Housing-led peacebuilding programme launches in Northern Ireland with focus on migrant communities

It also includes a creative programme that will be co-designed with communities and will aim to engage 2,700 participants across 12 areas, in projects focused on heritage, culture and arts, including cooking classes, exhibitions and sports. 

Common Ground will also provide accredited social enterprise and carbon literacy training to staff working in the social housing sector.

The project follows on from The Housing Associations Integration Project (HAIP), a similar project which ran between 2018 and 2021.

HAIP focused on improving relations across cultures and religious groups, and on the region’s engrained issues associated with social segregation resulting from decades of conflict.

According to Common Ground project co-ordinator Kevin Brassell, the new programme has evolved to focus on migrant and refugee communities in light of the region’s growing anti-immigrant sentiment.

He said: “Our previous project was focused on existing communities within Northern Ireland and the border counties. Now the scope is much wider, and our new project will also include new and migrant communities.

“A lot of these new communities might not be living within actual [housing association] properties, but we’ll still be working with them to find ways to live in harmony and recognising, more than anything, that diversity is a strength to a community, not a weakness.”

Mr Brassell said Common Ground would be starting out with a scoping exercise to find out what the community’s needs are, where the tensions might be lying and how Common Ground can build on work that is already ongoing.

Alongside NIFHA, the other partners are the Irish Council for Social Housing, Apex Housing Association, Choice Housing Association, Clanmil Housing Association, Radius Housing Association, Rural Housing Association and Woven Housing Association.