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Your Own Place

Your Own Place

Norwich

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Welcome to our new Non-Executive Director

Surya Campbell · 02/10/2023 ·

The key responsibility of non-executive directors at Your Own Place is to provide support, strategic oversight, challenge and scrutiny as well as oversee adherence to the company aims and due diligence.

They provide general counsel – and a different perspective – on matters of concern to the CEO.  We think of them as ‘critical friends’ to the Board, often asking questions the company’s performance whilst offering strategic input. 

We’re delighted to welcome Hannah Harvey onto our Board. She brings her 19 years of experience across the public sector: she’s held positions in the police, social services, and housing, undertaking roles nationally and locally at housing associations.

Hannah is a Governing Board member to the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) who provide those who work in housing with the tools to enhance themselves professionally.

Hannah is passionate about providing people with a safe warm home and all the skills needed to sustain tenancies.

You can read more abut our Non-Executive Directors on our Team Page.

Welcome to our newest team member

Claire Almond · 08/06/2023 ·

Leah joins our team as Online and Co-Facilitator after playing a key part in our Advisory Board

I’m Leah and I am joining Your Own Place as an online and co facilitator. I love dogs, dopamine dressing and being outside.

Having been supported by Your Own Place in the past and felt the impact, I wanted to join the team so I could be with others as they too realise their own potential. I have always been passionate about people, and believe that everyone deserves the best chance at success in the areas of their lives that they are working on or towards.

I know Your Own Place also holds this belief. It feels great to be somewhere that aligns with my values, and to be able to work with that focus. I’m looking forward to facilitating online workshops with people pre-tenancy, being able to get to know individuals and hear their goals and choices, and be alongside them as they begin or continue taking the steps to get there… whilst having fun too!

From being part of Your Own Places Advisory Board, learning from others, realising my own skills, getting my own home and still, really not knowing it all, I’m excited to now get stuck into being a part of Your Own Place’s big mission of preventing homelessness. 

Who needs yoga, when you work with Your Own Place?

Claire Almond · 21/03/2023 ·

So said a team member of our small but mighty Your Own Place conglomerate (currently eight team members and counting). But what does yoga have to do with the housing sector and homelessness prevention? 

Yoga’s early branding, when it arrived in England and North America in the 1960s, was all about flexibility, and receiving teachings from the lived experience of an expert who would pass their knowledge down to select students. In recent years, however, the industry has expanded to become more holistic, focussing on wellbeing, compassion and the effect each of us have on the world around us.

Originally posted to Flickr by Ben Sutherland at https://www.flickr.com/photos/60179301@N00/28442665.

In our sector, too, we see a widening of scope. No longer are housing associations, for example, only tracking number of evictions and rent arrears — there’s a growing curiosity and impetus to understand tenants, meet them where they are, and ensure their voice and lived experience can be heard. 

The vision of Your Own Place is for a world where everyone has a safe and secure home. For this to become a reality, the myriad systems governing economics, politics, and the amorphous ‘culture’ need to free up their rigidity and become more flexible. We play our part in this by listening, responding, iterating and committing to the virtuous circle of improvement.

And not only listened to, but catalyse change and influence policy.

This approach, however, requires flexibility. And maintaining flexibility has always been a key principle of working at Your Own Place.

At the level of team delivery, flexibility is paramount. We deliver workshops in a vast range of contexts. When we’re delivering group workshops or 1-2-1 sessions, this can range from adjusting timings, meeting trainees across community locations, or not knowing if four or eight people will arrive on the day. At all times, we need to be poised and curious when a challenge is raised in the room that needs to be prioritised in an empathic and solution-focused way. 

On a project delivery level, we work with our partners, funders and commissioners to trial new and different ideas. In our partnership work with Trussell Trust Norwich foodbanks and The Feed Social Supermarket, funded by Norwich Consolidated Charities, we’re quickly learning and working out how to best work with people in localised Norwich community areas. Rather than setting a schedule and obstinately sticking to it, we run a test, evaluate, iterate, and begin the cycle anew.

With our service offers, we have honed five main offerings, which you can view here. Considering the context of the people we work with, we can respond in community settings, to people in pre-tenancy or who have already moved on, with group or one-to-one workshops. We work in housing, but also criminal justice, education and health. Responsiveness and innovation are key to us reaching as many people, in as many places, as possible.

This change and iteration is an essential characteristic of the modern working world. Flexibility is inherent in success.

While you may trial a yoga class to stretch your hamstrings or touch your toes, working at Your Own Place offers another level of flexibility. Ensuring we have a flexible delivery style, with multiple service offers, to meet the holistic needs of the world in which we live, and the people with whom we work.

They said it wouldn’t work…

businessequip · 29/11/2018 ·

It’s certainly not perfect. I guess it’s what’s called a ‘Minimum Viable Product’. I’ve hated developing a website if I’m honest. My expertise lies in project management and setting things up.

Being out of my comfort zone and not even knowing what questions to ask wasn’t fun. It was probably quite healthy to feel this, navigate it and get somewhere towards creating something that is close enough to what I conceived.

More than anything it’s meant delegation. Jarrod understands the ‘back end’ of Your Own Network and as such is delighting in it and ‘owning it’. It’s still not a comfortable place for me to be, but I’m owning that too!

I love Your Own Network. Young people are like the rest of us – they wants their new homes to be beautiful and shiny. So I don’t mean to be ungrateful when I turn down offers of second-hand goods, but I know that young people won’t want them.

Being able to create an Argos wish-list puts the control in the hands of the young people (we’re not so different are we?) Most are setting up home without a budget and without support.

The items you buy them from their Argos wish-list make such a difference. They make a house a home.

So I may not understand it and it may not be perfect, but it’s making a difference. And so are you!

Repeat or new customers

businessequip · 04/10/2018 ·

As we approach our fifth birthday, move away from being a start-up and into an unknown phase, my attention has been turned to the notion of repeat customers.

In truth, from a public sector background, I find myself developing a lot of notions that I’ve never had to consider before. But that’s probably for another blog.

To what extent should be put our energy and limited budget into new customers? If we are to sustain and even grow (let along achieve our social mission) there’s no doubt we need more customers.

So in fact there are three options. Exactly the same customers again, new customers in the same sector and totally new customers in new sectors.

With over 90% of our customers buying again we’re doing something really right. It’s time not only to understand what that is, but to refine the messaging for new customers.

We’re not selling coffee after all. We’re selling a highly complex service that is utterly unique in its aims and delivery. The time this takes to communicate effectively is a threat to developing new customers.

Perhaps we should utilise the happy existing customers as leverage in reaching new customers and ensure the new customers become repeat customers too.

Happy birthday to us and all the new challenges our sixth birthday brings.

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Tel: 01603 611910

Email: rebecca@yourownplace.org.uk

23 Johnson Place
Norwich
NR2 2SA

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