Involving You

Supported and Sheltered Housing Meetings

Meetings are held across our supported and sheltered schemes on a regular basis. The involvement of our supported and sheltered housing residents at this level helps us ensure we are providing quality a service and are meeting our requirements under the 'Supporting People' regime.

Residents Associations

Formal Residents Associations have a constitution, which sets out the Rules of the Association and explains its objectives. Although residents associations may vary in their objectives, most include improving where they live and the surrounding area, bringing residents together socially and representing resident members when talking to people from the local authority or from CCHA.

Where Residents Associations are not yet in place, we are in the process of identifying resident representatives at various general needs estates to provide feedback on the estate services we currently provide (ie: cleaning, gardening, communal areas, estate repairs, lighting or security)

When CCHA is considering changes to its services, policies or would like your views and ideas on specific subjects, residents will be invited to join a forum for that topic. These meetings are an opportunity for residents with an interest in a particular aspect of the Association's services to be involved.

Future forums could be based around maintenance; specific to planned maintenance or gas servicing. If you are interested in a particular subject and would like to find out if others are please let us have your suggestions and we can try to set up a forum group.

An Annual Report to residents is produced in the form of a calendar. The Calendar includes figures about CCHA's performance as well as local information that may be useful for residents.

The 'Wednesday Walkabouts' provide an opportunity for all CCHA staff to visit estates and to meet residents face to face. Hopefully this initiative will keep us all in touch with the issues that are important to our residents and that affect them on their estates. Each Walkabout takes roughly an hour. All residents need to do to get involved is to come and meet staff as they walk around, you will be notified in advance of the date and time that the next Walkabout is planned to reach your estate.

The Presidents Fund of £10,000 has been set up to assist CCHA in meeting its mission of Resident Involvement.

The aim of the presidents fund is to improve the quality of life of CCHA residents and its main purpose is to consider and allocate grants for specific schemes or projects. It intends to support, promote and enhance resident involvement within CCHA.

Having this fund will improve CCHA's fundraising capabilities for resident involvement related activities in the future.

Some examples of how the fund may be used are; social activities organised by the social activities panel group, community initiatives i.e. drama, arts, music and sporting activities for young people, skills in the community development through training and support, competitions, community schemes such as improving Race & Diversity awareness on CCHA schemes, resident fun days, health and personal awareness training, crime reduction initiatives, alcohol/drug awareness training and to add value to existing projects which may be under funded.

We are committed to consulting our residents. We will consult you if we are considering:

• A significant change in our housing management or maintenance practice or policies.
• Improvements or major repairs to your home or estate.
• A change in the way we provide services or amenities which would be likely to affect a group of residents or all residents in a major way.
• Demolishing your home or transferring your tenancy on to another landlord.

We must make arrangements for residents who might be affected by any proposal to give their views to us. We must then consider any comments they make before deciding what to do.

We will make sure that all residents are able to give their views on services before service charges are reviewed, either at a residents meeting or by replying to a consultation letter. We will make sure that no major changes to services will take place without consulting people first.

CCHA's newsletter is produced twice a year with information for residents on current issues, maintenance updates, staff changes and other general information about CCHA. A request for residents will be encouraged to become more involved in the input of the newsletter and to then make it more regular.

The Association is controlled by a Board of Management. Board members are drawn from all sections of the community and each member must demonstrate a range of skills in order to ensure that CCHA delivers good governance.

The Association seeks to appoint resident representation to the Board of Management in order that residents' views are taken into account at a strategic level.

All Board members are subject to a competency based recruitment and appraisal process.