Dear CHISEL Residents,
I’m a couple of weeks late with this newsletter, but with good reason – I wanted to share with you, that the previous empty student home in Brighton, is now being used as CHISEL’s first supported housing scheme. It’ll be housing vulnerable LGBTQ+ young people in the City who are at risk of homelessness. Neighbourhood Managers Neil and Jordan signed up some of the tenants yesterday, and as a result, three people were not rough sleeping last night. I am really excited that CHISEL can explore these partnerships which will enhance our main work – managing your homes, and creating places that you are proud of.
It’s been super-busy in the past month. The stock -condition survey continues, and our compliance work is also underway. For the first time we are inspecting your fixed electricals at your home – basically wiring and circuit breakers etc – please look out for our contractor Amped who are delivering this essential work.
We have also had the results of our Tenant Satisfaction Measures – a massive thank you to all of you who spoke with the survey organisation Accuity. Your candour and frankness was really helpful, and was very much in line with what we hear when we visit you in your homes.
There are some very loud messages coming from the results – especially around basic housing management which as you know we are already trying to improve, with more resident-facing colleagues in both London and Brighton.
I’ll publish the results on the website very soon, but safe to say our overall satisfaction score was 47% (with another 20% of you neither satisfied or dissatisfied)  – but looking at our neighbourhoods the scores ranged from as low as 31% with our Brighton residents, rising to 80% with our Bromley/Nubia Way residents. We’ve clearly got a lot of work to do, but the team and I are up for the challenge, and our Board are giving their full support.
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Talking of our Board, we still have a vacancy for a resident board member – please do contact us if you would be interested. Don’t worry if you haven’t been a board member before, we can provide you with training and support. It’s a really exciting time to be a Board member, and help shape the future of CHISEL.
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We also have a few places left for our website think tank / focus group which will be held in the second / third week of June online – please let me know if you would like to join in – this one-off session will be renumerated.Â
We are also updating our relationships with the Co-ops that we support, who manage some of our homes for us. This consultation work is in progress, but a big thank you to everybody living in our homes that Three Boroughs and Dryads manage, who have been involved. Co-ops are an important part of CHISEL’s history, and I very much hope our future as well. I will update you more on this next month.
With my thanks to you all for your time reading this newsletter, and our very best wishes,
Miles
