We’re more than bricks and mortar - our social purpose is central to what we do. We want to deliver more for our customers and invest in the communities where we have homes. That’s why we’re setting up a Community Foundation to deliver £100m of investment across our communities over the next decade.
Our new Community Foundation will make a real difference to people. Working in partnership is crucial to all we endeavour to achieve: building long term alliances with community organisations, stakeholders and businesses who share our aspirations, is key to helping us increase our social impact. Our core priority is to create equality, fight poverty and to improve the wellbeing and quality of life of our customers.
We’re also committed to developing a place-based approach: focusing locally so that we’re connected to our customers and communities and can respond to the priorities and issues in different places, while providing a consistent core offer across our localities.
We’ll be developing our thinking and strategy for the new foundation during 2023/24 and co-creating this with our colleagues, customers and wider partners.
Currently our key themed focus areas are:
- Employment and Skills – we support customers to find work, better work or start their own business. We offer a wide range of funded training and qualifications to help customers upskill or re-train to open the door of work and development opportunities.
- Financial and Digital Inclusion – our team provides both proactive and critical support for customers who need support with money matters, building their financial resilience and improving their personal circumstances. We also support customers to get online, providing access to equipment and connectivity and help them stay connected to the digital world.
- Community Action – we work closely with key anchor organisations, local groups, partners and our customers to co-create social action programmes that enable our communities to thrive. Our key focus areas are: Youth programmes, Ageing well initiatives, Environment and Place, Health and Wellbeing, and Social Inclusion. We help build capacity in community organisations and harness community power, to realise customer aspirations and meet local needs.
- Partnerships and Fundraising – we bring in external funding to enhance and expand our existing community investment offer across our geography. This helps us to grow our social impact, maximise our investments and drive social value in everything we do. We offer an extensive grant-making programme to support local organisations and partner frameworks to increase their capacity and build their resources. That way they can continue to work with us to provide high quality services that help our communities to flourish.
This year we have an ambition to:
- Support 450 customers into work or better work
- Deliver 7,000 financial inclusion interventions to customers
- Support 250 community groups to build their capacity and deliver key programmes
- Raise £3.5m in external funding into our communities
- Generate £75 million of social value
- Launch a programme of Community Organising to galvanise community social action
If you are a partner, business, community organisation or stakeholder and would like to find out more, please contact:
Network Homes customers
Former Network Homes customers (London and Hertfordshire)
Network Homes website