Partner Article

Anti-Racism Moves into Board-Level Responsibility Across the North West

A Liverpool-based workplace equity and anti-racism consultancy is seeing anti-racism move into board-level responsibility across the North West, beyond EDI (equality, diversity and inclusion) and anti-racism activity and into governance and oversight.

Venekai Consulting Services works with organisations across the public, private, third and regulated sectors on how responsibility for anti-racism is held, governed and sustained at board and executive level.

The team is seeing a shift towards boards taking more direct ownership of anti-racism, with greater emphasis on accountability and risk, rather than relying on programme teams or individual roles to carry responsibility.

Venekai is led by Lisa Shoko, Anti-Racism Lead at NHS University Hospitals of Liverpool Group and a Non-Executive Director at Baltic CIC and Blackburne House. Her work centres on how boards exercise judgement, manage risk and discharge accountability within complex, regulated and publicly accountable environments.

Lisa said: “Anti-racism has often been positioned within EDI and anti-racism activity, which can limit its authority. What we are seeing now is boards placing responsibility for this work within governance and oversight, where it can be properly owned and sustained.

“For many leaders, this is about confidence rather than urgency. Boards want to understand how authority should be used, where accountability sits, and how anti-racism is governed in practice rather than treated as an add-on or a set of initiatives.”

Venekai’s work looks closely at how organisations operate in practice, including how decisions are taken at senior level, how responsibility is assigned, and how progress is monitored over time.

This focus is particularly relevant within public and regulated sectors, which together employ more than one in five people in the UK workforce. Within the public sector, one in eight employees is from the global majority, placing responsibility on boards to ensure that governance arrangements are equitable, robust and defensible.

Lisa added: “This is not about programmes or statements. It is about whether governance structures can support this work consistently, through leadership change and ongoing scrutiny.”

To find out more about Venekai and the work that it does, visit www.venekai.com

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Oliver Thomas .