Our Community Action Days are a great chance to spend time in our communities and hear first-hand from our customers about the challenges they're facing.
It really is a cross-team effort and means we can support you on a broad range of issues; from maintenance to looking after their homes, environmental improvements to cost of living support, employment support and everything in between.
Between August and October we held 16 days in Liss, Salisbury, Portsmouth, Windsor, Hythe, Somerset, Ilminster, Crewkerne, Winchester, Slough, Yeovil, Whitehill and Bordon, Chard, Mansbridge and Bristol, and supported Silva to run one in Bracknell. Our teams were busy, offering things like:
- Vans to remove unwanted items
- Minor repairs
- An opportunity to meet your housing team and tenancy sustainment team
- Access to employment support
- Benefits advice
- Chats with the police
- Tasty refreshments
We engaged with 233 customers across our events and have had some good feedback from those who came along. Our customers have told us that it’s been useful to have a visible presence and talk to us in person about any issues they’re having, often to do with community safety and housing issues. They’ve also been able to seek external support and advice from the police who’ve been on hand at most of the events.
We carried out 44 repairs at the action days, and follow-up repairs and inspections were booked for a later date if we weren’t able to fix the problem on the day. And we worked closely with the bulk waste team to remove a total of 20 truckloads of waste. Bulk waste issues have been a key focus at our action days, due to a mix of fly tipping in some areas, property inspection cases and hoarding cases which our teams will continue to support our customers with to resolve any issues they’re having.
Our partners at local councils have also come along to some of the events and have been able to take away some great improvement ideas from our customers. In Salisbury, customers raised the idea of cricket activities being available for children, and local councillors on the day took this idea away and have included this in some pop-up youth events they are planning for the area.
Customers in Liss shared some great ideas for their community, including a community garden on current unused communal garden land. Our Housing team are going to run a consultation to see if this is something we can make happen.
And in Portsmouth, customers asked for a key code to stop fly tipping, and this has already been booked in with our teams.
“It’s been really nice today, really nice to see you and talk to you.” Abri customer, Ilminster
We’ll be back with more Community Action Days in January 2024.
