Donna Gooby of Community Links talks to LAF about her new role and the importance of promoting diversity. 

Promoting diversity is a priority on the up and up, especially for supported housing providers in a society whose make-up is constantly evolving. Now a Leeds-based organisation has created a new role to address just this, and has renewed its commitment to supporting and celebrating the diversity of the community it serves.

Donna Gooby, who took up the newly created post of Director for Diversity and Human Resource Policy for Community Links on 10 February, is excited by the tasks ahead of her.

She said: "My role is to support and facilitate diversity. To me that's not just human resource issues, it's an issue across the organisation, and embracing diversity in the workplace concerns and involves everyone."

Community Links, which employs about 100 staff, provides housing, support and a range of other services for people with moderate to severe mental health problems, who may also be homeless, and have substance misuse problems. It also has a long-established Equal Opportunities Sub-Committee and workers' groups for black people, women, and lesbian, gay and bi-sexual employees.

Working with a diverse population, and addressing the mental health needs of the many communities in Leeds, the idea behind creating the role of Director of Diversity was to have someone to identify and explore further the needs of both the community and of workers at the organisation.

Prior to Donna taking the job, Community Links had also brought in a Diversity Consultant, who had praised the organisation as a 'trail blazer' and for forward thinking on the issue.

But not ones to rest on their laurels, Community Links decided to design a new post to expand on what they saw as work in progress.

Donna said: "I see my role to support Community Links to ensure that we all adopt and practice diversity policies effectively in our workplace, as this will benefit us all, including the clients and the image to the community projected by the organisation."

She said the role was also concerned with promoting diversity in the management and among her duties is working toward a management diversity scheme, so the diversity plan was effective throughout Community Links, and reflected in the management.

She said: "It's about people reaching their full potential and not having aglass ceiling: it's about being able to break through that.

"We want to ensure we are delivering a service to all; for all our staff and all our customers, and provide appropriate support to people of all different backgrounds."