Wellcome Trust, the UK’s largest philanthropic donor, is an “institutionally racist organisation” and must do far more to promote diversity, the medical research charity acknowledged in a mea culpa on Wednesday.
Its board and senior management promised to make Wellcome “an anti-racist organisation” both in the way it treats its own staff and in its funding of external researchers. The move came in response to the findings of an internal investigation into racism within the trust released on Wednesday.
The trust’s leaders said it would set up “a dedicated funding stream for researchers who are black and people of colour” and “apply positive action principles to research funding decisions, so that when applications have similar merit Wellcome favours those which broaden diversity”.
“Wellcome has played and continues to play a role in sustaining racism both in its own operations and in the wider research sector,” said Jeremy Farrar, the charity’s director. “I am sorry for the actions and inactions behind this, and the hurt and disappointment these have caused.”
Other medical research institutions have recently acknowledged structural racism, including the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, but Wellcome expects its size and influence to give its anti-racist programme a wide impact across academia and science.
“Through harmful action and inaction, Wellcome is perpetuating and exacerbating systemic racism within the wider research sector in which it operates,” concluded its 85-page evaluation, which it commissioned from The Social Investment Consultancy and The Better Org after first acknowledging in June 2020 that it had perpetuated racism.
“As a charitable foundation that will spend at least £16bn over the next decade on science to solve the urgent health challenges facing everyone, we know that Wellcome has great power,” said Farrar. “We have done too little to use this power to counter racial inequity in research.”
The report does not compare Wellcome’s performance systematically with other funding bodies, either charities such as the British Heart Foundation or government organisations such as UK Research and Innovation.
But it pulls out a few examples of good practice elsewhere. For instance the Institute for Cancer Research makes a special effort to support staff from black and minority ethnic communities, it said.
Even within Wellcome, the evaluation found “pockets of good practice across the organisation . . . A prime example is the mental health team who have created an anti-racism working group to support the implementation of the anti-racism principles and toolkit into their day-to-day work”.
However, it said many Wellcome staff “experienced discrimination and harassment” with 25 per cent of those identifying as black and people of colour reporting unfair treatment or discrimination because of their identity. Staff had to rely too heavily on their own networks to create change, it said, with insufficient support from the foundation’s leadership.
After publication of the report, Wellcome received messages of praise on social media. “Thanks for your openness here,” said Hilary Snaith, manager of Edinburgh university’s infectious diseases network. “I wonder how many other organisations would be so willing to share a similar report and acknowledge their identified shortcomings.”
Details of the trust’s new anti-racism programme will be worked out over the next few months, Wellcome said.
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