Ethnic minority residents have coined the term 'count me in' to celebrate the diverse cultures in Cambridge council housing.
Housing strategy
In 2008 the housing service consulted ethnic residents who helped create our black and ethnic minority (BME) diversity housing strategy.
It is a five-year action plan to ensure that ethnic residents get a fair deal in local housing, and that cultural diversity is seen as a strength of the Cambridge housing community.
A changing panel of ethnic residents help oversee that each year the action plan is completed.
Please get in touch if you'd like to help oversee the plan.
Exhibitions
The council landlord, City Homes, has also been celebrating the ethnic diversity of its customers.
At the residents' festival in 2007, ethnic residents staged a lively exhibition of music, dress and cuisine from their diverse cultural backgrounds.
Get in touch if you'd like to help present a table celebrating your culture at the Count Me In exhibition at the next residents' festival day on 4 October 2008.
Your stories
Whatever your ethnic background, you can contact us to ask for a grant to form a residents group to celebrate your culture in Cambridge.
Have a look at the achievements of the group formed to support Turkish and Kurdish tenants in Cambridge.
Keep telling us your stories, showing what you have contributed to your neighbourhood and to life in Cambridge.
Sharif's story
I'm a council tenant. I do what I can to help the residents' association I'm in, and I do some interpreting when the council need it. I'm a registered interpreter but I usually do it for free.
I got my British nationality four years ago, after I had lived in the UK for eight years. I live permanently in the UK now.
I was very pleased to get my British nationality, because it meant I was finally free to visit my home country again to see my parents. I don't know if people realise that when you make an application for political asylum, it means you have to give up all connection with your country of origin and you can no longer cross its borders or return there.
So you enter a sort of limbo or no-man's land, a kind of statelessness without any passport, while you wait to find out whether you can stay in the country you have applied to. So I was eight years in the UK before I could return to my country of origin to see my parents.
Aya's story
I've been a council tenant in sheltered accommodation for a number of years. I've lived in Cambridge for 40 years and my children were born here, but grew up in the Sudan.
The nature and tradition of Sudanese people is to be very welcoming and open and hospitable - to mingle. When you arrived among them you would straight away be invited to people's homes to come and visit and settle in.
There was no idea at all of segregation - around religion or skin-colour or all that. To be honest the first we ever saw of that was when the Catholic missions started telling people: "You must do such and such. You must not celebrate such and such festivals. You must not mix with such and such people."
That was the first we had heard of that sort of attitude - of all these barriers and segregations of different sorts.
Khartoum at that time was a genuine meeting point for so many different cultures and religions, embracing each other and celebrating each other’s strong points. We were very lucky to live in that time - all that tradition of openness and tolerance and curiosity about other ways of life and religions.
My family and I have brought those values with us to Cambridge. Originally as a family we were of course Muslims.
But I was in so many clubs and hobbies and activities that just through my activities I was more like a Christian, culturally and socially. We had so many Jewish friends as well.
We used to participate in everything - Jewish festivals, Christmas for the Christians, Ramadan for the Muslims - we used to celebrate them all in together. It seems amazing now to think of it compared to the divisions there are now in some places.
That was the beauty of Sudan at that time: there were none of these barriers at all. There was always some religious festival or other to celebrate.
