Hate Incident Action Project
In 2009 Human Rights & Equalities Charnwood in partnership with Charnwood Borough Council and Loughborough Police applied to the Equality & Human Rights Commission for a 3 year project working around hate crime. A grant of £209,100 was successfully awarded in November and since then the initial preparations for the project have been underway.
Two officers have been recruited to help implement the project, Tony Kelly (Hate Incident Officer) and Lesley Ansari (Training & Development Officer).
Over 65 people attended a high profile launch on Wednesday 24th March at the Ramada Hotel, High Street, Loughborough to launch the Hate Incident Action Project. Local groups, organisations and partners were all represented and they were able to find out what is being done around hate incidents in Leicestershire and what the local impact of the project will be.
Patrick Devine from the Commission told the audience the partnership had been extremely successful in securing the money from their Strategic Funding Program as there had been over 2,000 applications but only 61 community and voluntary sector organisations across the whole UK were awarded the funding.
For HR&EC this was a real triumph for everyone who had worked incredibly hard to build up the organisation over the past years and especially for those people who had completed the onerous paperwork for the bid.
The project will
Give support, advice and guidance to victims of hate incidents across all the equality strands (age race, religion/belief, gender/gender identity, sexuality and disability)
Provide awareness raising training for community groups, schools/colleges and voluntary/statutory bodies to increase understanding of hate incidents and how to report them
Re-visit existing Reporting Centres and establish new ones that are easily accessible and span across all the equality strands
Work with all the reporting centres to develop a consistent reporting framework
Provide training to Reporting Centre staff
Work with partner agencies to develop an effective coordinated response to hate crime in the Charnwood area
Develop and build links with key agencies: local groups from the voluntary and statutory sectors and maintain these links with the aim of encouraging joined up working, sharing good practice and developing a multiagency approach to tackling the issues that hate crime raises
Maintain a close positive relationship with the bid partners on all project issues
If your organisation would like to find out how you can be involved or get support from the project please contact Lesley or Tony on (01509) 261651 or email lesley@humanrightsandequalitiescharnwood.org or tony@humanrightsandequalitiescharnwood.org
