Diversity @ Resolve Partners
Diversity & Inclusion @ Resolve Partners
Our work at Resolve Partners centres on helping find solutions to some of humanity’s most pressing challenges. We recognise that the solutions to these challenges need to represent each and every community that make up our society. This has prompted us to reflect on our own actions, and consider whether we are enabling these solutions to come to the fore, or whether we are (unintentionally or otherwise) placing barriers in the way of founders and business leaders whose voices need to be heard most
This is not an SOP, a Charter, a locked down process — we are not ready for that yet.
This is a note, a blog, a set of thoughts at a point in time.
We will get some of the language wrong, but we are trying to get this right, without being massively prescriptive.
We are trying to capture our thinking on Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I) for Resolve Partners and the programmes and interactions we have in our ecosystem.
Our work is mostly supporting early and scaling Entrepreneurs to grow and raise investment (we invest our time or may invest capital in them), supporting the Corporate entities that partner and/or invest in these entrepreneurs and in us, and supporting the Research Institutions and Government agencies and subject matter experts who are core partners. This is addressed to anyone with whom we interact and those impacted by the work we do.
First, two principles.
- We believe fundamentally that all diversity of thought, experience, and context within a founding team is a defining characteristic of a start-up, and a core differentiator in building a better company or organisation.
- We recognise that some diversity merits special support, to platform and leverage what has been under-represented in a system to date. This is perhaps most clear when considering businesses that include women as co-founders. Beyond gender we recognise different backgrounds and experiences.
Special support and recognition could and should be offered to all under-represented groups — be they based on women founded, gender, socio-economic, race, ethnicity, geography and many more.
Most obviously in our programmes, we will register and recognise founder teams that include women within them, but we want to go further. We want to register and recognise founder teams that include a wider set of DE&I parameters, from the point of view that knowing this makes them potentially better (and more investable) founder teams with more diverse perspectives, opinions, experience/lessons and contexts.
Trying to formulate language around this, while being inclusive, leads us to unwieldy questionnaires and asking people to tick a box(es) that may make them feel uncomfortable about themselves.
Our default from August 2022 is to ask founders who apply to any of our programmes to declare for themselves if they consider that they have diversity represented in their teams and we give a sample of suggestions that is in no way exclusive.
We will report this metric publicly in all of our programmes.
Our first programme under this format was an Accelerate Green* cohort — nine climate focussed early stage business.
- 33% of the participants reported a woman was a part of their Founder team
- 100% of the participants reported that their teams contained diversity across the Founder teams
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Resolve Partners, Nov ‘22
*www.accelerategreen.ie — A Bord na Móna led climate focussed accelerator programme in Ireland
