Greater Together Foundation
Great Places Housing Group exists to improve the lives of the people living in our 25,000 homes across the North West and Yorkshire. We are much more than just a landlord, providing a wide range of services and promoting partnership work to create vibrant, sustainable communities.
Last year, Great Places launched the Greater Together Foundation which is made up of several funding programmes including the Resilience Fund. The £100,000 fund, which has been relaunched for its third round of funding in September, is aimed at charities, constituted community and faith groups and social enterprises that could support Great Places customers and the local community with the following themes.
- Fuel, furniture and food insecurity
- School uniforms and other essential items
- Financial literacy and digital inclusion
- Employment and development opportunities for those out of work and in work
- Health and wellbeing provision, activities and support
Recently, grants between £1k to £25K were made available and 32 organisations were funded, one of which is the Bolton-based Community Locker Project, run by two Breightmet mums to help provide school essentials for local families, at an affordable cost. Pre-loved items such as coats and shoes can be bought for as little as £3, a huge help for those affected by the cost-of-living crisis.
Community Centres
Great Places continues to invest in our neighbourhoods by supporting the great work of our network of nine community centres.
The Pat Midgley Community Hub in Wybourn, Sheffield, recently celebrated its first birthday and has been a massive success providing much-needed services to the local community. During the winter months the centre was used as a warm hub providing hot food and a place to socialise for people. There have been a number of projects and activities run from the centre from play groups and cake decorating through to digital inclusion and employability courses.
Employment and Skills
Each year, our dedicated Employment and Skills team help around 1,000 households in to work, training and volunteering.
Through our employability Coaching service, we’ve helped customers like Katie (not her real name) to turn their lives around. Katie had previously been living in temporary homelessness accommodation and had not worked for a number of years so was initially lost as to where to start.
However, her employment and skills coach soon identified she had lots of skills and supported her to create a CV around jobs that would be most suitable for her. He also arranged for her to enrol on some short courses to keep her busy and improve her skills. Katie began applying for jobs and was successful in getting a job in the centre of her city; we also helped Katie with obtaining new clothes for her new job as well as support with travel expenses. After a very long period of unemployment and sickness benefits, she has made a giant leap into employment and is flourishing.
Money and debt support
Times continue to be hard for many of our customers due to the cost of living crisis. We want to make sure that we provide our customers with as much support as possible to ensure that they are able to live their lives and sustain their tenancies.
Our Financial Resilience team is on-hand to support with specialist debt advice and has helped hundreds of customers this year with benefits advice or in-depth debt cases. We can also help with fuel bills, or other costs if you’re in financial crisis.
