Today Positive About Inclusion is celebrating its fourth birthday. As the organisation marks this milestone, Directors and Co-founders, Lucy Malarkey and Karen Faulkner reflect on their third year in business and what they are looking forward to in the year to come…
What has 2024 brought for Positive About Inclusion?
Karen: Looking back to when we celebrated our third birthday, its fair to say that some of our expectations for 2024 were met whereas other events have been more a pleasant surprise! I think what has given us both a great deal of satisfaction is the diverse organisations we’ve worked with during our third year. For both of us, our background is in social housing so that is a sector we care deeply about. We’re delighted to have worked with housing providers of various sizes, up and down the country, and approximately half of those clients are new to us which is great to see.
The really pleasant surprise has been developing some long term partnerships with private sector organisations such as Nissan here in the North East. We’ve delivered a range of projects for the Nissan Sunderland team including the design and delivery of in-person inclusive management training to 400+ Team Leaders and Supervisors. These longer term working partnerships allow us to get to know and understand what makes an organisation tick, and what interventions will work best. Other private sector commissions have included a US based financial guaranty insurance firm in the City of London and EDF Energy’s Hartlepool Nuclear Power Plant. Working across so many varied industries gives us a brilliant opportunity to identify and share best practice. It also gives me the chance to repeatedly say one of my favourite phrases…”Every day is a school day!”
Lucy: As well as the work we’ve been commissioned to design and deliver, something we both really enjoy is having the opportunity to share our learning through speaking engagements and we’ve delivered a number of these throughout the year. Within the housing sector, we continue to be the Tpas chosen provider of EDI and inclusive customer care training as well as being invited to share our thoughts and experiences at a number of events including for the Northern Housing Consortium, HQN, the Social Housing Retrofit Accelerator and the South East Consortium. We’ve also had the pleasure of speaking at an online event for HR professionals organised by the CIPD North East‘s Special Interest Group for ED&I.
In September of this year, we launched our new Housing Masterclass – a lunch, listen and learn type session that takes a deep dive into a subject of interest for social housing providers, based on the work we do within the sector. Our launch event was an exploration of the equity, diversity and inclusion elements of the revised regulatory regime, recognising and responding to vulnerability and making reasonable adjustments. All really hot topics in housing right now! We were delighted to have attendees join us from housing associations across the country, from a small North East support housing landlord to a large national older persons housing provider. It made for a great session with those in the virtual room sharing their experiences and learning from each other too!
What does the next year have in store for Positive About Inclusion?
Lucy: When we set up Positive About Inclusion in 2020, it was a priority to us that the business was values-driven. We wanted a governance structure that allowed us to give something back and that’s why we are a social enterprise. We reinvest the surplus we generate to deliver our training and consultancy services pro bono to small, local voluntary and community groups who otherwise would not be able to access these. We are proud of our positive impact and of the added social value we deliver, and looking forward to being able to do much more of the same in our next year in business.
Karen: One of the ways we give back is running the Inclusion Forum North East. This is an in-person networking event for North East professionals who share a passion for EDI to come together to learn, network and collaborate. We want as many people as possible to be able to engage with the forum, so we have continued to make this a free to attend event, either covering the costs ourselves or with the help of our lovely members. We’ve already got a date in the diary for next year (21st January 2025) so that starts the new year off in a great way for us!
As we celebrate our fourth birthday, thank you to all of the organisations with whom we have worked, both new and existing. We appreciate your continued support, enabling us to deliver this added social value and make a positive difference.
