Sovereign CEO joins board of diversity charity Leadership 2025

Leadership 2025 has announced the appointment of six new board members, including Sovereign’s CEO Mark Washer. The recently registered charity campaigns to make housing sector leadership more diverse, with better representation of BME individuals at leadership levels.

Leadership 2025 has a vision to dismantle structural inequality within the housing sector, and a mission to create opportunities for the sector’s leadership to be ethnically diverse.

It is a natural fit for the Sovereign CEO who is passionate about equality, diversity and inclusion. Since his arrival at Sovereign in 2018, Mark Washer has reinvigorated the organisation’s EDI policies, appointing a new EDI Manager and launching an ambitious new strategy.

He said: “Leadership 2025 aims to examine cultural impact and support talent. We’re looking for a sector-wide change in mindset so that people understand the importance of making leadership teams more reflective of the communities they serve.

“We need to continue to focus on ensuring that BME senior managers feel they are fully equipped to be sector leaders. Those who go through the leadership development programme developed by Leadership 2025 should be sitting around the top table in no more than a few years.

“I’m excited to encourage this kind of growth at Sovereign, with the introduction of new opportunities for our employees to discuss the issues that really matter to them, at our LGBTQ+ Network, our Caribbean African Asian Network (CAAN), and our Gender Network, as well as through the forward-looking targets we’ve set in our EDI strategy.” 

For more information about Leadership 2025, and what it aims to deliver, please read Delivering a step-change in ethnically diverse leadership across the housing sector , updated in 2019 with statistics and recommendations to support organisations to make a change.