Giving Something Back - A Housing Association Challenge

Trafford Housing Trust is just one of over 40 housing associations that were in this year's list in the Sunday times of the Top 100 Best not-for-profit organisations to work for.  For us it was the third successive year that we'd made that list and I know from reading the comments from our own staff that were the key part of the assessment that they really value the terms and condition and ways of working that we have established.

A ginnel clearing masterclass

One of the aspects of work that staff are invited to comment on relates to the extent that their organisation "gives something back" to the community. Of course, the questionnaire is used to assess all sorts of organisations, and for many private sector organisations, the thought of giving something back doesn't enter their business model. For housing associations it could be argued that we are all about building stronger, more supportive, more resilient communities and perhaps the fact that so many housing associations feature in the Sunday Times list is a reflection of this. But in our case, our scores from staff on this "giving something back" dimension were relatively low and in trying to understand why that should be the case, we discovered it was because this community-based work was so much ingrained into the DNA of our organisation, people just didn't realise they were doing it.

So we've set up what we confidently expect to be an annual event, to engage all (we slimmed the service down to the bare minimum for the day so everyone could take part) of our staff team on the same day in activities that are designed to show just how we do give something back. I've blogged in the past about "The Big Day In..." which was our first attempt at this but this year, we did it through the medium of Business in the Community's "Give and Gain" day, and I hope my Twitter followers found at least some of the pictures of what we did at least mildly entertaining.

Staff went into schools for a morning, showed would-be silver surfers in sheltered schemes how to use technology, they baked with and gardened for tenants, cleared grotspots and over-grown ginnels, organised and ran a farmers market, painted (and pointed), planted - the list goes on and on. My contribution, aside from some rather limited painting and ginnel-clearing, was to hold an opening ceremony for a new community building in Lostock. The Leathwaite Centre was named after one of our Board members who died in 2010. Steve Leathwaite was a pillar of his community - he gave back big time, and it was an honour to mark his dedication and service.

On that day, we were one of over 200 organisations across the country, contributing over 10,000 people to community based activities - you can find the full details here and if you are looking for our project on the map, it seems as if BiTC have relocated us to Central Manchester rather than Trafford, so I guess they know about our growth ambitions...and of course some (but not very many) of those were housing associations.

So here's my suggestion - next year, what would it be like if housing associations across the country all gave something back to their communities on the same day? Whether we do it as part of the BiTC event, or whether as a sector we could co-ordinate our own, I don't know. But an annual day when we engage our staff in a different way, have a visible presence in our communities and honour our volunteers couldn't be a bad thing - could it?

EDIT - for a full slideshow of our Give and Gain see the slideshow:

THT Give & Gain 2012 - photo slideshow

Six Years And £5 Million Spent On Community Investment: What Have We Learned?

It's possibly too early in the year to be talking about reflections - especially as I only recently finished formulating my predictions - however, a recent HACT meeting about Community Investment led to a period of reflection on the fact that Trafford Housing Trust is now six years old. In that time we've spent £5 million on Community Investment and I thought it would be worthwhile bringing together what we've learned. As ever I'm really interested in your views and insights on the subject, so please feel free to leave a comment or reach me on Twitter.

Lesson One: Community Investment is “Mission Central” for THT

It's not that we are a landlord who does Community Investment as part of a CSR initiative, or just that it sounds like the sort of thing we should be doing. Community Investment directly gets us to where we aim to be. Our values state that we will be “at the heart of neighbourhoods which are safe and clean, where communities have a strong voice and where people choose to live.” I'm not saying we're perfect, our approach should (but still doesn’t) involve everyone on the staff and not just a small Community Investment team, but we strive to see that our budgets deliver community benefits as well as great levels of landlord service.

Lesson Two: Our Activity Is Structured At The Neighbourhood Level

We think it's vital that our Community Investment work is driven not by us, but by the customers and the communities in our neighbourhoods. Our approach has five steps:

1 - Having hard data about the strengths, weaknesses and needs of communities at the level of our neighbourhoods. For most neighbourhoods, we feel this information is still fragmented, or held exclusively in people’s heads, which often mean it has key elements that are missing.

2 - Having “soft” data about the same things. Listening to what customers and community leaders say, examining plans and actions of other stakeholders to maximise impact/avoid duplication, observing how things are actually used in the local area, learning from best practice elsewhere. This is about having well attuned “eyes and ears” and good local and national networks to inform them.

3 - Understanding that data. Our early experience was that we frequently jumped to conclusions about what the data told us and as a result we moved too quickly into solution mode. This step is crucial and one we are now bolstering by bringing in much stronger analytical skills. Intelligence, not just data, and causality are the prizes here.

A good example of this approach is education. How many times will we try to address poor educational attainment by improving schooling, when actually the problem is that at home there is neither a culture that values education, nor quiet space for students to study. This step is not without controversy; seasoned professionals view the rigour of a regression analysis at this stage as somehow questioning their finely honed “gut instinct”; missing the point that that is precisely the point!

