United Communities

Our Community Connection Strategy 2014-2018

For Board Discussion

‘Having a positive impact on residents’ lives by providing great homes and communities’

Our Business Plan recognises the need to create a more aspirational and successful relationship between us and our customers. As a community based housing association our 2013-17 Business Plan states:

“We want to change the way we manage and support communities as well as developing a real sense of community and responsibility from our residents, our staff and our board members”

The journey that our tenants have to navigate to get allocated a new home implies an overt focus on their needs rather than their strengths and skills. Our landlord/ tenant relationship can then exacerbate this with the assumption that we take on full responsibility for tenants’ homes and neighbourhoods. A more effective and sustainable outcome would be to value the skills and experience that residents bring to us by ‘co-producing’ our services with tenants. Our successful Pride of Place work on our estates is based on the principle that tenants have skills and experience to contribute too. It requires a move away from a service-led, top-down approach to genuine citizen empowerment and involves residents, communities and the professionals who support them, pooling their expertise.

We are a community based organisation that provides affordable homes; Our Community Connection Strategy underpins our vision and purpose to provide ‘More than Just a Roof’. By getting the basics right and delivering a goodand cost effective qualityhousing service we can safeguard funds and resources to invest in making our communities successful and resilient. We see that this strategy both supports and enhances our other work as well as reinforcing our core business work such as income maximisation from rents, keeping our homes well maintained, sustaining tenancies whilst also supporting communities to help themselves.

Our Commitments are to:

  • Invest in our community development role as core part of what we do, particularly within diverse communities who have previously been ignored or discriminated against.
  • Encourage residents to give us feedback that helps to improve our services and which holds us to account.
  • Aim for clean and safe neighbourhoods by delivering estate management services in conjunction with our residents via our ‘Pride of Place’ approach.
  • Support residents to improve their life chances and choices by finding work and/or accessing training.
  • Help residents to sustain their tenancies by providing personalised support and advice.
  • Speak out against disadvantage and inequality that affects our residents and communities.
  • Work in partnership to help improve residents’ quality of life and get the best deal for the communities where we have homes.
  • Be flexible and nimble in our approach so that we can respond to individual circumstances and opportunities.
  • Stand up for what we believe is in the best interest of residents by lobbying for change and shaping local and national policies.

We will work with others to deliver real benefits for residents and communities, responding to a wide range of issues in these times of change. We will develop an annual action plan with clear objectives and goals to guide this strategy.

The challenge is to move towards residents taking the lead. We want to develop a real sense of how our investment can be measured and maximised at a time when there will be significant competing demands for resources. Change is a certainty throughout the lifetime of this strategy, and from this we may change and follow other opportunities but we will always work within our More Than ethos. We therefore see our Community Connection Strategy as being used to meet our ambition of being ‘More Than Just a Roof’ - where we not only make a difference in our work and in our communities, we will also support and enable others to do so as well.

Our resident’sneeds and the changing times

Our average resident is, 43 years old, female single head of household who has lived in one of our homes for just over five years with two or more children. They are five times more likely to be in receipt of some form of benefit and facingfinancial pressure due to welfare reform changes, increasing energy and fuel costs and other cost of living pressures. Additionally, public services are being cut across the board and our residents have had to become more resourceful.

Geography and issues

We have just over 1900 homes across the wider Bristol area and Swindon. We will focus our investment and community support in the communities where we have the majority of homes that are under the most pressure the priority commitments in Bristol are:

  • Horfield and Lockleaze
  • St Pauls
  • Easton
  • Fishponds and Eastville

Key Themes

Our Community Connection Strategy for residents and communities will coverthree key themes:

  • People
  • Place
  • Purpose

We will develop an annual delivery plan that details the work we will deliver in that year in line with this strategy.

1.People :understanding our communities and the impact of the work we do
  • Our Support Services Offer

Weaim to support 100 residents per year to manage and sustain their tenancy and take an active part on their community. We will offer direct personalised support and referresidents to specialised services such as mental health agencies and domestic violence support etc. Our staff will be knowledgeable of the agencies within our areas of operation and will develop key relationships with them. Agencies will include children centres, health centres, schools and advice centres. Our aim is to ensure residents become more resilient and support them to support themselves.

  • Our Diversity Offer

We will work with key agencies to champion our Diversity Offer to residentsand communities. We will develop greater understanding of residents’ needs, aspirations and assets to identify appropriate support and partner agencies to work with. We are developing a Service Level Agreement with SARI (Support Against and Inequality) and are exploring how we can work together to create cohesion and address any inequalities faced by our residents and our communities.

We want to encourage and support wider engagement from young people as we see they form the residents and communities of the future. We also want to support initiatives to address anti social behaviour (ASB) and improve community cohesion.

  • Our Employment, Training and Advice Offer

Supporting residents to reach their goals is a vital part of our role as a community organisation. We will encourage residents to achieve their goals by supporting them to find work and training which enhances their skills and quality of life. We will prioritise resources to deliver employment, training and advice to residents and to refer and sign post residents to key services and agencies. We have a target to support 100 people into work or training over the next three years and we will look to grow this service with our internal resources and our partners.

  • Our Money Management Offer

Approximately 80% of ‘financially excluded’ households live in social housing and are affected by the welfare reform. We are strengthening our approach to financial inclusion as part of our planning for welfare reform. As well as increasing our ability to signpost and guide residents who may be affected, we will put in place programmes and develop partnerships which help to mitigate the impact on residents. In the long term, we will develop partnerships with key organisations to support residents to manage their money better. This has a strong link to our business objectives of income maximisation.

