Gloucester City Homes (GCH) is proud to support the National Housing Federation’s new initiative “Homes at the Heart”. The campaign aims to bring social housing providers together and create “once-in-a-generation investment in social housing” to make sure that everyone has a safe, secure and comfortable place to call home.
We are committed to supporting our Tenants aspirations and ambitions to actively help them achieve their potential. We offer support at varying levels from our Community Investment Team, working with partners across the City and alongside other teams in the organisation we encourage referrals to our Shine Employment and Training support service. By using this service Tenants can choose from a variety of ways to improve their confidence, learn new skills, become more active in their own community and access employment or further training.
From creating or updating a CV to completing an Access Course into Higher Education we have helped people to get started on their employment journey or make a change of career.
For those residents that are not ready to go into employment we have worked with our partners to provide volunteering opportunities, to help people to grow in confidence and build some new skills. In addition to this we offer funding to our partner community so that they can deliver projects that support communities and residents alike. This funding has been used to support lunch clubs, art activities, one off social events and ongoing support for people with mental health issues, to name but a few.
During lock down GCH were at the sharp end of the food delivery and welfare support across the city, offering funding, practical help such as delivery drivers and premises to store and allocate food deliveries from as well the delivery of individual food parcels and activity and sunflower growing kits for families. Over the last 6 months our staff have made over 1030 welfare calls to tenants which helped us to identify the most vulnerable and make sure that they were supported during the crisis.
The Community Investment Team are keen to support all tenants to get online in order to access information in the event of further lockdowns, but also to improve their chances of accessing training, job searching and making applications as well as staying connected with family & friends. If we can help anyone that you know to get online please give us a call on 01452 424244 and ask for the Community Investment Team.
This has been proven by the following real-life story of one of our customers:
Names have been changed to protect the identity of the individual
Mr A was referred to the Community Investment Team by the Tenancy Sustainment Team in July 2020 after he was made redundant from a company where he had worked for more than 20 years. Although he had much experience, he had no qualifications or a CV to allow him to start applying for prospective jobs. Through Shine Employment and Training support he was able to take a course in Health & Safety in a Construction Environment and then apply for his CSCS card. A new CV was created with Mr A and now he is able to apply for jobs with confidence.