The Council and democracy Our Approach to Equality

Objective 1 – Knowing Manchester Better

We will work together with Manchester’s citizens and our partners in the public and voluntary sectors to improve the quality of the information we have about Manchester’s diverse communities. This will strengthen our understanding of our people and will help us to support ‘community cohesion’, where people from different backgrounds get on well together in the local area, and treat each other with respect and consideration. We will engage with our citizens to build strong, trusting relationships which will help us to develop policies and commission services that meet everyone’s needs.

We have 6 indicators that will tell us we’re making progress in these areas:

1. We will strengthen our approaches to engaging with residents and communities, making extra effort to speak to people and groups who are harder to reach. We will embrace co-production, reaching out to people at the earliest opportunity when developing our services and projects, and enabling minority and / or disadvantaged groups to influence the decisions that affect them the most. We will build on what people tell us to better understand our communities and how our services affect them.

2. We will use our growing knowledge of Manchester people and their lives to inform our own priorities and services. We will share this evidence-base with our partners and learn from their understanding of communities, to ensure that our shared work reflects residents’ challenges, issues and opportunities. This will help us to develop targeted and effective services across the public sector built on robust evidence, without the risk of duplication.

3. We will continue to work with and support Manchester’s voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCSE) organisations, recognising the close and unique relationship that they have with many protected characteristic groups in the City. Working with our VCSE partners, we have started to develop the leadership and capacity of some of our BAME and disability groups amongst others, which we will continue to build on together.

4. Building on the tolerance and unity that characterises Our Manchester, we will work with our partners and directly with communities of identity to ensure that our communities are cohesive and safe places to live. We will learn from our communities what unites us, and tackle those things that people feel would divide us. We will monitor our community relations, mindful of tensions in the UK more broadly, and will address hateful, divisive and anti-social behaviour head on, to support our Manchester people to enjoy a City that is respectfully everyone’s.

5. We will support our City Council workforce to build its knowledge and confidence about Manchester’s communities, developing up to date tools and learning about a wide range of identity groups. We will capitalise on the diversity of our workforce, engaging with our staff networks to learn from their experiences of working with the Council and helping them to influence our approaches to inclusive employment.

6. We will extend our use of Equality Impact Assessments, making sure that all of our key priorities and services are underpinned by a robust understanding of how they affect different people differently.

Read more about our equality objectives.

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