  • Our Digital Inclusion Offer

We are aware of the pressures on resident’s to become ‘digital by default’ as services, employers and welfare benefits will require access to good quality IT services. We already know that many residents do not have access to affordable and good quality IT services such as a computer at home or internet access. In addition, many residents lack basic IT skills to equip them to look for work as well as receive cheaper good and services on line. We will initially understand the needs and gaps for our residents and then develop appropriate partnerships to sign post our residents to. From this we will work with others to create our offer around digital inclusion.

  • Our Health, Happiness and WellbeingOffer

We know that many social housing residents have suffered with are faced with poor health and significant health inequalities. We want toboth understandresident’s needs as well as exploring the opportunitiesavailable to them. To help us do this, we will work with our resident’s, local health centres and local health organisations to develop this offer.

How will we do this?

  • Understand our communities better by profiling our residents on a community basis
  • Gather and understand external data on a community basis
  • Spend quality time in these communities, listening to local issues
  • Support resident led activities, Identify funding to support these communities and develop partnerships in these communities
  • Signpost and provide direct support to residents who want to get into work or training and generate work or training through the services we offer or partnerships we make
  • Understand the local health organisations more so we can understand how their priorities might benefit our residents and our communities.
  • Encourage our staff to volunteer as mentors for residents Work with Pennywise
  • Implement a digital inclusion framework
  • Signpost residents to IT learning and support
  • Support residents to access and utilise the internet

2.Place : creating great communities for our residents to live in.
  • Our Communities Offer

Creating great places to live is vital to our work. We will continue to grow our Pride of Place programmewhich will incorporate wider issues such as refuse, recycling, environmental and green issues as well as minimising ASBand crime where we can. We will set aside annual budgets for regular clean-ups and walkabouts as well as estate improvements. We will also work with a wide range of agencies including health organisations, Bristol City Council, the police, schools and children’s centres.

  • Our Homes Offer

Our purpose is to provide ‘more than just a roof’. We want to make sure that residents know how to efficiently heat their home, how to access affordable services such as contents insurance and broadband and know where to access healthy and affordable local shops.

Our Asset Management Strategy will go someway to address these issues but we will explore what else we can do to address fuel poverty, digital exclusion and accessibility to good food produce; via partnerships, signposting and direct provision e.g. Centre for Sustainable Energy, Green Deal.

What will we do?

  • Develop and support local community hubs with key partners especially those who offer IT support, IT facilities and employment support
  • Develop a Service Level Agreement with Centre for Sustainable Energy to help residents access better energy deals
  • Influence the choice of areas and design of new communities to ensure we meet our community priorities.

3.Purpose :delivering personalised and accessible services that meet our residents’ needs

We are developing our role as a community organisation all of the time. We want to both respond to residents as well as creating local accountability.

  • Our staff and Board

Our approach is not only about our residents, we also recognises that everyone involved in United Communities, staff, board and contractors, will need to think about the way that we behave and the values we hold. This behaviour should reflect the values inherent in ‘More than just a Roof’ and as a community based organisation, is essentially what makes us different from other housing associations.

  • Making an impact

It is essential that we monitormeasure and evaluate the impact of the work we do in our communities to enable us tocompare the costs against the benefits and learn from experiences. We will trail the HACT social measures as well as other key data in relation to our work.

Our approach is based on early intervention and building positive working relationships, rather than addressing failure. We will continue to help residents address issues but will focus ona prevention and capacity building approach tosupport residents to achieve their goals and help achieve sustainable communities.

  • Working in partnership

We will build partnerships with local groups and agencies, the voluntary sector, housing providers and local authorities to identify opportunities, funding gaps in service provision. We will use our ‘buying power’to ensure our contractors and suppliers share our values so that they offer employment and training opportunities to residents. We will also work with partners to bring in supportin the form of time and donations and supportour staff to volunteer time to benefit our communities and our residents.

Funding

Our overall approach to delivering value for money for our stakeholders is that, by consistently doing the basics efficiently, we can free-up resources, in both time and money, to invest in the added value activities that really make a difference to our customers and other stakeholders. This Strategy confirms that we consider our role within communities as one which is more than just a landlord. We will invest time, and the surpluses we make from our day-to-day landlord activities, in the key areas of People, Place and Purpose which we believe make a broader contribution to those in our communities.

One of the aims of this Strategy, and our Value for Money framework, is to work with stakeholders to prioritise areas for investment. The result of this will be an agreed strategy for investing surpluses. We will establish an annual budget for our investment into this strategywhich will be set each year by ourBoard, but developed with the help of ours residents. This is used to fund projects and initiatives in the communities where we operate. Within this budget we provide a number of funding opportunities for individuals, groups andorganisations. These range from our popular Opportunities Fund which offers up to £500 for individuals to reach their personal goals and also our project funds for local projects, to support for initiatives through our community investment fund.

We will also actively look for external funds where appropriate and work with partners to secure this. To date we have secured over £29,000 in external funds and we will monitor this each year.

Success measures

Our Community Connection strategy will assist us to connect with our communities and assistus to make decisions over investment to help createsuccessful and sustainablecommunities. In order to achievethis we have identified a numberof success factors:

  • Knowing our customers – we will get to know our residentsand communities to find outtheir needs and aspirations.
  • Attract investment –from external sources for the communities where it is most needed.
  • Be part of innovative partnerships –linking in with specialist and local organisations to ensure thatcommunities have access tothe best expertise.
  • Empowering – enablingcommunities to shape theirown solutions.
  • Creating a legacy – thinking long-termand creating enduring andevolving outcomes.

The future

Residents and communities come first in our work and we have established an appropriate structure and strategy to for delivery this.We aim to ensure that the maximum amountof investment is delivered directly to benefitcommunities, rather than being diverted intomanagement costs or overheads.