4 - Selecting the outcomes/benefits we want to achieve and then the projects that will best achieve them. Note the order here; too often our drive has been to “do” something, rather than “achieve” something. We’ve learned from this and increasingly we look at the benefits we want to achieve and work backwards to the projects that are needed to deliver them. We seek to answer the “Why are we doing this?” question, before the “What are we going to do?” one. No more creating a nice project, just because it’s a trophy!

5 - And finally, the old challenge of how we measure impact and value for money. Here’s where a national framework would be invaluable, but we don’t underestimate the difficulties of producing something meaningful. We would ideally be looking for something that enables us to know that:

i.    The distribution of resources and benefits is fair in relation to need and opportunity
ii.   Absolute cost/benefit assessments (CBA) can be made on individual projects to support “go/no go” decisions
iii.   Comparative CBA can be made to select preferential projects from the universe of possible ones
iv.   Retrospective CBA can be carried out to compare expected outcomes from a project with those actually delivered
v.   Whole organisation assessments of “value added” can be made on an annual basis

Problems Still To Address

Although these steps represent the methodology that we are using, we are the first to accept that it is far from perfect! We still have a list of problems that we need to solve.

a)    The information is collected in many and varied ways, at different times and when data from other organisations is also examined, different meanings of the same word can lead the unwary into bear traps of inconsistency.

b)    Understanding of data is not a science, but an art – and in some cases the political lens through which that data is viewed will be a more important driver of understanding than and statistical technique.

c)    Even with the best understanding available, at best we are left with a “fuzzy” picture of what's best to do. As a result somebody, somewhere, still needs to make a decision, stick their neck out, do something and be accountable for the outcome. Mistakes are inevitable; Boards must treat these as opportunities to learn, not reasons to punish.

d)    There are real pressures to do what everyone else is doing – even if the circumstances aren’t the same. The herd mentality of following your neighbour is still a driver of too many project decisions.

e)    A focus on needs and community opinions can hamper innovation. Steve Jobs didn’t use focus groups to design products that people said they wanted, he used creative innovation to design products that people didn’t yet know they wanted. Maybe that is why so much Community Investment we see is a recycling of old ideas.

f)    Many of our Community Investment activities are selected by community groups themselves. The scale of their thinking is often small, when a bigger project would give proportionately more impact, and their time horizons are short, further reinforcing the “quick and dirty” approach to creating value.

I'd be interested in your own approaches and thoughts on this issue. It seems like Community Investment is one of those topics that could best be attacked with a crowd-sourced approach, allowing us to pool our differing opinions and learn from the mistakes and successes of others.

Basics: Grounds Maintenance

Today is the final post in the Basics series we’ve been running to recap on some of the elementary services and products we provide (The Basics on Repairs, the Customer Hub and anti-social behaviour can be found here) and this one concerns grounds maintenance. Tony Lowry, Assistant Director of Neighbourhoods, has some thoughts on how things have progressed.

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My favourite food is without doubt, Indian. I love the flavours, the presentation, everything about it. In fact, I like it so much, I decided to take a lesson in Indian cooking and what surprised me was the sense of real science behind the cooking.

There really is a clear and rational hierarchy of spices and how they should be used and in what quantities. Like the primary colours we learnt about at school, there are in Indian cooking, four primary spices on which everything else is based. These are the spices that drive the whole experience.

So what has this to do with grounds maintenance? Well, if we are really serious about creating sustainable neighbourhoods, places where people choose to live, then grounds maintenance is one of those key ingredients that has to be right. Just like the primary ingredients in Indian food, simple, effective grounds maintenance offers a gateway to lots of subtle ideas that really add something to neighbourhoods.

Grounds maintenance is one of those services that if you get it right then no-one says anything. It becomes an unspoken comfort - just like a nice two-year-old sofa that has adjusted to your body. But get it wrong, and the whole world will tell you! Three years into the THT’s existence and we were making progress on a range of issues - but in terms of grounds maintenance our brief was wrong. We had two very poor contractors (only the council performed creditably) and despite all our progress, we had thirty complaints a week about grounds maintenance, which keeps you firmly in the quagmire.

Two years later an effective specification of the standards needed, working with a first class organisation called Greenfingers (on their site you can click on the Map Garden and select Trafford Housing Trust from the customer drop down list to see photos of the areas they look after) who provide the service, and we have to date had not one complaint. In fact, we've had several compliments. Greenfingers really are first class and share the same values of leadership that THT do. Treat the workforce well, engage them, give them responsibility – and they have created a working ethic where any slight slip in standards, any minor hint of dissatisfaction is addressed in an effective, unfussy style.

And really it’s all so simple - turn up on site when you say you are going to, be visible so the community knows you are there, leave the place looking clean and tidy before you leave. Oh and don’t forget to ask customers what they think and if they have any ideas. Then when you get feedback act on it the next time you visit.

