Q&A: Fuad Mahamed, ACH
How a forward-thinking housing association has partnered with Starbucks and Co-op to get its tenants — including resettled refugees — into work.
ACH is not your typical housing association, but it’s one from which other social landlords can certainly learn a lot.
ACH provides accommodation to refugees and other vulnerable homeless people in Bristol, Birmingham and Wolverhampton, as well as taking concrete steps to help them into work — including challenging perceptions through a campaign to get employers #rethinkingrefugee.
The story starts in 2008, when a young engineering graduate, Fuad Mahamed, a refugee himself, saw an opportunity to use his past experiences to offer appropriate help and support to newly arrived refugees. ACH was born: a social enterprise that specialises in integrating refugees through accommodation, support and community-based training.
Since then, unprecedented political instability and conflict has resulted in the biggest movement of people across the globe since World War 2. There are now an estimated 68.5 million displaced people globally, and we are facing the most serious refugee crisis for 20 years.
ACH is well positioned to create a positive social impact out of this, by utilising lived experience to design services that make a real difference to its tenants’ lives. The housing association now employs over 60 staff, works with 2500 people per year, delivers services in the West of England and West Midlands, and offers advice and assistance across the UK and beyond.
Purpose caught up with Fuad to find out what other housing associations can learn about upskilling and social integration from ACH’s experience.
Q. ACH has now been helping refugees for 10 years. How has your mission and business developed in that time?
The past ten years have seen a marked change in the work that we do. We’ve evolved from a small-scale housing provider, located in inner city Bristol, to a leading provider of resettlement and integration services for refugee and newly arrived communities in the UK.
We specialise in helping refugees enter the labour market and integrate with society, by designing various programmes and training opportunities to suit business needs. For example, we are currently working in partnership with Starbucks to run bespoke courses that will lead to barista jobs for refugees in Starbucks outlets in Birmingham and Bristol.
This came about following their global pledge to hire 10,000 refugees by 2022, which led to them identifying four partner organisations to work with in the UK. Refugees are looking for a chance to rebuild their lives and have a fresh start in the face of extraordinarily difficult circumstances, and Starbucks believe their talent, experience and resilience will enrich the communities they serve around the world.
Q. It’s interesting that your services combine housing and jobs. Why is that important?
Providing a roof over somebody’s head is a vital first step in their journey away from homelessness into independent living. Getting sustainable employment is the final step on that journey. To achieve this we provide safe, secure and comfortable housing combined with culturally sensitive support and employability skills training.
Our approach focuses on building individuals’ resilience in the labour market, upskilling and supporting refugees into sustainable, higher level employment in order to develop their independence and ease their integration into UK life.
This means working directly with employers. Every year, 2500 people across three cities come to us to access the skills and careers they need, and employers like Starbucks come to us to recruit work-ready talent.
Working directly with employers makes us more sustainable as a business, as we can work with them on an ongoing basis to provide staff. Other funding streams tend to be limited to a small number of years, which then leads to services ending and staff being made redundant. This model causes harm to the lives of beneficiaries and staff, and we are determined to move away from it.
Q. Are there special challenges in terms of cultural sensitivity when working with refugees?
Yes, certainly. A number of staff and board members are first or second-generation refugees themselves, and staff members speak over 30 languages between them, enabling us to provide services in multiple languages. This diversity and our understanding of local communities enables us to put the needs of our BAME tenants and learners at the centre of our work, and tailor our services accordingly.
Q. Do you think it makes sense for other housing associations to invest in improving their tenants’ employability?
Absolutely. Not only is it financially prudent for them to do so, but as housing associations we have a duty to our tenants to support and enable them to lead quality lives. Helping them progress in work or education is key to this.
Q. You’ve grown to over 60 staff now. How do you keep them aligned to your mission, and sensitive to your customers’ needs?
We recruit with our mission and customers in mind, selecting candidates we believe can drive the business forwards whilst remaining true to our core values. Consequently, we have a very passionate and engaged workforce who buy into our vision for all refugees coming to the UK to be successfully integrated into society.
Q. Have you found that some employers are reluctant to hire refugees?
Unfortunately, yes. We launched the #rethinkingrefugee campaign in 2015 as a reaction to the negative portrayal of refugees in the media. We want to change the perceptions of refugees and convince employers and local communities to see them as assets.
Q. What challenges have you faced in implementing your mission?
At the beginning, we faced challenges around tenants being able to sustain jobs, around repeat homelessness, and around the lack of a move-on strategy. We found that we were good at providing supportive accommodation, including mental health support, and at securing entry-level jobs for our tenants. The problem was simply that this isn’t enough. We want to build careers, not just fill jobs.
Three quarters of people who take up entry-level jobs remain at that level. We believe that the communities we serve deserve access to quality jobs. So, over the next ten years, we will be working with 25,000 more individuals, not simply helping them into entry-level jobs, but aiming for progression to median-salary positions.
Q. What are the main lessons other housing associations could learn from your decade of experience?
Well we are certainly happy to work with other housing associations to devise programmes that will best support and integrate socially-excluded tenants, including refugees.
It’s important for housing associations to recognise that an individually tailored approach works best in getting the socially-excluded into jobs — that’s why we run bespoke pre-employment training and selection programmes, offer vocation-specific accredited training and support pre-selection internships.
More widely, I think that housing associations have a role to play in changing perceptions of social housing tenants, just as we challenged community and employer misconceptions about refugees through the #rethinkingrefugee campaign.
To find out more about how to create an innovative, problem-solving culture within your housing association, get in touch to ask us about Future Housing Lab, a new collaborative network for housing innovation and business transformation. Call The House at 01225 780000 or email graham@thehouse.co.uk.
[Disclaimer: we are sharing ACH’s story here for inspiration and to spread exciting ideas throughout the sector. No endorsement of The House or Future Housing Lab by ACH is implied.]
