Equality & Fairness Report 2020 Fairness Annual Report 2020 | Page 69

Accord Equality & Fairness Report 2020 Conclusion Accord has always valued fairness and diversity across colleagues, customers and services. Our existence as a social organisation has its origins in commitment to equality, fairness and social justice. Conclusion Our customers are living in some of the most hyperdiverse wards across the country and we work with people from many different ethnic backgrounds as well as people who have physical disabilities and mental ill health and others who are vulnerable in different ways. We are also committed to developing an organisational culture that values people as individuals, recognising the contribution each person can make. This is not merely words but demonstrated throughout all we do; leading on BAME housing particularly for South East Asian customers, housing schemes and services for older BAME customers to meet specific needs, supporting BAME customers with a range of needs such as domestic violence, mental health services and specific support to women of South East Asian origin with no recourse to public funds. Accord’s customer base is diverse and represents the demographics of the areas in which we work. These include key inner city areas such as Sparkbrook, Balsall Heath and Small Heath where the BAME population is the majority. Accord’s colleague make-up also reflects our localities in terms of ethnicity but there are variations and our levels of declared colleague disability are lower than average: • Accord is well represented from a BAME perspective across the Directorates, when compared to the West Midlands population. However the Executive team are under-represented being 100% white. This did not used to be the case with Exec having good diversity however with various events there is a much smaller Executive currently and action needs to be taken to change the ethnicity make-up. 67