Lara Oyedele, the new president of the Chartered Institute of Housing, is challenging the sector’s complacency on ethnic diversity, finds Martin Hilditch.
“I want to change the world.”
Lara Oyedele doesn’t beat around the bush when she talks about her motivation in life. And it was the scale of her ambition and passionate campaigning that won her the role Inside Housing is here to talk to her about: president of the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH).
Ms Oyedele, who was the founding chair of BME National, the national representative body for Black and minority ethnic housing associations, became the CIH president in October. Her campaign, In my shoes, looks to raise awareness of the importance of racial diversity in the housing sector, drawing on her own experiences.
“I’ve been there. I’m telling you what I have seen, working my way through the ranks. People like me tend to disappear as you go higher up,” she says.
This point about racial diversity in the sector’s most senior positions has been borne out numerous times in recent years, including in Inside Housing’s own research into the diversity of board and executive teams in 2021, which found 60% of housing associations had all-white executive teams. It is something Ms Oyedele is determined to change in her year as the CIH’s president – and she is clearly frustrated by what she has seen happen since social landlords expressed their solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement back in 2020, following the death of George Floyd in the US.
“Organisations did all these beautiful statements of intent, and it is almost like that’s now passed. That was fashionable then. It is no longer fashionable,” she says.
Personal experience
As an “eternal optimist”, Ms Oyedele says she would like to think that housing sector leaders who made statements of support and pledged action in 2020 “really believed” in what they were saying.
“But what I’ve observed… it’s almost like we’ve gone back,” she says. “We’ve gone back to normal, we’ve gone back to the status quo.”
Ms Oyedele is looking to turn the spotlight onto the housing sector in her mission to change things – and the sector can expect plenty of challenge this year. Inside Housing met her in order to find out what her campaign is likely to involve, but also about those personal experiences she hinted at that are driving her approach.
While she wants to smash the sector’s glass ceiling, Ms Oyedele is equally as passionate about the sector’s overall mission to provide decent housing for people on low incomes. This is also based on personal experience. She became homeless in her late teens after her landlord evicted her. She slept in her place of work until she was housed by her local council.
Although she has talked about this in recent years, it was something “I didn’t tell anyone about” at the time, she says. “I actually never spoke about it for years, until I became very comfortable with it,” she says, as she felt “really embarrassed” at the time about what had happened.
“I want to change the world. I want to challenge the status quo and add a bit of colour and joy and happiness while I’m doing it”
It was an experience that has guided her approach to life, and career choices, ever since. After initially studying media and communications at university, Ms Oyedele decided “I wanted to do something that made a difference, something that moved me emotionally”.
At this point, she asked herself, “What are the professional areas that are lacking in people like me? And one of them was housing. I thought, ‘Well, that’s a really good profession, because they helped me get that council flat, and I know what it is like not to have a home.’”
She has not looked back since, doing a master’s in housing at the London School of Economics, and then working in organisations including Notting Hill Housing Trust, Hammersmith and Fulham Council, Eaves and Pinnacle.
Broadly speaking, these early experiences in the sector were positive, although there were moments of discrimination. She says that when she worked as a housing officer at Hammersmith and Fulham Council, a boss told her she was surprised to find out her family were Nigerian, because “all Nigerians are dodgy”.
“She said, ‘You’re really honest and you’re really good at what you do and I can’t believe you are Nigerian.’ I remember that as the first insinuation about my ethnicity and my background.”
Other jobs were very positive experiences, she says, although she mentions one where working practices were exclusionary to some members of staff, with informal decision-making taking place outside the office.
“I don’t drink, I never have. I found having to go down the pub used to really irritate me, but I used to go, because that’s what you were expected to do.”
Ms Oyedele first rose to public prominence in the housing sector in the mid-noughties, when she became chief executive of Odu-Dua, a small Black and ethnic minority housing association in north London, whose tenants are mostly from African and Caribbean backgrounds. She went on to be a founder member of BME National, which is still going strong.
Ms Oyedele says, when she started at Odu-Dua, she felt she no longer had to “worry about my Blackness – I can just turn up and be Lara, and I don’t have to feel excluded from anything”.
“One of the things I specifically did at Odu-Dua was to make sure that any events we had were non-exclusionary. So we would never have an event outside of office hours, because we had staff who had childcare issues.”
