About Us
The BFI is a registered charity, established by Royal Charter and governed by a board of nine Governors. The Governors work in partnership with the BFI Executive board. The BFI Board of Governors is chaired by Tim Richards. Our published accounts for 2019/20 can be found here.
More information about us can be found on our website: www.bfi.org.uk
Our Executive Structure
Our purpose
We are a cultural charity, a National Lottery distributor, and the UK’s lead organisation for film and the moving image.
We believe society needs stories. Film, television and the moving image bring them to life, helping us to connect and understand each other better. We share the stories of yesterday, search for the stories of today, and shape the stories of tomorrow.
Our purpose statement is supported by five pillars.
Storytelling
Society needs stories
Choice
Stand for choice and for difference
Opportunity
Keep moving image culture vibrant
Discovery
Help people get more out of it
Connection
To bring people closer together
Our mission
- To support creativity and actively seek out the next generation of UK storytellers
- To grow and care for the BFI National Archive, the world’s largest film and television archive
- To offer the widest range of UK and international moving image culture through our programmes and festivals – delivered online and in venue
- To use our knowledge to educate and deepen public appreciation and understanding of film and the moving image
- To work with Government and industry to ensure the continued growth of the UK’s screen industries
Our vision
By focussing on the diversity of our audiences, expanding our work to embrace television and games, reframing the public’s relationship with the BFI’s collections, investing in the growth of our digital platforms and working with industry to deliver long-term strategies for education and skills and net zero – we will transform access to our programmes, screen culture, and jobs across the whole of the UK.
Our immediate strategic focus and what we will achieve in the next 3 years:
Remodel the BFI
Shape the organisation to drive collaboration and innovation, and deliver our long term goals
Focus on digital
Expand access to our work across the UK and internationally, and grow our audiences
Consolidate our sector leadership
Support UK-wide growth across the screen sectors with a focus on developing skills
Drive a commercial mindset
Unlock value in all we do and invest in our revenue-generating capacity
Our culture
We’re building an innovative, highly diverse and digital organisation with creative storytelling at its heart. A place of real passion and fandom, where everyone can go confidently, think freely, share generously and bring it together.
The culture drivers that will get us there:
Go confidently
We listen and learn to lead. Challenging constructively and matching words with action to stretch our artform, shape the industry and create meaningful change.
Think freely
We unleash our creativity and work flexibly. We stay curious and light on our feet, taking smart risk to bring joy to our audiences.
Share generously
We build expertise and share it. Like an enthusiastic friend, we exchange ideas and democratise thoughtfully to create extraordinary experiences for everyone, not an elite.
Bring it together
We go as one. Actively including and empowering, with trust and transparency at all levels. We pull in and pull together – all in, all heard – to create greatest possible access and opportunity.
Our Working Together principles
Here’s our big idea:
Work where you can, when you can
In response to our experiences of working through the Pandemic, we have launched a new principle:
‘Work where you can, when you can’
Where
Sites become hubs – flexible shared workspaces. Use them as and when you need them. A place for collaboration, socialising, problem solving, or just when you need a change.
Even those whose roles are mainly location-specific can benefit as it’s about ‘how’ as well as ‘where’
When
Working with your team to decide where and when you work best. Starting from a position of trust where we believe everyone will choose the right environment and time for the work they do, that day.
Becoming a Consciously Inclusive Employer of Choice
What we do matters, because imagery is persuasive. We seek to do all we can to ensure our genuine commitment to inclusivity is evident at levels within the BFI and that we create the right environment and culture for people to thrive and do their best work.
- We are champions of everyday inclusion at the BFI helping us to be a consciously inclusive employer of choice by creating the culture and environment for our workforce to be able to think freely, go confidently, share generously and bring it together.
- We are agents of change and positive disrupters by creating pioneering work such as our BFI Diversity Standards that shift the landscape and are scalable and accountable across Film, TV and Games.
- We are sources of expert knowledge providing consultancy by directly, or indirectly, connecting with our extensive network of trusted partners and specialists, such as our BFI Screen Advisory Groups.
We want our Inclusion Team to become unnecessary, by embedding inclusivity within the BFI and wider industry, ensuring our partners, audiences and the public feel connected to us by championing equity and equality in all that we do.
We hold ourselves accountable to achieving high standards and hope to inspire others to do the same. We believe in long term interventions rather than short term initiatives. We won the 2020 UK Inclusivity Excellence Award for our work on engagement in representation.
Our vision is that the audiences that come to us, the organisations that partner with us, the people that for work us and our industry feel included, valued and connected to the BFI, so that inclusion is viewed as not our biggest challenge, but our greatest untapped opportunity.
We strive to be accountable, by publishing all our diversity data on an annual basis. We report on race, gender, LGBTQIA+ and disability. This reporting covers the diversity of our workforce cut by five levels of leadership, recipients of our lottery funding and our pay gap reporting.
We have a thriving Race Equality Network and we are currently consulting on more Equality Networks being developed by and for our colleagues. We have a well-established in house mentoring programme that is open to any colleague seeking a mentoring partnership to further their professional development.
We believe in the social model of disability and are a Disability Confident Employer and a Stonewall Champion. Two specific areas of under –representation we are prioritising to address are race equality and disability equality. If you identify as ethnically diverse or disabled and meet our job specification, we’d love to hear from you to progress to stage one of the process.