been continuing our progress to become ‘Leaders in Diversity’, a journey which started back in 2019. In August we rolled out training for the entire team and all of our hiring managers and senior management team are completing additional training too.

We’ve also continued to have important conversations with members of the local community, and we’d like to thank everyone for their advice, contributions and for helping us to make connections. Our door is always open, and we welcome and value your thoughts.

We’ve always been committed to delivering a Games for Everyone and we’re taking action to turn that commitment into a reality.

I look forward to providing more updates soon.

Ian Reid, CEO Birmingham 2022