On an uncharacteristically muggy evening last Thursday, nearly 30 of our youngest tenants met my colleagues and I to begin what I hope will be a long friendship.
As anyone who works in housing knows, it is mightily difficult to encourage our younger residents to have their voice heard on housing issues. We are all too familiar with the usual suspects of tenant involvement - immensely valuable though they are, but they tend to be white, 60 or 70 something and have been a tenant for some 30 years. We wanted to make a special effort to get views from newer, younger people who may have a perspective we are missing. This is not about replacing one set of tenant views with another but about getting a range of views.
Two of our Future Jobs Fund employees put an enormous amount of energy and creativity into recruiting them and I was pleased to see the room so busy. I met some people who I immediately thought of as tenant board members of tomorrow, brimming with ideas and the enthusiasm of youth. One young woman, Kelly, particularly impressed me. She had thought up some really challenging questions for me and had some innovative ideas of her own.
It turned out we had both only been in Wolverhampton a few years but had immediately fallen in love with the people and the general laid back feel of the city. As a single parent with a baby (but engaged to her son's father, getting married next year), Kelly felt older people on her estate looked down on her and made quite wrong assumptions about her behaviour and lifestyle. In fact, she and a girl friend spend a lot of time chewing the fat about what makes a good community and what they might do to help.
She asked me if Wolverhampton Homes would perhaps train up people like her to work with younger people as she already wanted to put something back into the community. I have already put it on my list as something to explore and discussed it with the head of our Local Neighbourhood Partnership which also wants to harness the potential of volunteers.
Not satisfied with asking me difficult stuff like which person living or dead would I most like to meet (!) - I said Mr Blair on the basis that I still want to know why we went to war - Kelly particularly wanted to know what we are doing to engage 7-16 year olds in council housing. Like many ALMOs we have a range of really exciting projects that we support for example the Timken social enterprise or Goalz (a project with Wolverhampton Wanderers Football Club) but is this really engagement? If I am honest, it’s about trying to prevent antisocial behaviour and control the kids during the holidays!
We have been struck by the lack of basic life skills amongst our youngsters - managing money, dealing with applications/benefits, cooking, managing a home or garden, dealing pleasantly with neighbours and so on. So for our first young tenants get together we focussed on managing money, particularly how to borrow money sensibly and avoid loan sharks.
Shock tactics worked well here. We showed a
video of a young man talking about his l6 years (yes!) of indebtedness to an unauthorised lender who drove him almost to the point of suicide.
I was hugely impressed by how keen the young tenants were to make a difference in their area and learn new skills which they will take with them for life. We can learn so much from them and I look forward to seeing our friendship develop over the years to come.
You can see some more
photos of our young Get Together on our facebook page (and we'd love it if you liked us while you were there too!).
