As hardship deepens and division narratives grow louder, BCohCo founder Katie Donovan-Adekanmbi explores what equity looks like when it’s experienced and the consequences when it isn’t.
The UK is living through a period of heightened strain. Living costs remain high, public services feel thinner, and political debate has hardened. The State of Us report, from British Future and the Belong Network, warns that this combination can create the conditions for polarisation to deepen.
In this climate, fairness is easily reframed as competition. “Queue” narratives thrive: the idea that some people are being pushed to the back while others are allowed to cut in. It is a powerful story, and it can turn real hardship into resentment between groups and communities.
But this is not only a question of rhetoric. It is also a question of how systems treat people in everyday life. When support is missing, inconsistent, or designed without the people it is meant to serve, trust erodes. With fewer trusted places to turn, and fewer reasons to believe institutions will respond with care, people are left feeling unheard and isolated, stuck with problems that never get properly addressed and more vulnerable to divisive narratives.
That is where equity matters, not as a buzzword or box-ticking exercise, but as the difference between services that look fair on paper and services that feel fair in people’s lived experience.
To explore this further, we spoke to Katie Donovan-Adekanmbi, Inclusion and Cohesion Specialist and Founder of BCohCo (Building Cohesive Communities). Katie’s work focuses on Diversity, Inclusion, Cohesion and Equity – or DICE – across public services, health and the private sector.
Why now? Reclaiming the meaning of equity
“My work centres on DICE,” Katie explains, “and helping organisations understand how inequality is created and sustained,not just through individual attitudes, but through systems, policies, culture, data and power.”
For Katie, the current moment feels pivotal. “DICE has been distorted and politicised in ways that strip it of its original purpose. What began as a framework for fairness and belonging has too often been reduced to a compliance exercise, or framed as something that benefits some people at the expense of others.”
This distortion matters. When concepts like equity are poorly explained, they become vulnerable to fear-based narratives. People who already feel insecure are told that fairness for others means less for them. The result is resentment, mistrust and division.
“Digging in now is about restoring clarity, rebuilding trust and grounding this work in humanity,” Katie says. “DICE is not ideology. It’s about how we live and work together in ways that are fair, functional and sustainable for everyone.”
Lived experience: the missing expertise
Few areas illustrate the cost of ignoring equity more starkly than maternity services. Evidence from the Mothers and Babies: Reducing Risk through Audits and Confidential Enquiries (MBRANCE-UK) report has repeatedly shown that Black women in the UK are significantly more likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth than White women and more likely to have their pain dismissed and their concerns minimised. These outcomes are not explained by biology, but by systemic racism built into how care is delivered
In response to these disparities, Black Maternity Matters was launched in 2021. The programme brings together NHS networks and anti-racism advocates, including Katie and BCohCo, to support maternity teams through a six-month programme of anti-racist education.
For Katie, the aim is not just to improve awareness, but to change the way maternity services understand risk, care, and credibility. It means asking difficult questions about who systems are designed for, and who ends up paying the price when they are not.
“Lived experience does not replace clinical expertise,” she says. “It completes it.”
If women, particularly Black women, had designed maternity training and procedures, Katie believes services would feel fundamentally different. “Listening would happen earlier, rather than after harm has occurred. Pain would be believed the first time it is expressed. Risk would be assessed with curiosity rather than stereotype.”
Crucially, she adds, training would address power. “It would explore what it feels like to be dismissed, disbelieved or managed, rather than cared for. That embodied understanding changes culture – and culture is what ultimately shapes outcomes.”
The parallels with economic disadvantage are striking. When services are designed without the voices of those who rely on them, they often prioritise organisational efficiency over human need. People become case numbers, not individuals. Engagement becomes transactional, not relational.
Did we fail to take people with us?
Movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter have transformed public discourse around gender and racial justice. They named harms that had been normalised or ignored. Yet the backlash has been fierce – and revealing.
Did we fail to bring “everyday people” along?
“I think the place where we didn’t always succeed was everyday life around the kitchen table,” Katie reflects. “These movements were powerful and necessary. But much of the conversation happened in institutions, media and professional spaces, rather than where people are making sense of the world with family and friends – often under real financial and emotional pressure.”
Katie stresses that when people are worried about bills, insecure work and stretched services, conversations about equity can feel abstract unless the links are made explicit. Without those connections, people feel spoken about, rather than spoken with.
“Through a DICE lens, the challenge wasn’t that the movements went too far,” Katie says. “It’s that we didn’t always make clear how these struggles are connected. When justice feels like something happening elsewhere, fear and resistance can take hold.”
The myth of the queue
Katie’s point about the “kitchen table” matters because it is often where fear takes root. When people already feel hard done by, overstretched, or left behind, it becomes easier to believe that someone else is being prioritised. Equity gets misrepresented as favouritism. Justice gets framed as a loss.
That is where the “queue” narrative comes in. It is the idea that life is getting harder because some people are being allowed to cut in, while others are pushed to the back. It takes real hardship and turns it into competition, encouraging resentment between communities instead of solidarity.
“The queue narrative is one of the most damaging myths of our time,” Katie says. “It reframes systemic failure as competition between communities, rather than exposing the structures that fail many people at once.”
Equity, she stresses, is not about advancing one group at the expense of another. It’s about fixing systems so fewer people are harmed in the first place. “When maternity care improves outcomes for Black women, outcomes improve for all women. When access improves for disabled people, services become clearer and more humane for everyone.”
Rebuilding belief doesn’t come from rhetoric alone. It comes from solidarity in action – locally, visibly and relationally. Mutual aid. Community leadership. Shared problem-solving. “Change doesn’t only come from the top,” Katie says. “It also comes from people choosing not to be divided. We don’t need saviours. We need honesty, connection, and the confidence that cohesion makes us stronger.”
Changing the conversation: from processing to hope
For Katie, today’s tensions are not a sign that equity work has failed. They are a sign that inequality, mistrust and disconnection have been building for a long time, and are now impossible to ignore.
“I would question whether things have gone wrong at all,” she suggests. “Or whether this work has simply brought to the surface the very issues we’ve been avoiding. What’s changed is visibility. Before people can move forward, there’s healing required – and that begins with acknowledgement. People experience the world differently, and those differences come with real challenges. Naming that isn’t divisive. It’s honest.”
Katie describes an “80:20 rule” for humanity. “Eighty per cent of us is the same. We all want love, safety and belonging. The other twenty per cent is where our differences live – politics, histories, identities, beliefs. That twenty per cent can divide us, or, if we approach it with openness and curiosity, it can transform us.”
Hope, she argues, grows when people feel seen rather than processed, and when systems lead with dignity instead of suspicion.
Join us: Changing the Conversation
Changing the Conversation is not about blame. It’s about rebuilding trust, reconnecting policy with lived experience, and reclaiming equity as a tool for fairness rather than fear.
If we want to counter regressive politics, we must offer something more compelling: truth, dignity and hope rooted in people’s real lives.
Join us 5th March for our webinar, Changing the Conversation: Reconnecting With Communities Who Feel Left Behind, as we dig into what equity really means – and how changing the conversation might just help us change the future.
Image: Cottonbro Studios/Pexels