Newsletter - September 2008
AGM Picture Slideshow
We had a great time at our Annual General Meeting held at the New Cedar Mount High School in Gorton on Wednesday September 10th. We will tell you all about it in our next Newsletter but for now here is a slideshow of the pictures taken on the day...
Margaret House gets a Facelift
We are carrying out refurbishment works to our Head Office during the months of October and November. As you can appreciate, there may be some disruption at this time and we would be grateful if you could bear with us. You can contact us on the same telephone number throughout, but we are unlikely to be open to visiting tenants.
It is likely that your Housing Officers will not be based in our Head Office during these works, but we will keep you informed of any new contact numbers if
applicable. If the office does have to be closed at any point, we will give you plenty of notice of these times. Thanking you in advance for your co-operation.
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Help us improve repairs work and win £25
With every repair we undertake we ask the tenant of the property to complete a survey to tell us how satisfied they were with the overall process. This is one way that we check on the contractors who do work for us and it is a good chance for you to report back on their performance and also on our performance as well.
You can see from the analysis of the results from April to July 2008 (below) that we will be particularly focusing on getting jobs completed on time for the next quarter. As an incentive for completing and sending these back to us we have a prize draw where you can win a £25 gift voucher.
The new maintenance team is here!
Anyone who has come into contact with our repairs service over the past year may have noticed that there have been a few changes over that
period. In this time the association has experimented with different ways of providing the service by outsourcing elements of it to another housing association and supporting this process with a part time consultant service. We have analysed the effectiveness of this approach and finally decided to directly employ our own maintenance team that is now in place. The new team looks like this:
Review of estate management gets underway
What do you see when you look out of your window? A clean street, tidy, well-maintained fences, neat and attractive front gardens, brickwork free from blemishes and windows that are freshly painted with glass that
shimmers in the morning sun. In short, do you see your vision for your neighbourhood and if not do you want to do something about it?
The association has been carrying out scheme visits for a number of years now to ensure that we do whatever we can to make the areas in which you live are the best they can be. Of course there are lots of things that we cannot control such as the roads, peoples behaviour and the quality of property we do not own. However we can control the quality of the exterior of property we own and we can influence our tenant’s behaviour and other agencies working in your area. Moreover so can you and we can identify problems together and find solutions together.
This is the starting point of the estate management review that we are presently undertaking. We have consulted with you on this issue at the Annual General meeting in September and it is also the focus of our
second postal survey for 2008. Please help us get this right by returning the postal survey and letting us know what you think. Don’t forget that there are prizes for returning all 4 surveys.
Arawak helps tenants enter the employment supermarket
The sustainable ways to work programme has been running for 7 months now and 52 Arawak Tenants have used the service so far. One tenant, Colin, from Ardwick has received support from James Gilbert at Sustainable Ways to Work to help him enter an 8 week pre-recruitment training programme for Tesco which enabled him to gain paid employment.
The programme is not simply about gaining employment however it is about ensuring that that people stay in work. To ensure Colin was in the best financial position possible he was also referred to Citizens Advice Bureau to get help over benefit and financial matters. As the sustainable ways to work initiative is networked with a wide range of other agencies he was also able to pursue his interest of working with young people through contacts with local theatre workshops.
For more details on “Sustainable Ways to Work” contact James Gilbert at Places for People on 0161 875 1461 or by send a text to 07966 695 114.
Arawak Walton Performance
As always we like to keep our residents informed about how we are performing. See for yourself below.
| Aug 08 | Jul 08 | Jun 08 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Voids % (no. of properties) |
0.59% (5) |
1.3% (11) |
1.3% (11) |
| Rent arrears (as a % of weekly rent receivable) |
7.35% |
6.73% |
7.08% |
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