After thirteen years working in the private sector for corporate organisations, Rebecca wanted her next role to have a bigger social purpose. She is now Learning and Development Business Partner at Hafod. Here she talks about her role in supporting the organisation’s main priorities.

“When I joined Hafod two years ago, I was completely new to the housing sector. My background was in financial services, but I was ready for a role that was part of something, the position with Hafod came at the right time.

As the Learning and Development Business Partner, I am responsible for supporting the whole organisation in finding learning solutions to suit the priorities of different teams, whether that’s for frontline colleagues providing housing, care and support services or our central services teams.

Carbon literacy is a big priority for Hafod over the next few years and is a key objective across the organisation. Our current focus in the Learning and Development team is providing education around the importance of making carbon neutral decisions, be it retrofitting properties and making them fit for the future, right across to the administrative side and taking steps to reduce carbon emissions by going paper free where possible.

Being a part of the Carbon Literacy Cartrefi Cymru (CCLC) consortium brings lots of collective benefits to the 27 member organisations. It was through this we had the great opportunity to attend the Carbon Literacy course being offered by Manchester Metropolitan University. I was keen to learn more and have the knowledge to lead from the front, so myself and another member of my team enrolled on the course. We are now fully qualified to deliver certified carbon literacy training, and we can now begin rolling that learning out to colleagues, and in time, to customers too.

I also sit on a steering group which is writing a carbon literacy training course specifically for housing associations with seven other colleagues from the sector, which will be adaptable and applicable to different teams from our maintenance operatives to our neighbourhood coaches.

I really like how collaborative the sector is, it’s not competitive in the way that other industries I’ve worked within have been. Every housing association in Wales works together towards a common goal, sharing best practice and materials to support each other, and that’s a really refreshing outlook. We are able to use that collective mission to influence the government to make sure high quality, sustainable housing is a priority, especially with work around carbon literacy at the moment.”

Rebecca Shand is L & D Business Partner at Hafod.