Take Action Make Impact: What Abri’s doing to be more inclusive

We want to be a great place to work, where people are free to be themselves, and everyone is celebrated for their individualities, because that’s how we’ll better understand each other, our customers and deliver great services. What have we been doing to create an inclusive workplace?

• We’ve reformed our EDI steering group and created an operational EDI Champions group to ensure we’re held to account on our commitments and have dedicated colleagues making sure we’re representative in our communities.
• We’ve continued to create safe spaces to share stories and opportunities to learn, covering topics like trans awareness, race, pride, menopause, bereavement and more.
• Everyone is welcome at Abri, we acknowledge and celebrate all voices, experiences and preferences. That’s why colleagues have the option to include their pronouns in their email signatures.
• To provide a supportive, inclusive working environment we introduced several new policies and procedures including Respect and Work and Gender Reassignment.
• We have also introduced workplace adjustment passports that help colleagues that may become ill or disabled receive the right support whilst working at Abri.
• To learn more about the people we work with we undertook a big data collection project and carried out Equality Impact Assessments to remove the potential for bias in the work we do.
• And to ensure our workplace is representative of the customers we serve, we’re reaching out to places of worship and community groups that we know haven’t historically been proportionately represented in our applicant pool.

Abri exists to create inclusive, thriving communities and empower lives. No one should be left behind just because of their age, gender, beliefs, disability, race or economic status. Right now our customers are significantly affected by the cost of living crisis. We’ve been working hard to support our customers sustain their tenancies and access equal opportunities to grow.

• We expanded our holiday hunger club to support more families and tackle food inequality during school holidays.
• We’ve continued to run, and support community pantries to enable people to access food for the fraction of the cost of supermarkets. We even launched our first mobile pantry to provide access to people in rural communities.
• We ran virtual wellbeing sessions for our customers to provide self-help techniques and help build and manage their confidence.
• Our employment team supported 576 people get a job or better job.
• We’re supporting Café Revive in Southampton to work with local charity Read Easy to encourage adults to develop their reading and writing skills.
• Over the next year we’ll keep capturing data to ensure we fully understand our customers and improve our services. We’ll also be analysing our customer complaints to see if any groups are disproportionately affected by service issues and address the root cause.

I’m really pleased with everything we’ve achieved so far at Abri to make our workplace and communities more inclusive places, but we still have some way to go. We will continue to ensure equality and diversity underpins everything we do. I look forward to seeing what we’ll achieve in the next year.