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Leadership 2025 aimed to diversify housing sector top jobs. In its target year, what comes next?
In 2017, Leadership 2025 was founded to support minority ethnic senior professionals to become sector leaders. As it reaches its target year, Katharine Swindells finds out what is next for the organisation. Photography by Alicia Canter
Leadership 2025 was founded to support minority ethnic senior professionals to become sector leaders. Katharine Swindells finds out what is next for the organisation #UKhousingIn a glass-fronted boardroom in east London, the trustees of Leadership 2025 shuffle their papers in to neat piles, and quickly tidy away half-drunk glasses of juice and lipstick-marked coffee mugs. “We need to look good for the photos,” someone jokes.
The trustees are in a good mood, if a little worn out, after a long day around this table discussing the charity’s future in its mission for ethnic diversity in housing sector leadership.
Why now for this huge discussion? Well, that answer is clear: the name, chosen at founding in 2017, set a target of this year for its diversity goals to be achieved.
When I ask Gina Amoh, co-founder and trustee, why they picked that date, she laughs the question off. “I think it just sounded right. It certainly wasn’t anything scientific,” she says. Then she gets more serious. “We knew that there was a huge challenge that we faced, and I think what we really were hoping was that by 2025, things would have improved significantly and that we’d see a number of BME [Black and minority ethnic] leaders across the sector. But unfortunately, as we’ll discuss, probably we’re not there at all.”
A report by the National Housing Federation (NHF) in 2023 found that 10% of England’s housing association workforce was Black, and 8% of residents, but only 3% of executives. Five per cent of the workforce was Asian, and 5% of residents, but only 1% of executives. Of the more than 160 respondents to Inside Housing’s Chief Executive Salary Survey in 2024, just six chief executives identified as being minority ethnic.
Having reached its target year and with ethnic parity in the housing sector far from achieved, what is next for Leadership 2025?
Looking back
In 2017, Ms Amoh was chief executive of Black and minority ethnic housing association Inquilab, a role she had been in for more than 15 years. She was having a one-to-one with Olu Olanrewaju, then chair of Inquilab, and they discussed what had happened to the other Black and minority ethnic young professionals who had been their peers early in their careers.
“We realised that quite a number of them had fallen away and we wondered why,” Ms Amoh says. “So while we were talking, it came to us that a lot of them had really become very disillusioned because they’d been in their jobs and trying for senior positions for a long time and hadn’t really got anywhere.”
Inquilab – which became Karibu Community Homes in 2024 following a merger with Westway – had been hoping to run a sector-wide initiative on diversity, and Mr Olanrewaju suggested a programme to support Black and minority ethnic leaders. So, then Leadership 2025 was founded.
The organisation commissioned consultancy Altair to undertake an independent review of the state of Black and minority ethnic leadership representation in the social housing sector. The report set out a five-point plan for organisations to sign up to:
● Report annually on key diversity statistics
● Set “aspirational targets” for diverse representation on boards, executive team and mid-tier management
● Interview more diverse pools of candidates
● Develop the talent of junior Black and minority ethnic employees
● Chief executives and boards to vocally support and promote the goals of ethnic parity
Leadership 2025 called the organisations that signed up to implement the five-point plan “diversity champions” and they attended workshops to share best practice. These included landlords L&Q, Peabody, Home Group, Notting Hill Genesis and Riverside.
The programme received £45,000 in funding from the Greater London Authority and support from London mayor Sir Sadiq Khan. He wrote: “It is vital that London’s leaders look like London. I’m delighted to support this programme and excited by the leaders of the future, who will help change London for the better.”
The NHF credits Leadership 2025 for its push on data and transparency, which led the body to run sector-wide data collections on equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI). Alistair Smyth, director of policy and research at the NHF, says this is crucial for organisations to “not only hold themselves accountable”, but also “to send a strong message about the value they place on diversity, inclusion and equal opportunity”.
But the trustees of Leadership 2025 see the biggest success in the 27 mentees who have been through the programme over five years. The course focuses on people who are already at upper levels, supporting them to get into the top jobs in the sector. Success stories include Chyrel Brown, who has held a number of senior roles since the programme and is now chief customer officer at Notting Hill Genesis, and Jehan Weerasinghe, who has since gone on to hold senior roles at landlords Wheatley and Riverside. He recently announced that he would be joining Brent Council as corporate director for neighbourhoods and regeneration.
“We’ve got a real opportunity because we bring together groups of great people,” says Nathan Warren, a trustee at Leadership 2025 and group director – growth and partnerships at Sanctuary. “It brings people together who probably didn’t know each other before but find out that they’ve got a lot of shared experience. When everybody gets together, you really see the power of the alumni.”
