We know that listening to what you say and acting on it is the key to improving the quality of our services. Over the course of the year over 1000 of our residents gave their views and experiences through focus groups, resident scrutiny panels, online surveys and face to face interviews to help us plan how we listen, learn and respond to our resident’s views. 

Over the next four years, we will continue to work alongside our residents to make sure we're really working 'Together' to bring  our resident engagement  strategy to life. This means you'll really notice the difference in the way we do things and how, together, we can improve the communities you live in.

As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, we worked innovatively coronavirus-volunteers-square.jpgto continue to deliver our frontline services and ensure we continued to safely engage with our residents.  Volunteers from teams across the organisation identified and called nearly 1400 older and vulnerable residents to see how they are doing and to make sure they have access to the support they need. We arranged weekly call backs to those who requested them. Feedback has been really positive, one resident said he doesn’t know what he would have done if we had not called, "I  now know Origin are here for us should we need support."

Since then we’ve facilitated a Digital Neighbourhood Explorers and our Spotlight and our Scrutiny Panels are now being managed online. Our Scrutiny Panel is currently recruiting new members, so if you'd like to be involved click here for more information.
 

Case study: Our open house event 

1-open-house.pngIn February 2020, before the outbreak of COVID-19 across the world, we held our first open house event so residents had the opportunity to meet our leadership team and talk about any issues that they had . The event was the part of our Together Strategy , Trying new ways of working and learning from others’  with the aim of helping us understand residents’ experience of our services and how we can improve. Our main repairs contractor, Gilmartins, were there on the day to run a repairs clinic to find out the things most important to our residents and help shape the way we deliver our services in future . As the pandemic unfolded we worked innovatively to ensure we continued to engage with all of our residents, sending out emails and text messages asking for any questions or concerns they had that they’d like answered by our Executive team;  that's our  Chief Executive, Director of Development, Director of Operations and Director of Finance.

Our first online Exec Q&A

 

In our first Executive Q&A,  we had over 200 questions submitted, from general enquiries about what we do, to questions about what we’re doing to help our residents through the changes that the coronavirus pandemic has caused in many people’s lives.


To make it quick and easy for everyone to view the answers most important to them, we grouped information into key topics before recording the Executive Team answering questions which we then published on Youtube, and promoted on our website and Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. The online Q&A worked really well, so we continued with the format and produced three more Q&A's you can find on our Youtube channel.
 

We'd like you to work with us to help us improve
 

There are lots of ways we can work together to improve services, look at how we invest in the communities we work in and much more. If you'd like get involved in any (or all) of the topics above please let us know by emailing community.development@originhousing.org.uk or calling 0300 323 0325 or if you'd like to read the full Together strategy please click here to download a copy.