Everton Football Club is driven, quite simply, to do the right thing.
We treat people equally and celebrate diversity and this starts at the top with our executive directors, who demonstrate individual leadership and responsibility for embedding diversity and inclusion across the Everton family, role model inclusive behaviour and drive the achievement of our departmental action plans.
In December 2018, Everton launched All Together Now, its ongoing initiative to celebrate diversity and increase awareness of everything done by the club and Everton in the Community to promote equality.
All Together Now, with the tagline 'a football family for everyone', is front and centre of Everton’s brand presence online and on matchdays, reflecting the prominence and importance of equality, diversity and inclusion in everything that the club does.
But it's only through taking positive action – together – that sport can be used to educate and make authentic change.
We want to ensure that Everton sets the example by being one of the first Premier League clubs to sign up to the Football Leadership Diversity Code so that we can continue to be a football family for all.
While individual campaigns play a critical role in raising awareness - and we are proud of our celebrations for Black History Month - it is only through collaboration that real and lasting change can be made.
The club and Everton in the Community works closely with its diversity networks, staff, fans, participants, the Premier League, Kick It Out and other clubs to ensure that it remains at the forefront of equality, diversity anti-discrimination education and positive social action.
Signing up to the Code is a natural progression of our existing commitment to driving change.
In order to create real and lasting change within English football, it is important that positive, proactive steps are taken to provide opportunities for those who have previously been under-represented within coaching and leadership positions in the game.
The Football Leadership Diversity Code provides a framework for clubs to take these positive steps, enabling a holistic approach to advancing inclusion that considers measures ranging from coach development to senior leadership and team operations recruitment, supported by a robust monitoring and evaluation process.
It will enable clubs to support diverse talent and ultimately help English football to become more representative of its players and the broader communities that it serves, creating greater inclusion that will change English football for the better.
Find more information on how to sign up to the Football Leadership Diversity Code, and further detail on its principles, pledges and definitions.
