Building relationships to boost equalities, diversity and inclusion

Gareth Young and Nadia Ayed discuss a new initiative starting this month by the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Excellence.

At CaCHE we’re delighted to announce our equality, diversity, and inclusion initiative, which will form a core part of the work we do at CaCHE now and going forward.

The key aim of this work is to have meaningful and engaging conversations about housing and diversity in the broadest sense, using our platform to share people’s real stories and experiences of housing and home. You can read more about our plans here.

As we begin this work, we’re very openly saying we don’t have all the answers. We don’t have all the right people to take on the work, and we don’t have a full understanding of precisely what issues exist or how we might be able to build an ongoing research agenda that addresses these key challenges facing policy, practice, and communities.

We want this to be a chance to build and deepen relationships, to bring together new networks of people who have the power and ability (whether this be through knowledge and lived experiences, or resources to fund and support research) to do this work well. We want to broaden our relationships. We want to encourage our academics, and future generations, to think about the diversity of their work and teaching.

So, to begin the work, we’re opening up to anyone who wants to contribute – working with existing partners but also trying to reach out wider to run a story-telling series. These can be blogs, videos, Q&A interviews – whatever people feel comfortable doing. We want to get the conversation going, encouraging people to respond to others, build on discussions and keep sharing positive experiences in housing, but also (where people feel comfortable and able) to share stories of what needs greater focus and redressing within the housing system. We want to use our platform to share these stories, to begin the debate within CaCHE (and housing studies in the UK more broadly) and to ensure that we can meaningfully embed EDI throughout all of our work, starting today.

We’re doing our own learning internally and with other partners, such as the Housing Studies Association. But we want to emphasise we’re listening. We know we might get things wrong, and while we’re making all efforts to handle this work sensitively, we will change, adapt, and develop as we continue to understand and improve. In this spirit, we welcome constructive feedback so that this can be an open, collaborative, and iterative learning experience.

We welcome all HQN members to get involved. If you’d like to contribute anything (and when we talk about EDI we’re referring to it in the broadest sense, so everyone is welcome to write about their experiences) or to discuss ideas, please contact Nadia Ayed (n.ayed@qmul.ac.uk) and Gareth Young (gareth.young@sheffield.ac.uk) in the first instance.

Gareth Young is a Knowledge Exchange and Impact Fellow at CaCHE. Nadia Ayed is a PhD Candidate at Queen Mary University London.

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The Housing Studies Association (HSA) is a UK-wide membership organisation which brings together researchers, practitioners and professionals to promote the study of housing. HSA runs a programme of events including our annual conference and our public lecture on housingrelated themes. The Association also offers: • Events grant scheme enabling members to disseminate and discuss their work, • Seminar Series grant competition • Conference bursaries to early career and/or nonwaged housing researchers and practitioners • The prestigious annual Valerie Karn prize for best paper by an early career housing researcher.

Become a member from just £25 a year and access these benefits plus reduced rates to our events. See www.housing-studies-association.org

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