Leading the way on representation in the housing sector

At Your Place, we know that diversity, equity, and inclusion (EDI) are crucial to building a successful and thriving organisation and team. That’s why in April 2022, our senior leadership team and Board prioritised measuring our impact of EDI across our work. Our goals included growing more talent internally, offering a wider range of development opportunities, and having fair recruitment processes in place. As a part of this of this, it was important that we ensured our leadership team was representative of the wider diversity of our organisation and those we support in their journeys away from homelessness.

We used statistics from external EDI research we participated in which was published in December 2021 by the National Housing Federation (NHF) to benchmark our progress and ensure that we were leading the way in the housing sector. We focused on four key protected characteristics: gender, race and ethnicity, sexual orientation and disability. By the end of 2022, we had made great progress in most areas, but we acknowledge that there is much more to do, especially in our most senior roles in the organisation.

One area where we have made significant progress is in the representation of people living with a disability. Currently, 22% of our wider leadership roles represent people with disabilities, which is a 6% increase from April 2022 (NHF data 19%). We have invested a lot of time and energy to be a Disability Confident employer and have a comprehensive occupational health offer to help us get detailed advice on how we can put the right adjustments in place for people to do their jobs well and their best work.

We have also seen an increase in the representation of Black, Asian, or other underrepresented ethnic communities. Currently, 43% of our wider leadership team are from these communities, which is a 6% increase from April 2022 and above the 30% NHF statistic in housing more widely. Many of our wider leadership roles now have participated in the Housing Diversity Network Staff Mentoring Programme, access coaching and mentoring externally or internally and all participate in the various leadership development programmes we have invested in over the last year.

Although we have made progress in the representation of people from the LGBT+ community, we recognise that there is more work to do in creating more LGBT+ role models internally. Currently, 17% of our wider leadership roles are represented by people from the LGBT+ community, which is above the 6.5% NHF statistics, but we want to see even more progress in this area.

Finally, we have seen significant progress in the representation of women and non-binary individuals in our leadership team. Currently, 65% of our wider leadership roles are held by women or people who identify as non-binary or identify in another way, which is a 7% increase from April 2022 and well above the 50.5% NHS statistics in the housing sector more widely.

At Your Place, we believe that creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace is an ongoing journey, and we know that there is still more work to do. But we are proud of the progress we have made so far and will continue to prioritise EDI in everything we do. We hope that our efforts will inspire other organisations in the housing sector to prioritise EDI as well, and work towards creating workplaces that are truly representative of the communities we serve.