Successfully Engaging Social Housing Residents: Ensuring Voices are Heard

Aasia is an experienced housing professional with over 20 years’ experience in the housing sector but her real niche is resident involvement, community development and engagement. She is committed to ensuring residents voices are heard, making a real difference as to how services are delivered. Following Sovereign’s merger in 2016, Aasia led on a successful review of involvement, resulting in the Resident and Board Partnership’s award winning and co-created, model of engagement. At present she is working on rolling out Sovereign’s Customer Impact strategy.

Before joining Sovereign in 2008, Aasia worked on several European Social Funded projects, as well as writing major funding applications for the National Lottery. She has a PhD in Sociology and Social policy.

As a resident and Chair of Sovereign’s Resident and Board Partnership, Joyce truly has residents at the heart.

As early adopters of the Charter, Joyce was invited to sit on the NHF’s National Tenant Advisory Panel, helping to shape the Together with Tenants’ Charter, and rebuilding trust between residents and landlords following the Grenfell tragedy. 

Eamon has over 42 years’ experience in housing, having started at the Greater London Council in 1977. He then worked for the London Boroughs of Brent, Hillingdon, Barnet and Islington

Eamon was appointed Chief Executive of Homes for Islington in 2004 and retained that position until March 2012. During that period, he was responsible for the management of 35,000 homes

Eamon is now an independent consultant and is currently Managing Director of the National Federation of ALMOs which is the trade body for all ALMO's.

He is also Chair of the Barnet Group, a Trustee on a Homeless Charity and a Fellow of both the Chartered Institute of Housing and the Chartered Management Institute

Anne-Marie is Salix Homes’ Customer Engagement Manager and is responsible for ensuring that Salix Homes listens to and acts on the customer voice. Anne-Marie has recently been leading on the appointment and development of the trail-blazing Salix Homes Customer Committee, giving parity to the customer voice in the organisation’s governance structures.  The Customer Committee is a committee of Salix Homes Board consisting of 12 customers who have been appointed to ensure that Salix Homes delivers on the consumer standards and the outcomes arising from the Hackitt review of Building Safety. Most recently, Anne-Marie has delivered two scrutiny projects entirely digitally as well as moving the Customer Committee to an entirely digital approach. Anne-Marie is passionate about meaningful, outcome focussed customer engagement and making sure that the customer voice is listened to and acted on.

Yvonne is Managing Director, consultant, facilitator and trainer at Scrutiny & Empowerment Partners Limited, working to achieve great resident involvement, community empowerment, governance, customer governance, resident scrutiny and equalities.

Yvonne is a former Housing Association Managing Director, with 38 years’ experience of working in Housing and Communities the former Head of Housing and Economic Development at the Audit Commission.

Yvonne is focussed on housing, including support for resident engagement, health checks and strategy review, building strong and outcome focussed resident voices, building capacity in communities, building resident capacity on Boards and supporting residents in scrutiny, participation and engagement.

Yvonne runs a scrutiny and involvement network for engagement staff, which meets approx. 6 -8 weekly for a few hours on line to discuss and share latest thinking and best practice and she runs tenant involvement unconferences for residents. Most recently, the conference in January on the Social Housing White Paper was supported by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Govt speakers. A further conference is planned when changes to consumer regulation unfold for consultation.

Yvonne also undertakes board governance reviews, regulatory compliance assessments, equality and diversity assessments, facilitation of Board, Charity and Tenant awaydays, confidence building, influencing skills training, 360-degree assessments and appraisals for Board and Tenants/groups, customer insight, developing community groups into housing associations, data analysis, complaint mediation and much more!

Yvonne runs conferences and training for residents, a membership website www.tenantadvisor.net and a performance group for involvement staff.

Yvonne runs the programme for Board Excellence in Governance for the Housing Diversity Network. Yvonne is a a Board Member of 2 community based HAs - Cobalt Housing and Steve Biko HA

She loves to work hard and play hard. Her hobbies include watching welsh rugby, travel and lots and lots and lots of socialising.

yvonne@tenantadvisor.net

@ yvonnehousing @yvonne_hello

Danielle Gregory is a tenants rights campaigner focused on the social housing sector. She founded the Ledbury Action Group and successfully lobbied for the rehousing of more than 200 families after highlighting serious fire and structural safety problems on her tower block estate. She works with Tower Blocks UK - an information resource and support hub for people who live in, or are concerned about, tower block safety.

Sarah Dicker is Head of the Social Housing Regulation Team in MHCLG. Sarah is responsible for policy relating to both economic and consumer regulation of social housing landlords, including implementation of the reforms to regulation set out in the Social Housing White Paper. Sarah works closely with the Regulator of Social Housing and leads on their relationship with the Department. She joined the Social Housing Division in March 2020, having previously worked on education and energy policy across Government.

Sarah Carpenter joined the Social Housing Division in 2018. She leads on Resident Engagement and has facilitated the Social Sector (Building Safety) Engagement Best Practice Group since its inception in March 2019. 

Born in a small parish in Jamaica, Monica sadly lost her own mother when she was aged just seven. She was brought up by her father and aunt (her mother’s sister). Her aunt had an opportunity to come to the UK in 1954 as part of the Windrush generation and she took Monica with her. They settled into her new life in Brixton, South London.

Monica went on to have three children of her own and, with housing being a major issue at the time, she was inspired to get involved. She wanted to have a positive impact and influence on social housing in the best way she could. This eventually led Monica to volunteer and become an involved resident with her housing provider, Optivo.

During her involvement with Optivo, which now stretches over a decade, Monica has held many different positions, including Chair of the Resident Strategy Group. Her dedication, hard work and involvement has seen her win many awards. She was recently recognised in the New Year Honours list with an MBE for her achievement in shaping and leading one of the most successful tenant involvement approaches in the social housing sector.

Monica remains dedicated to helping residents and improving services. She says: “As an involved resident, you don’t give up hours of your time to be recognised – you do it because you want to make a difference.”

Dr Halima Sacranie is the Research Lead of the Housing and Communities Research Group at the University of Birmingham, where she completed her PhD in Urban and Regional Studies in 2012. The Housing and Communities Research Group undertakes research in relation to housing policy, third sector housing models and governance, sustainability in social housing, the role of the private rental sector, and community-led housing. Halima’s housing research interests include Community Investment, Tenant Engagement, Sustainability and Social Responsibility. She is currently working on a 4-year European project on the circular economy in social housing, as well as a 2 year project on housing quality and tenant well-being for an English housing association.