Research by Keep Britain Tidy shows how key factors affecting the local environment, such as how well the communal land is kept, can actually help engender a real sense of community. Another body of well-documented research shows that the stronger the sense of community in an area can impact on people’s quality of life. In short - and as ridiculous as it sounds at first - there is a link between personal well-being and a lawnmower, because strong positive perceptions of place have an impact on people’s everyday feelings. And best of all, this positivity about an area is catching. Is it a coincidence for instance that as soon as our grounds maintenance improves, the volume of fly-tipped waste we have to remove goes down?

So grounds maintenance is one of the basics – but no way is it a functional, dreary service that we get right through gritted teeth; getting it right is the catalyst for making someone feel better about where they live and therefore getting it right deserves all the care and attention an organisation can spend on it. Remember this the next time you add just a quarter of a teaspoon of paprika to all the other spices to create the most flavoursome Indian food full of hidden subtleties that make you appreciate the joys of living.

Basics: How To Beat Anti-Social Behaviour

Back to basics (although it should read ASB)

One of the enjoyable problems of writing this blog is that the subject matter for posts comes thick and fast, consequently choosing what to blog about can mean choosing what to miss out.

It seems that rarely a week goes by without housing hitting the headlines – as it did this week when Ed Miliband asked whether community-minded residents should get priority when it came to housing. Aside from reacting to the latest news, there’s the multitude of intriguing issues at work in the sector – ranging from innovation to responsibility – all of which could probably be the subject of a blog in their own right.

However, one thing I want to focus on more are some of the main issues that THT as an organisation are confronted by. As well as that I’d like to give readers an up-to-date view of the services we’re responsible for. So over the next couple of months there will be a series of guest posts from people within THT looking at these “basic” topics. First up, Tony Lowry, Assistant Director of Neighbourhoods, on how we are confronting the ever-present issue of anti-social behaviour.

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In a recent blog Matthew wrote about the importance of getting feedback from tenants. One topic that they have always been very vocal and emphatic about is anti-social behaviour. Anti-social behaviour is one of the main causes for concern from tenants, and if we are to achieve our mission of being at the heart of our communities then we have to take it as seriously as they do. You can read more about our approach to the topic here, but the simplest thing to say is that we understand precisely how this issue can ruin the lives of individuals, destroy families and ultimately tear apart communities unless it is dealt with promptly and properly.

Despite the doom and gloom that usually surrounds the topic, over the last few years there has been a lot of work done on how anti-social behaviour is approached by organisations like THT. That effort has laid out an intriguing – and exciting – new approach, which has resulted in some real success. Statistics never tell the full story and I wouldn’t like to say that we had the problem beaten but the following make for good reading:

• We get 250 cases of anti-social behaviour a year. This is less than similar organisations working in similar areas. We feel this has much to do with the quality of our work to prevent anti-social behaviour in the first place.
• We know tenants want us to work towards solutions quickly. Consequently, we monitor the time taken on every case and we now have only nine cases open more than nine months. 18 months ago this was 36 cases.
• Every person reporting anti-social behaviour gets at least a monthly update.
• We have just had our best month ever with the number of anti-social behaviour cases successfully resolved in agreement with the person who reported the case.

One very interesting study which has helped shape organisations' response to anti-social behaviour was undertaken in nearby Salford. One of the surprising things that it revealed was that only a small number of families were responsible for most of the anti-social behaviour experienced in the area. These were not typical families either – they were living chaotic lifestyles characterised by debt, addiction, domestic violence and long-term benefit dependency.

To get a fuller picture, all of the contacts and interventions from the various agencies were mapped out and costed for just one of these families. The cost amounted to £160k per year! It would have been cheaper to put a Police Officer on their doorstep all year round! The key thing that the study revealed was that all of this intervention was reactive and, therefore, unplanned. This incredible amount of money was spent fighting fires. Clearly, this was not the right approach and led to a re-think in how to address the problem. The conclusion was that organisations and agencies had to learn to combine their resources and budgets to change the approach so that now, virtually all of the contacts and interventions are planned.

The financial implications of taking this proactive stance and helping this family out in a more rational way, is that it now only costs £120k per year, saving the tax-payer £40k per year. If you factor in the tax now being paid by the two members of the family who are now in work, the overall savings are more like £60k. Perhaps more importantly still, this positive approach is more effective and means that rather than spending the money on clearing up and punishing anti-social behaviour, we can help prevent families from committing it in the first place.

Imagine the implications if it’s not just one family, but twenty, or thirty getting the benefit of this shift in approach. The overall cash gain to the tax payer is potentially in the millions. This isn’t money that will come through to organisations like THT, but if we are undertaking this work and standing by our values to make communities stronger, then that means we have to protect those who are about to drop off the edge. If we can help a family with a few problems, or those intent on bringing full-blown chaos to an area - then we, the families and our communities all win.

Impressively, the recent trend of anti-social behaviour reducing has continued despite the cuts impacting on youth services and police numbers. The key to making this work in the future is to make real and fundamental changes in how services work together. It’s about stating what needs to get done, how it will be done and who is responsible for getting it done. If we are to carry on these improvements and continue acting on the concerns of our tenants then these partnerships are the key to unlocking the problem, because ultimately we believe that we can beat anti-social behaviour.