Our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion focus
I’ve had a varied and interesting career in equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) and it’s an exciting time for me to return to housing with Radian and Yarlington forming their partnership, to become Abri.
The importance of creating a diverse and inclusive workplace cannot be underestimated. Similarly, our role as a social landlord is about helping to create strong, safe, prosperous and healthy communities. It’s about having the infrastructure in place to enable this to happen, such as good transport links, digital inclusion, access to the best quality health care and support, education and employment opportunities.
However, not everyone is able to access services in the same way so we need to work with our customers to create actions that will help remove these barriers. We can only do this if we have staff with a level of cultural competence and understanding of inclusion to support these conversations
Our work in this area includes a high-quality EDI training offer, toolbox talks and digital resources as well as more robust data collection to inform our EDI journey.
Doing this helps us to develop a strategy that is informed by our people, both inside and outside of the organisation.
Creating conversation
We continue to prioritise creating an environment where equality, diversity and inclusion is embedded into everything we do. Having a positive conversation about equality, diversity and inclusion is key to implementing positive change.
Everyone needs to understand what role they have in implementing inclusion. For me it’s about enabling people to have those open and honest conversations about what inclusion means to them and what an organisation should really have in place for everyone to feel included.
EDI is about how we get the most out of our relationships with colleagues, how we make our colleagues feel included, and how we understand the complexities of our customers’ needs so we can provide services to meet these needs.
Challenges and how we’re meeting them
Soon we will finalise our inclusion framework, setting out our vision and key deliverables. We are looking to introduce a number of initiatives to track our progress which will help to improve accountability and processes in the new organisation.
Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Manager