Hayley Bennett is a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Consultant who specialises in providing consultancy and leadership development training to some of the world’s most famous brands to help them improve gender equality, race equality and employee wellbeing. Hayley’s career began in the world of football where her work involved empowering football’s future leaders and educating stakeholders in the game on diversity and inclusion.

 Hayley’s passion and determination for promoting diversity and inclusion in sport stems from the start of her career at Kick It Out, English football’s equality and inclusion organisation, where her work involved empowering football’s future leaders and educating stakeholders in the game on diversity and inclusion. Hayley’s love and commitment to driving greater representation and inclusion in sport led her to create Nutmegs, a football community for women of colour and non-binary people of colour. In its first year, she successfully collaborated with Chelsea FC and spoke at the global Ethnic Minority Women in Football roundtable at the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup in France.

Hayley studied Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is a visiting lecturer on Race and Sport at the University of Bolton and has been published in Routledge. She was chosen to be on the first Commonwealth Women’s Mentoring programme and was a team member at the 4th annual Commonwealth Debate on Sport and Sustainable Development in 2019. She recently became a Board Director for Spirit of 2012, the London 2012 legacy charity.

In this episode of In Her Corner, we talk to Hayley about being intentional about creating inclusive cultures on and off the pitch to enable people to be their full selves, the challenges facing sport and society in addressing race and gender inequalities and the work Hayley’s doing to inspire more young black girls to play the beautiful game.

You can listen to the trailer for Hayley’s episode using the player below:

Hayley’s full episode will be released on Wednesday 26 May and will be available to listen to on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and other major streaming platforms.

Podcast theme track by Wayne Urquhart  and Mix Engineering by Nick Murphy.