CMI Level 5 Award in Coaching and Mentoring  We believe that building a culture of diversity and inclusion goes hand in hand with a strong coaching and mentoring culture. We are partnering with Whole Spectrum to offer this course which builds on our existing successful board excellence and staff mentoring programmes. Whole Spectrum have a long track record of delivering coaching and mentoring qualifications within the social housing sector. This programme has a focus on diversity and inclusion and can both support professional growth, organisational development and meet wider diversity goals. Who is the programme suitable for?  Existing mentors on [...]

Why are Diversity Initiatives Failing? The past few months have been eye-opening for me. I’ve been working with housing organisations on improving their performance in equality, diversity and inclusion. I used to work in this area, but having had some time away the roles have now been reversed and I’m the trainer and consultant and not the client. It has meant that I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the amount of work that organisations have done on diversity initiatives and why many people feel that on the whole these initiatives have failed. It’s not as if housing [...]

Culture, Diversity and Inclusion – “Firms are nervous about the threats they face” FCA Discussions about Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) have been taking place in the housing sector for years but despite encouraging positive examples of good practice we're a long way from seeing it being embedded sector-wide. EDI in many organisations is still regarded as an afterthought or troublesome concept or as 'yet another' thing to be added to an ever-growing 'to-do' list. Lack of understanding and a misplaced emphasis on inputs and effort required to tackle EDI issues has for some resulted in a compartmentalised, box-ticking approach [...]

NEWS RELEASE Social housing more diverse but satisfaction of protected characteristics groups a concern 13th December 2018 A new report from Birmingham-based research charity the Human City Institute reveals that the social tenant group has become more diverse in the last two decades, with more BME tenants, more women-headed households, greater levels of disability and long-term illness, and more tenants identifying as LGBT. The report also identifies levels of satisfaction with social landlord services among some protected characteristic groups – especially BME tenants, women, disabled tenants and LGBT. Read more here

The Inspire Awards: Diversity & Inclusion in UK construction, engineering & housing The Inspire Awards 2018, recognising and encouraging diversity in the construction industry, proved to be successful.  HDN helped with the judging and will do so again for Inspire Awards 2019.  How about HDN members and their construction and improvement partners putting forward some nominees this year. Do have a look at the brochure for 2019 here.

Raj Patel 09:52 October 2, 2018 Equality and Diversity rise up the social housing agenda E&D, and greater inclusion, cover who is housed by the social housing sector, as well as the roles of staff and governance of social housing providers. The growing importance of E&D issues is partly thanks to the determination, campaigns and initiatives of several sector-wide agencies, and a number of social housing providers, including Housing Diversity Network members. HDN organised the highly successful #housingdiversityday in March this year, which made E&D concerns even more visible, and we will be doing so again next year. [...]

Boldly Going into the Beyond Hi everyone, my name is Aisha and I work for Poplar HARCA, a housing association in East London. I was asked to share my experiences and what I have done beyond the HDN Mentoring programme. The idea of public speaking is something that can really put the most confident person on edge. I used to be one of those people but then I had a job that involved going into schools and speaking to 16-18 year olds about donating their blood, organs, and bone marrow. With a topic like that it was not unheard of [...]

Celebrating a culture of can-do Industry awards highlight diversity and inclusion in construction, engineering and housing The people and organisations trailblazing the way towards a more inclusive and diverse built environment workforce were honoured at an awards ceremony in Manchester last week. Over 300 industry professionals gathered at the glamourous surroundings of the Hilton Deansgate in the city centre to applaud their peers at the Inspire Awards 2018, held on Tuesday 5 June. The event is dedicated to showcasing and promoting – indeed to inspire – a more diverse and inclusive culture in construction, engineering and housing. Set [...]

Cym D’Souza, Chief Executive, Arawak Walton and Chair, BMENational, and Raj Patel, Chief Executive, Housing Diversity Network Read more here

#housingdiversityday On Monday 19th March Housing Diversity Network (HDN) held the first #housingdiversityday social media campaign.  We are particularly grateful to Ben and Jane from Tower Hamlets Housing, a HDN member, who provided the energy and expertise in making this happen. Both 24Housing and Inside Housing partnered with us in this campaign. The momentum of activity built quickly with a mood amongst participants becoming joint owners of the campaign inviting their contacts to get involved.  It wasn’t too surprising that the analytics at the end of the day revealed #housingdiversityday was very successful.  At its peak we were trending as [...]