Just when it appeared her professional life was going from strength to strength, an episode occurred that changed the course of her career. After a well-documented falling-out with Odu-Dua’s board over the direction of travel for the organisation, Ms Oyedele was dismissed. Inside Housing covered that story extensively in the past; in short, Ms Oyedele’s roles in the sector came to an end in one fell swoop. It was the beginning of a long and difficult period of soul-searching for her.
“If it was part of your regulatory requirement to have a diverse board, I guarantee you boardrooms would be diverse”
For a couple of years, she suffered from “a major depression, and I very rarely left home”.
“There’s a whole bunch of people that I owe apologies to between 2014 and probably 2017, where I would make an arrangement to go somewhere and I wouldn’t turn up, and I’d miss appointments because I literally could not function.”
The experience made her question what she wanted from life, so she asked herself directly, “What is the point of Lara?”
On a practical level, there was an increased desire for personal security. This led to her selling up in London and moving to Bradford for a fresh (and mortgage-free) start. But there was another answer to that question too, she says.
“I decided that it was to try and make the world a better place. So now I’m much more comfortable about saying I want to make things different. I want to change the world. I want to challenge the status quo and add a bit of colour and joy and happiness while I’m doing it.”
Diverse boards
It is this mindset that led to Ms Oyedele’s successful tilt at the CIH presidency. But the past few years have been dominated by an awful situation for Ms Oyedele’s family.
A chance conversation with her mother, who had been working as a nurse in the NHS since arriving in the UK in the mid-1960s, revealed that her parents were part of a group of long-term UK residents wrongly threatened with deportation by the Home Office as part of its ‘hostile environment’ policy. This sought to deter migrants by creating administrative and legislative obstacles to them staying in the country long term. It was exposed by The Guardian’s reporting on the Windrush scandal.
Ms Oyedele found out that her parents were reporting to immigration officials in Leeds once a month, living under the constant threat of deportation from the country they had moved to half a century ago.
“My mum says she didn’t tell me because she was embarrassed and she was ashamed,” Ms Oyedele says. While her parents now have indefinite leave to remain, after Ms Oyedele got involved with their case, they are still waiting for compensation. Government claims that people were affected in error get short shrift from Ms Oyedele.
“How can you make such a big admin error that just happens to affect a whole bunch of brown and Black people that came from the Caribbean and Africa, and some people from South East Asia?” she asks.
“It’s not an error. It was a conscious effort.”
Ms Oyedele will be looking to talk about all of these experiences in her presidential campaign. It is easy to see why she launched it stating that she wants to “highlight why it’s important to create a fair and inclusive environment”.
In part, this will be a conversation about homelessness, and she will be raising money for Shoe Aid, the footwear charity, throughout her presidency.
The campaign will also involve a blog series to raise awareness of ethnic diversity in boardrooms; a library of resources about research into boardroom diversity; and a collation of tips and ideas about how individuals can be advocates for diversity in boardrooms and leadership teams.
“We [the sector] have to actively make decisions and make choices to diversify senior leadership teams”
On social media, Ms Oyedele is encouraging people to use the hashtag #representationmatters to talk about their own experiences.
This is also about challenging all organisations to scrutinise their performance in this area.
“If it is not measured, it’s not going to get done,” Ms Oyedele says.
“It’s not [currently] getting done, because no one is challenging it,” she adds. “And I mean in a regulatory or financial sense. If it was part of your regulatory requirement to have a diverse board, I guarantee you boardrooms would be diverse.”
Inside Housing will follow the campaign closely over the coming year. Clearly – and rightly – it is going to contain plenty to challenge the sector, as well as tips for how to improve.
The first challenge is for leadership teams to take the issue seriously, rather than paying it lip service, Ms Oyedele suggests.
“We [the sector] have to actively make decisions and make choices to diversify senior leadership teams,” she says. “That’s what I say now, because the organic approach hasn’t worked in the last 30 years or so that I have been in the sector.
“It’s not happening naturally, it’s not happening by accident, so maybe we need to be more specific, more strategic and more critical about it.”
Or to put it another way, Ms Oyedele has done her own soul-searching and concluded she wants to change the world. In a sector lacking diversity at the top, the next question is, ‘Do you?’
