We, and our residents, felt the impact of a challenging year in many ways, and not just with finances. There have been increases in social pressures around mental health, street homelessness and crime and a reduction in public services that meant we needed to look at improving and broadening our services to respond to the needs of our residents.

Recognising increased levels of vulnerability and people in crisis, we launched a new Support Hub, bringing in specialist mental health skills and making access to a range of existing support services easier for our residents. 457 people benefited from one-to-one support services, aids and adaptations to improve accessibility and advice on maximising income and budgeting. 81 people got help with everyday essentials from our hardship fund and community fund.

We were successful in securing contract renewals to our valued Westminster floating support service and our well-regarded Camden Young People’s Pathway service.

 

 

Supporting our residents with their finances

With the emerging Financial Crisis becoming a greater challenge for many of our residents we have ensured we can offer some straight forward, practical, financial support through our Financial Support Team.

You can find out more about the support available in the animation below:

Help where it's needed most

To provide immediate and easily accessed help to those in need we issue supermarket vouchers, after completion of a very simple application form. Once an application is received by the Financial Support Officers, vouchers are then issued usually on the same day. To date 90 vouchers have been issued, to 86 residents, totalling £6,074.

We have had some really positive feedback from some of our residents:
"Please may I say how very very grateful both myself and my daughter are to receive you very kind gift. This will go an absolute long way to helping us manage. I can’t tell you how grateful and humbled I am with your exceptionally kind gesture."

"Struggling to heat the home even with the help from the government at the moment, so the food voucher means a lot...thank you very much"

We hope that this fund means crisis can  be averted allowing those we need help most some relief at what is an extremely difficult time for many. There is also an opportunity for us to offer more ongoing /in depth support where it's needed or useful. 

You can find out more about the support we offer here.
 

Hear how our specialist young people move through service helped one of our residents 

Working alongside Camden Council, our specialist service for young people supports residents aged 16-25 who have been in local authority care into further education and employment providing a safe secure home. Hear what one of our residents has to say about his experience of our move through service below.

 

Using technology to maximise social impact

 
​We are excited to announce we're the 2023 Housing Innovation Awards ‘Best Digital Innovation Team’ winners! 
In December 2021, we identified an opportunity to improve the way Origin manages our safeguarding cases. Handled up until now by manual systems on spreadsheets we set about improving things by forming a 'Digital Innovation Team'. The team worked across to engineer a new process and system to make things quicker, easier and much more efficient.  Read more here