New Community Involvement Strategy launched at annual Conference
The Housing Executive has launched its new Community Involvement and Cohesion Strategy 2024-2029 at their annual community conference.
Introduced by Chief Executive of the Housing Executive, Grainia Long, the strategy provides a unique framework for the Housing Executive and tenants, residents and leaseholders to work together to build strong, diverse, connected communities.
Grainia Long explained: “The vision of the new strategy is that communities should feel engaged, enabled and empowered as part of a more cohesive strategy.
“It brings together our two previous community involvement and community cohesion strategies. This will ensure that cohesion, collaboration, inclusivity and integration are brought together in one action plan.
“As the title of the strategy would suggest, this has not been created in isolation. It has been co-designed and will be co-delivered with our Housing Community Network; particularly members of the Central Housing Forum.
“The community conference is the right place to launch this strategy as so many of the communities and representatives who were integral to its development are here. I would like to thank everyone who gave their time and commitment to inform and develop our service delivery to tenants, residents, and leaseholders in our estates.”
“The strategic aims of our new strategy are to engage our communities to promote and strengthen involvement; enable our communities to influence, shape and improve our services and empower them to embrace community cohesion within and between our communities.
“We look forward to work beginning on our year one action plan.”
Speaking from the conference, Linda Watson, Chair of the Central Housing Forum (CHF), commented: “As Chair of the Central Housing Forum (CHF), I am both proud and excited to endorse this new and important strategy.
“Members of the CHF have helped to lead in the development of, and formal consultation for this strategy.
“The Housing Executive is rightly recognised as being a model of best practice due to our encouragement and development of community engagement work for over 40 years.
“We hope that the content of this Community Involvement and Cohesion Strategy encourages and inspires everyone to become more involved in your own community.”
The launch of the strategy took place during the annual community conference with almost 300 delegates from the community, voluntary, social enterprise and statutory sectors in attendance.
The conference is a celebration and formal acknowledgement of the work that communities undertake on a voluntary basis, providing an opportunity for community representatives from all over Northern Ireland to come together and share ideas, best practice and provide networking opportunities.
The theme of this year’s conference was #TogetherWeCan and included discussions on the new community involvement and cohesion strategy, community, wealth building, promoting social justice, actionable concepts and tools for meaningful engagement, in addition to a panel discussion on empowering communities to embrace tenants, residents and leaseholders.
To read the Community Involvement and Cohesion Strategy visit:
https://www.nihe.gov.uk/community-involvement-cohesion-strategy
