Black History Month: What Windrush can teach housing about community cohesion

Community cohesion isn’t something housing organisations can achieve just by publishing an equality, diversity and inclusion strategy. Fundamentally, it starts understanding the communities we serve, writes Tavepo Masawi, housing management independent living lead at Adullam and CIH EDI board member.

Housing organisations, by their nature, serve communities with different political views, religions, cultures and lifestyles. But as we mark Black History Month and its theme of ‘honouring our communities’, how well do we really understand those communities?

It sounds like a simple question. But when we have an understanding of everyone in our communities, it provides the foundations for communities to thrive — where everyone has a sense of belonging, is treated with dignity and fairness, and has confidence that the organisations serving them act fairly.

Looking back the experience of the Windrush generation offers an important reminder of what can happen when people and institutions fail to understand the experiences, backgrounds and circumstances of our communities. While the Windrush generation made significant contributions to British society, they faced discrimination and barriers to services and opportunities, including housing. Their experience is a stark reminder of how cohesion can go wrong and how that experience continues to inform people's trust in institutions decades later.

For today's housing professional, that provides a vital link — and lesson — to understand how past experiences can influence present-day relationships.

Understanding, professionalism and self-challenge

Understanding the past and current drivers of communities isn’t the sole driver of community cohesion.

Housing by its nature is diverse, as it the professionalism we approach it with. But there is no escaping that the fundamentals of professionalism: knowledge, values and judgement are key to serving everyone fairly.

To operate in a way that creates cohesion and without bias, a housing professional should be willing to ask difficult questions:

• Am I making an assumption about this person?
• Could my decision be influenced by conscious or unconscious bias?
• Would I make the same decision if this person's background were different?
• Is the service genuinely accessible to everyone, or merely available to everyone on paper?

These questions go to the heart of professionalism, and the understanding on which community cohesion depends.

Four principles for community cohesion

For me, the principles that sit within CIH’s EDI framework, are particularly important:

• Professionalism means behaving appropriately and responsibly, recognising that our actions can have a significant impact on people's lives.
• Ethical practice means asking not only, ‘Can I do this?’ but ‘Is this the right thing to do?’ Fairness and integrity should underpin decisions that affect people's homes and communities.
• Being non-judgemental means not allowing personal assumptions, stereotypes or negative perceptions about an individual's background to influence how we treat them.
• Impartiality means making decisions fairly and objectively, while recognising that conscious and unconscious bias can affect judgement.

These aren’t abstract principles. They are relevant to everyday housing practice including allocations, tenancy management, complaints, homelessness services, community engagement, enforcement and customer services.

When prejudice or discriminatory attitudes influence those processes, housing organisations can contribute to exclusion rather than cohesion.

From knowledge to action

The Windrush experience reminds us that community cohesion cannot be separated from fairness.

People are more likely to engage when they feel heard, respected and are treated fairly. Communities are more likely to thrive when people have a sense of belonging and have a genuine stake in the place they live.

Cohesion is born out the way we allocate homes, manage tenancies, deal with complaints, engage residents, develop neighbourhoods and make decisions that affect people's lives.

That means we should be transparent and prepared to challenge assumptions, recognise bias, understand history and listen to communities. It means ensuring professional standards live within all our decision, and that equality and inclusion are reflected in organisational policies and everyday decisions.

As we commemorate Black History Month, the lesson from Windrush should be more than reflective. It should be a catalyst for better decisions in the present.