The financial year 2020/21 was the year that we launched our five-year £15m Community Investment strategy – our commitment to creating thriving communities.
We want to make sure we are driving change where it’s needed most and that we are tacklingthe big issues – health and wellbeing, employment opportunities, anti-social behaviour, andhomelessness. Instead of spreading ourselves too thinly, we carried out research to identify keycommunities that will benefit most from our support. Therefore, we are focusing on eightCommunity Investment Zones.
These zones reflect the communities where many of our customers face some of today’s mostchallenging issues. We are focusing on key neighbourhoods and have developed 13 Community Investment Plans (CIPs) with a flexible response to deal with emerging needs.
We try to understand our customers communities, which is why we worked with each keyneighbourhood on an individual basis to develop their CIP. It was clear that health and wellbeing, employment and community empowerment were important areas they wantedsupport in. These areas link directly with our central mission – to create thriving communities and empower lives. So, that is what our investment is focusing on.
Our community investment zones
We are one of South of England’s largest housing providers, but we have a hyper-local approachto our work within communities. We know one size does not fit all.
We spoke to our customers, communities, local organisations, and colleagues in 2019-20 to findout how they felt about where they lived and worked. We used this to put together Community Investment Plans (CIPs), which share how we will support and work with the community andpartner organisations to make things better.
It was clear that there were three main areas of focus for our communities. We call thempillars, as they are the core of our CIPs and support everything that we do. The three pillarsare community empowerment, employment and health and wellbeing.
Every household in our CIP areas received a summary of their investment plan in January 2021.While the CIPs highlight what we will do based on what communities told us they wanted, we will continuously consult with customers, organisations, and colleagues to review them and adapt what we support and deliver.
COVID-19 meant circumstances for our communities had changed drastically since we createdthe CIPs. So, we invited customers to virtual ‘coffee and chat’ sessions – an informal way forthem to share their opinions. They told us what they thought of the plans and what else they thought we could do to support them. This changed the focus of project in some of our areas.
We are not stopping there. Consulting with our customers, partners, colleagues, and localorganisations is key to our approach to our community investment work. We are continuing to build partnerships with local organisations, so we can respond to the changing needs of thecommunity, facilitate conversations and feedback what our customers are saying to us. Asrestrictions ease, our teams will be back in the community, delivering much needed face-to-face support.
You can read more about our Community Investment Plans here.