MTVH’s Social Value work with their larger contractors such as Pinnacle and Aaron Services is re-engineering the potential of a local levelling up because it’s building relationship and capacity.
It’s all about the people….do you wonder sometimes how your organisation, or business can a) get to know and understand better the people who work with you/for you as contractors? b) transform your organisation into a place full of people who feel they’re engaged in providing a service that responds to input?
MTVH have found that in Social Value projects the experience and contribution of the people who do the contracting jobs works much better in a neighbourhood that sees, cares, feels and understands how the skills were found, developed and grown. (See MTVH’s Kelly Thomas’s Social Value presentation below):
When the people (in this case MTVH) contractors work for understand, recognise and resource the time in the job you’re doing for them so you can build new experiences and skills in local neighbourhoods, as a contractor you feel you’re recognised and matter.
Nothing is better for people than to feel their work connects to something larger than themselves: not only is it a job well done but you can see and feel it’s improving things for the wider neighbourhood. Its about genuine, shared experience and this builds customer service.
Since July 2020 MTVH have been supercharging the roll out of their Empowering Futures work in a strategic way, empowering their largest contractors (contracts over £100,000 like Aaron Services (part of Sureserve Group) who look after boiler heating, maintenance and repairs and Pinnacle Group, who do many things across the UK housing infrastructure (eg: placemaking and groundworks).
Contractors work with MTVH like inside entrepreneurs (it’s actually a lot like intrapreneurship where as part of individual and organisational CPD there’s encouragement and support to help you grow your ideas and skills in projects that can add value to the organisation and the community). This is a great way to get to know people in and outside the organisation as well as contractors inside the organisation. It adds richness of possibility to the working day, week, month and year.
What does this mean? Well social value projects are genuine: real. For many organisations because of the structure of businesses and the way PR and media work online the very brilliant work that businesses organisations are doing stays inside its own silos, supply chains and networks.
Social Value projects are different: putting skilled and experienced people into settings to to give a real interesting story and feedback on a real world situation so that their audience, participants can see feel, hear and participate in activities that build new awareness and opportunities.
A recent example is Pinnacle’s work at Nottingham Academy with Year 10 students. With Pinnacle they got the chance to talk about the possibilities of work with the Pinnacle team, their Student Development and Linda Etheridge Social Value Mentor. Have a look at the story of one of the Pinnacle groundworks contractors.
MTVH introduced Match My Project in Oct 2023 Social Value outcomes increased by 97.7 % in 22/23
The hardest thing in the world is to create genuine reciprocity in the contracted out environment because there’s so much more work we need to do in reconnecting those neighbourhoods to the democratic structures in every neighbourhood, town, village, city.
It’s too easy to criticise levelling up, efforts to improve social mobility that are really incredibly valuable ways of reconnecting to a richer, longer view of people, neighbourhoods and potential.
The potential of people living in social housing to find, maintain and develop work in good jobs throughout the lifespan, develop skills, partnerships new ways of learning and working is now a possibility: social mobility throughout the lifespan is now seen as understanding and integrating every part of what creates the economy: neighbourhood, village, town, city, region all provide regeneration to the whole of the UK (see Social Mobility Report 2023)
We know that Levelling Up ambassador, Secretary of State Michael Gove knows we live in a country that needs a lot of work in housing (his latest campaign Report, Complain, Escalate Oct 23)
The work he’s doing also highlights how much we need to build work opportunities, skills and aspirations inside the social housing estate through knowing the strengths, capacity and potential within the workforce and householder community. Efforts to rejuvenate democracy need to be connected and joined up with people’s work and life experiences in the contracted out relationships, the work and life culture of the housing association and the work, life and future of the householders.
What we need to realise is how much everyone has learnt across society, how much they have grown and developed as well as suffered during their lifetimes so that what happens at the parliamentary level (such as the Housing and Social Mobility All Parliamentary Group) which has been set up to support social housing providers to help people of all ages and backgrounds to find and maintain secure work) can result in jobs and opportunities in new economies that aren’t precarious.
In 2023, Grant Thornton are encouraging housing providers to distribute their story ‘housing providers are reminded to update their narrative reporting to explain the impact of the cost of living, staff pay rises and supply chain demand issues, as well as utility price increases and the impact of these costs on tenants’ ability to pay’
Everyone feels better when they can develop and grow their work while at work: MTVH’s Social Value projects are about including and communicating with more people, more of the time.
signsofanopencity 
You must be logged in to post a comment.