Quiet leadership in housing in a time of division

I am an ex-Police Beat Constable and former Racial Harassment Officer. Over the past 20 years, I’ve worked with over 1,000 organisations in several countries and witnessed how our communities have been stretched — not only by economic pressures but by narratives designed to divide.

Now more than ever, housing leaders as both employers and as influential members of local neighbourhoods, must lean into the work of building harmony, not harm. That means listening to people from all backgrounds, addressing grievances with empathy, and refusing to let misinformation damage neighbourly relationships.

In today’s climate of rising division, housing leaders face a unique set of challenges. From disinformation to social tension, the communities we serve are exposed to narratives that threaten cohesion. As leaders, we cannot stay silent, we must instead respond with quiet confidence, grounded in truth, fairness, and empathy.

Five tips for housing association leaders to promote cohesion and challenge division

1. Know the claims being made. Understand the accuracy and truthfulness of narratives spread about migrants, refugees, and minoritised communities. These often centre on crime, housing access, or cultural tensions. Awareness is the first step to countering harmful claims effectively.
2. Know the counter-arguments — and use them with confidence. Robust, evidence-based responses exist for most far-right or xenophobic claims. These arguments often crumble under facts and real community stories. Equip your staff to calmly and confidently challenge misinformation, always returning to shared values and human dignity.
3. Understand the real story behind “two-tier policing”. Claims that ethnic minorities receive special treatment from police are misleading. When the data is interrogated properly, a more complex — and often contrary — picture emerges. Leaders should ensure their teams understand this nuance and avoid simplistic narratives that damage community trust.
4. Create a culture of confidence through training and conversation. Don’t wait for crisis moments. Train your teams in cultural awareness, unconscious bias, and how to respond to misinformation or racism. Foster a culture where inclusion is embedded, not just driven by compliance.
5. Engage communities with empathy and tell a better story. Community cohesion grows through visible, empathetic leadership. Create safe spaces for dialogue. Listen to all communities, including those feeling unheard. Share stories of integration and collaboration. Show what’s possible when fairness, respect, and inclusion are lived daily.

How you can take the FREDIE approach to drive inclusion

Housing organisations are uniquely placed at the intersection of need, identity, and resilience. In this space, the FREDIE principles — Fairness, Respect, Equality, Diversity, Inclusion, and Engagement — offer a compass. FREDIE helps win hearts and minds in workplaces, education settings, and communities.

Below are some of the key concepts and tactics of the FREDIE approach that we ask housing associations to understand and embed in their workplace cultures, practices and neighbourhoods.

• Recognise the fact that inclusion is a two-way process and if an employee wants to be included then they must make themselves includable. It can’t all be on the employer or manager.
• The inclusion sweet spot is the intersection of where the employee and employer or manager are doing everything they can to be inclusive of each other. At the point where they meet is where inclusion occurs.
• The three margins of inclusion – margin for error, margin for forgiveness and margin for reasonable disagreement are all critical.
• If your inclusion work doesn’t include the inclusion of white straight men or it makes them feel excluded, then it’s probably not inclusive.
  Your inclusion work needs to ensure that disaffected white communities are also included.
• The challenge is to get people who are fundamentally different to each other to find commonalities and similarities and to be able to feel a sense of sameness. It is at the point of similarity and sameness where the connections happen, not diversity and difference.

Listening doesn’t mean accepting all views as correct. When grievances cross into obsessive blame — particularly targeting “others” for personal failings or systemic issues — we must challenge this. Struggles cannot be outsourced to people of a different background. Listen but don’t appease.

Community harmony grows through trust, listening, and long-term inclusion. It means protecting and valuing everyone, regardless of background or postcode. And it means challenging toxic narratives — not just because they’re untrue, but because they corrode the very communities they claim to defend.

To housing leaders: keep going. Show what real leadership looks like — respectful, courageous, grounded in values that don’t shift with headlines. Through FREDIE, we can build communities not of fear, but of hope, understanding, and unity. For more information about FREDIE and the wider Investors in Diversity programme, please do get in touch.