The project was less than three years in and dealing with the transition to online working during the coronavirus pandemic when the murder of George Floyd in the US by a police officer caused the global outcry of Black Lives Matter. Across the social housing sector, leaders and individuals vowed to tackle racism in their organisations, against staff and tenants alike.
“I think everybody wanted to give us something or talk to us,” Ms Amoh remembers: “I think it was genuine at the time, but life gets in the way and other priorities get in the way, and it slips down people’s agenda.”
Edith Stokes is interim director of Leadership 2025 and an EDI consultant. She says that during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, she “saw a lot of organisations actually put resources towards having these conversations, towards transformation and towards change, and that was really encouraging. I saw a lot more people feel a bit braver to sit in uncomfortableness as well, because in order to grow, you have to be uncomfortable”.
Tolulope Oke, chair of the board of trustees at Leadership 2025, adds: “I did see an increased desire for allyship – people saying, ‘I’m here to support, I’m here to play my role.’”
She also says that, crucial to Leadership 2025’s mission, organisations have become “a bit more comfortable with data” when it comes to tracking diversity and ethnicity.
Mark Washer, chief executive of Sovereign Network Group (SNG) and a Leadership 2025 trustee, is one such example, and he is candid about the fact that his organisation is far from perfect. “We’re in a better position than when I joined Sovereign seven years ago, but we are nowhere near where we want to be,” he says. “20% of our non-executive directors are not white, but none of my executive team are.”
He reflects on the racist riots across the UK in the summer of 2024 and how SNG’s response to these could have been improved – something that was especially important given the increased proportion of Black and minority ethnic staff post Sovereign’s merger with Network Homes in 2023.
“One of the pieces of feedback from the wider team was that [SNG’s] initial response hadn’t recognised the impact that the riots have on people and how scared and uncomfortable it makes them feel, and you can’t help but think that was because there wasn’t a person of colour in the executive boardroom when we were meeting around that time,” Mr Washer explains.
Calling out complacency
SNG, alongside much of the sector, suffers from a “degree of complacency”, Mr Washer says. “I joined the sector 30 years ago and it felt to me then as if the [social housing] sector was really kind of leading the way to some extent,” he says. “But now there can be a view that, ‘The organisation is full of nice people who work in social housing, so how can there be a problem?’ So calling it out and recognising it is one of the first steps.”
This was a key challenge in the early days of Leadership 2025, Ms Amoh says, as the organisation tried to recruit for its first mentoring cohort. “To put it politely, I think there was the typical unconscious bias situation where people felt that in promoting this, that would mean that they would antagonise colleagues. Things like, ‘If we promoted this initiative, what about our white colleagues? How would they feel,’” she says.
The organisation also received push-back from HR directors who would say they “can’t find any BME person that would fit the criteria”, Ms Amoh explains. “But they weren’t going out there and looking in the right places for these people.”
In the run-up to the first course, she says Leadership 2025 was worried that they would not be able to fill all the spaces. “We thought, ‘Oh, my God, are we going to get enough people to actually go on the courses?’ But
we did. We were oversubscribed, which was wonderful.”
The charity is primarily funded by sponsorships and has received significant contributions from L&Q and the G15 group of London’s largest landlords over the years. Now that Leadership 2025 is looking forward, resource remains a key challenge.
“Today [at the board meeting] we had to have a really frank conversation about money,” Ms Oke says.
“There’s just not enough money, so we need more housing associations to get on board,” Mr Warren says. “But we don’t want to shame people into getting involved, because it’s a fantastic thing to be involved in.”
So what is next for Leadership 2025? The name is the most obvious place to start.
“The name ‘Leadership 2025’ works two-fold,” Ms Oke says. “It’s a hop into the past and a reminder of what we set out to do. And that’s us throwing that back to the sector to say, ‘Well, actually, eight years later, what has changed sector-wise?’ It’s like a reminder.”
But whatever the name, it is clear that Leadership 2025 needs to redefine its mission for the future. There are “discussions to be had”, Ms Amoh says, about strengthening the organisation’s presence outside of London, as well as potentially widening its remit to work with Black and minority ethnic professionals at a less senior level, although she adds that they need to be sure they are “not diluting” their purpose.
But the biggest shift, Ms Amoh says, is between what she calls “the supply side” – the mentoring and growth of BME leaders – and “the demand side”, which is making sure that organisations are set up for those leaders to be heard. “For me, the demand side is probably now where the focus needs to be,” she says.
Mr Washer echoes her words: “As well as the development piece for senior leaders, an adjacent ambition has always been to influence the culture in the sector. You can support individuals, but that doesn’t get you anywhere unless you’ve actually influenced organisations to change the way that they think.”
“It’s not just about representation, but the redistribution of power,” Ms Oke says. “You can sit in the chair, but do you have the voice to truly influence an organisation?”
No mean feat, then. Leadership 2025 will likely need more than eight years to do it.
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