Staff Lived Experience: Reflections on Black and Minoritised Social Leaders and Change Makers
Over the past three years, V4CE staff have worked directly with grassroots organisers, founders, trustees, faith leaders, change makers, and volunteer-led groups across the Black and Minoritised Ethnic VCSE sector. V4CE engages leaders through our membership and networks, trusted relationships with Black and Minoritised Ethnic (BME) Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise (VCSE) organisations, targeted outreach, research, events, peer spaces and community-led programmes. Our national role enables us to connect community knowledge with decision-makers and share learning across places and sectors. We support leaders through leadership development, mentoring, peer learning, organisational capacity-building, advocacy, networking and access to influence. It is against this backdrop that we asked our own team to reflect honestly on what they have seen: the strengths, the barriers, and what has and hasn't worked. Here is what they told us.
Leadership already exists.
Staff consistently pointed to lived experience, deep community trust and first-hand knowledge of local needs as the defining strengths of the leaders we work with. One example: a leader's personal relationships within a specific community "not only boosted attendance but created a space where people felt safe to share, learn, and were extremely engaged." Another colleague described a leader who used trust and lived experience to run an event explaining available support "in an accessible and cultural way," helping previously unheard residents feed into decisions and pushing local services to become more responsive. This shows that leadership already exists; it needs to be recognised and given resources to succeed.
The barriers are structural, not personal.
Every single respondent rated barriers to leadership development as 'very' or 'extremely' significant. Funding, time, racism and lack of culturally relevant provisions topped the list of barriers. As one member of staff put it, under-served leaders are "frequently offered advice, coaching, or training programs when their actual constraint is a lack of core, operational funding and direct structural capacity." Another described a leader delivering essential community activities while single-handedly managing funding applications, policy and monitoring who wanted to attend leadership development but was unable to find the time or funding to do so. This shows that existing leaders are capable but structural barriers in their environment stop them from meeting their full potential.
The leaders we work with include emerging leaders, founders, trustees, community organisers, change makers and leaders of grassroots VCSE organisations, particularly those rooted in communities experiencing poverty, disadvantage and discrimination. They bring significant community knowledge, cultural expertise and trust, but face two related barriers. They are often underserved by conventional leadership development because of cost, time, limited organisational capacity, their role as sole workers or volunteers, and a lack of culturally relevant provision. They can also be underrepresented in formal leadership and decision-making despite their community legitimacy and expertise.
V4CE's mapping of over 300 organisations found a sector that is "functionally essential yet systemically undervalued," with high levels of community trust and expertise alongside chronic underfunding, capacity constraints, exclusion from decision-making and asset poverty. Read the report here.
Our learning also shows that leadership needs vary by role, stage and context, so a single model is unlikely to work equally well for everyone. We want to understand whether more equitable access to resources and greater leader agency can address some of these barriers. But even within this shared picture, some leaders face barriers more acutely than others.
Some leaders are consistently overlooked.
Small grassroots and informal community leaders, women (particularly those balancing caring responsibilities), disabled and LGBTQ+ leaders, as well as specific communities such as older East and Southeast Asian residents were repeatedly named as under-served and under-represented. Staff provided some concrete examples like the migrant-community leader with no proper meeting space who was forced to gather residents in a cramped borrowed room, or in their own home, with no formal recognition or support to change that. Another respondent described an East Asian artist and community leader who won a prize for her work, only to face comments suggesting she won because of 'EDI' and the 'trendiness' of feminism. These comments erased her hard work, talent, and effort entirely. This shows that leaders closest to the communities experiencing the worst inequalities also face the most barriers and are furthest from getting the resources and support that they need.
Support only works when it is flexible.
Staff were clear that one-off training or generic programmes are not useful. What makes a real difference is coaching, mentoring, peer learning and flexible funding, offered as a response to a leader's actual circumstances and needs. One example given by a respondent was supporting a leader who initially asked for help with funding, but later a needs assessment revealed that the organisation needed stronger governance and a clearer project plan first. This shows that a one-size-fits-all solution does not work; leaders need culturally appropriate support that considers their real priorities.
Relationships come before programmes.
Trust, cultural responsiveness, and being met "as a peer, not from a superior point of view" were named as what makes V4CE's approach distinctive. Staff described meeting faith leaders inside a mosque at a time that suited them, rather than expecting attendance at a fixed external session, as a way of reaching leaders who might not otherwise engage. This shows that to recognise and value the cultural insights and community strengths leaders bring with them, we must make the effort to include them in discussions and decision-making rather than assuming they are unreachable.
V4CE has already learned to adapt and knows there's still more to learn.
One respondent pointed to V4CE's 2022 COVID Impact Report, where 97% of respondents asked for more networking and funding information, prompting a shift to online 'meet the funder' events and a move to both organisational and individual membership. Through the Catalyst programme, staff found some leaders could not attend scheduled group workshops because of service delivery, employment or caring responsibilities, so V4CE moved to flexible one-to-one support built around each leader's own needs assessment. Another colleague described simply moving a session online when a leader needed to collect their child rather than forcing them to choose between the two commitments.
Staff were equally candid about what is still missing. One respondent noted that V4CE's funding tends to support BME organisations' resilience at a project level, but individual staff or volunteers with real leadership potential don't get equivalent access to direct, one-to-one leadership development. Another pointed out that while V4CE has experience in grant-making and relationships with funders, "it's not always clear how we use these relationships to influence the wider funding landscape" for individual staff development; and that support still leans towards one-off grants and workshops rather than the longer time frame leaders actually need. This shows that although V4CE has been adapting to better support existing leaders, further resourcing is required to sustain long‑term, responsive, and culturally grounded support for those we have established trust with.
What this means for V4CE and funders:
Resource leaders in the BME VCSE sector directly for flexible staff learning and development, not just the programmes built around them.
BME VCSE leaders should have a voice in decision-making and designing what support looks like.
Actively seek out and support leaders from minoritised, under-served and under-represented communities who are often overlooked, rather than waiting for them to step forward.
Trust and flexibility should be pillars of the support provided, rather than looked at as bonuses.
Judge impact by the influence and skills leaders gain, instead of how many sessions they attend.
The clearest message from our own staff is that the leaders and change makers we work with bring lived experience, community trust, and cultural insights. There is no shortage of skills. There is, however, a shortage of flexible, trusted, well-resourced conditions that would let them use their skills and capability to make real change.
This is consistent with what we've seen through the Race Equality Infrastructure Flexible Fund (REIFF), which invested £283,000 through seven racial minority-led infrastructure organisations across five regions, with learning focused on placing more community leaders in decision-making spaces. REIFF reinforced the value of locally rooted infrastructure as "trusted, culturally grounded bridges between communities and the systems that shape their lives." The difference this makes is both individual and collective: leaders build confidence, relationships, skills and agency, while their organisations strengthen their own capacity and influence. It is this kind of trusted infrastructure that V4CE aims to provide around leaders, while giving them greater choice over the development support they value. Read our REIFF Impact Report here.
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