Finalists in the NZ Rainbow Excellence Awards 2023

Held annually, the New Zealand Rainbow Excellence Awards are the only Rainbow-focused awards programme in Aotearoa New Zealand, and acknowledge workplace leadership, innovation, best practice and collaboration in relation to LGBTTQIA+ communities.

As an organisation, we strive to ensure that we provide a working environment where all our people feel comfortable bringing their whole selves to work and we are proud to have been nominated as finalists in two categories:

• ​​​​The Rainbow Tick Training and Development Award: Recognising organisations who provide training and development initiatives internally to improve Rainbow inclusion.
• The Rainbow Tick Non-Commercial Sector Award: Recognising and celebrating organisations within the non-commercial sector who demonstrate leadership and innovation in the area of Rainbow diversity and inclusion within and/or across their sector.

These nominations reflect our commitment to embracing diversity and inclusion for both staff and customers, including our employee-led Rainbow Network which is championing awareness of the Rainbow communities.

An initiative of the Rainbow Network has been for Kāinga Ora to take the Pride Pledge, and we are currently in our second year of Pride Pledge Gold level membership. This values-based commitment means demonstrating our dedication to the safety, visibility and inclusion of all the Rainbow members of our community and workforce.

We are also proud to provide our people with the opportunity to build on their diversity and inclusion capability within the organisation; earlier this year launching our Rainbow Awareness Learning Module to help improve understanding of our Rainbow workforce, customers and communities. The module is intended as an introduction to how we can all support in the creation of a safe and supportive workplace for our Rainbow communities at Kāinga Ora, and be more inclusive of our Rainbow customers.

Congratulations to our all our people across the organisation who have supported, and continue to support, Rainbow inclusion kaupapa at Kāinga Ora. We are making great progress in promoting a more diverse, equitable and inclusive place to work, and are proud to see this recognised with two Rainbow Excellence Awards nominations.