Vision and Partnerships

Our aim is to target the six government strands of equalities as our focus for race equality and thereby promoting the development of the new Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR).

We aim to engage faith in to the work of Race, Faith and Community Relations as an inclusive part of our work and enable this to lead the debate across the community cohesion agenda.

Our objective is to enable the 46 local authorities and other public authorities across the East Midlands to increase their awareness and skills in promoting the Public Duty across the work of the authority.

National and the International Agenda

Local authorities are increasingly becoming more concerned with the national and international ‘political’ agenda influencing race relations in their vicinity and thereby having to seek increased resources to increase their knowledge and skills to deal with such matters.

Faith has become an increasingly difficult subject to address and this has given rise to Right Wing extremists groups to prosper. EMREC intends to offer a supportive network of engagement with positive groups and communities to build good relations between people of different faiths.

EMREC is able to offer skills based upon professional knowledge and skills to assist public authorities including the police services deal with an increasing number of challenging events. EMREC has a pool of talent and professionals from where such skills can be easily sought.

Community Engagement & Modernisation

Over the last twenty five years local agencies have attempted to develop relationships with local community organisations without fully appreciating the networks and the difficulties of establishing authentic or valid representation within a wider range of minority ethnic communities. EMREC will build upon the existing community networks and offer a unique opportunity to assist in promoting a more progressive and ambitious structure which enables local agencies to modernise their relationships with local communities and to build cohesive working partnerships with young people, gays & lesbians, women, people with disabilities, faith groups, the elderly and many others from within the black and minority ethnic communities. The modernisation agenda no longer offers only a mono-phile relationship with a commonly perceived ‘elite group of community elders’ but assists public sector organisations and statutory agencies to create a dynamic dialogue through local partnerships for the promotion of a wider social engagement and a community cohesion agenda across a wide range of community based participants from all sections of the black and minority ethnic communities.

EMREC through its work will offer to take the lead for modernisation in the strategic engagement agenda by providing training and seminar presentations on new and existing legislation and legislative information. Through this work agencies and organisation will be able to increase their understanding and extend their profile in to and beyond existing community based frameworks for development.

Future Ambitions

EMREC aims is to promote its strategic support structure for positive community relations to develop across the East Midlands region. The structure offers specialists in the area of community relations, race and faith and community cohesion. This knowledge base enables EMREC to link up with local community based race equality and diversity networks which have previously been inaccessible to the statutory sector agencies.