The organisation aims to provide high quality affordable homes to rent in places where people will enjoy living, and strives to be a landlord and employer of choice through being innovative, ethical, responsive and inclusive.
In order to achieve its objectives of providing better places to live, put residents first, be a good place to work and provide excellent leadership, PCH was keen to examine its approach to equality and diversity and create a culture where difference is valued.
In a new approach for Juice Learning, we worked in close partnership with the Housing Diversity Network (HDN) who offer the social housing sector specialist advice and consultancy on equality and diversity issues and had been assessing PCH’s performance in this area over a number of months.
At the very start of the project it was made clear that a standard E&D approach was not what PCH would be looking for and it was agreed that a drama based proposal drawing on the wealth of insights of PCH already acquired was the most appropriate solution.
The resulting programme was delivered to over 500 staff over a period of two weeks. The sessions clearly identified the meaning of ‘Equality & Diversity’ highlighted the importance of promoting ‘fairness’ at PCH.
The workshops outlined the new Equality Act 2010 in an engaging and accessible way and helped all staff to understand their responsibilities as an employee of PCH.
Participants learned about the impact of discrimination; harassment; victimisation and prejudice on both colleagues in the workplace and on customers, and how ‘respect’ for others feeds into the better services and what this actually means in practice.
The programme was extremely well received by the vast majority of staff and created a dialogue within the organisation which would have been hard to achieve using ‘conventional’ methods.
In addition, through a thorough evaluation process participants were asked a series of questions to assess the effectiveness of the training. The results indicated a clear transference of knowledge as a result of the intervention, and a willingness to use this learning in the day to day activities of staff.
Among the responses, participants told us:
Did the event help you better understand the basic Equality Legislation?
Did the event clarify your responsibilities as an employee of PCH?
Did the event illustrate how “respect” for others impacts upon the service we provide?
"The training Plymouth Community Homes commissioned with Juice and the Housing Diversity Network was extremely well received .The attendees came from a wide variety of roles within the organisation but the training engaged everyone very effectively and challenged people's preconceptions about the diversity of the customers they deal with. The theatre based approach was very well conceived and performed and a lot of fun. Without doubt the best equality and diversity training anyone had received by a long way."
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