Collaboration is key to transform communities, so who should housing providers work with to shape long-term strategies?

It takes time

Collaboration and positive long-term impact work hand-in-hand, says Daren Moseley, managing director at Breyer Group.

“When we talk about collaboration, and we’re working together to truly collaborate, it can’t be done quickly in a short time frame,” he says.

“When it’s a short, sharp fix, and then you walk away, it truly doesn’t work. You don’t get any bang for your buck in terms of social value.”

He continues, to increase social value in a community, one of the key drivers is learning and training, such as apprenticeships. Once local residents are skilled and qualified, “they will be able to get regular, paid work and earn more… This means they’re not going into rent arrears and [can have] a more sustainable life”.

Many in the housing sector are “fleeting actors” relative to the longevity of the communities in which they work, argues Mr van Doorn. “As housing providers, we have an opportunity to think long term and in a transformational way,” he adds.

Maximising the benefits and power of collaboration takes time, agrees Craig Egglestone, director of capital strategy and portfolio management for the London Borough of Waltham Forest.

He says his team has been really successful in delivering sustainable social value, where it has built what he calls “proper partnerships”. “Not just partnerships on projects, but real long-term public-private partnerships that have been sustainable for more than 10 years – that’s where we’re seeing the real value now,” he says.

It is crucial to start taking action as early as possible, Kerry Starling, director of communities and social impact at Hyde Group, points out.

“In order to have real transformation, we need to do more early intervention work with individuals, but also the community groups we work with,” she says. The business case is never as strong, because early intervention doesn’t generate those bigger impacts initially, but we need to push through that and get the message across about the importance of early intervention.”

Engaging with partners

“We collaborate really well within the sector and in the community investment space within the sector. We don’t collaborate across systems,” says Matthew Buckham, community investment director at Sovereign.

“We don’t work well enough with our NHS partners, our education partners, we don’t work very well with the private sector. I am part of Business in the Community [a network of business leaders committed to delivering social value], and they’re crying out for organisations like ourselves to come and assist with their corporate social responsibility or ESG [environmental, social and governance] agendas. So I think there are willing collaborators and partners out there – it’s about how we galvanise and ignite them,” he says.

Given the scale of many of these organisations and housing providers, collaborating means multiple points of contact.

“[Collaboration] is actually across multiple places and systems,” Mr van Doorn says. “We have to work all of those levels and use resources in different ways to achieve the right collaboration and change.”

The key to making this a success, he says, is not necessarily leaders, but the “brokers and enablers” within each organisation who can facilitate connections. “Without those brokers and enablers, that won’t happen. We need to shift the culture,” he adds.

The most important collaboration, perhaps, is with communities and residents themselves – and what underpins successful partnerships at the community level is trust. Building that trust can be a long-term project in its own right; Mr Buckham describes “moving at the speed of trust”.

“It’s keeping that feedback loop going to show that you’re listening,” says Alys Exley-Smith, community relations manager at Lewisham Homes. “Over time, that builds trust… and as you develop that relationship, it will help you in the long term.”

That collaborative feedback loop involves reaching out in as many ways and to as many people as possible, she adds.

“We go door-knocking every month. We focus on the areas where we don’t have people’s emails or texts, really going out to talk to people who don’t normally engage. That feeds into the decisions we take about what we’re going to do,” she says.