WISH North West - Autumn Newsletter

With the new North West WISH board in full swing now we have hit the ground running. Earlier in the year we hosted our first event on Gender Diversity.

Gender Diversity Event

Joanna Wilson from the University of Manchester, Debbie Sizer from Seddon’s and Kate Venables from Brabner’s shared their unique insights and experience of how to break down barriers and ensure recruitment processes are fair and equal.

A lively panel discussion explored the different challenges faced across the sector, initiatives that have worked well and some really positive outcomes. Key strategies included improving workplace flexibility for both women and men, transparent pay and reward structures and diversity task forces. The importance of positive role models cannot be underestimated.

A clear message from the morning was that to break down barriers we need to change organisational culture through strong leadership and making equality and diversity a key priority.

Digital Agenda

In September we held an event exploring the digital agenda. Our Co-Chair Nicola Brown who has vast amounts of experience in the world of technology talked about what digitalisation was and what it meant for housing.

We then had Carole Galsworthy from Halton Housing Trust who discussed the changed that had been taking place within Halton and why they chose a “Digital First Strategy”. Halton had previously had a minimal digital offer which had no automation - just an email to the Customer Services Team. There overall aims and objectives included:

• To become more efficient by improving business processes
• To mitigate the adverse impact of Universal Credit
• To create a modern, flexible and dynamic working culture
• To improve services to customers

She spoke about the challenges the organisation faced and the benefits achieved. It was a fantastic to hear about how the culture has changed and all the positive outcomes for both the residents and employees. Halton Housing are definitely paving the way for future organisations.

Upcoming Events

Our Next Event - The fantastic Hayley White will be talking to us about resilience. This year Hayley completed the 6663 Arctic Ultra which is regarded by many as the toughest, coldest, windiest, ultra-distance footrace on the planet, only attempted by the most extreme ultra marathons competitors.

Christmas - We will be holding our Christmas Drinks event on Wednesday 4^th December. The event will be held in Manchester and the venue will be revealed shortly, so keep an eye out!

Next Year - We have also been busy planning our of events for 2020, this includes a joint event with North Wales, a International Women’s Day event, we are bringing back Women at the Top, and going to run a social media masterclass.