Community Gateway - Easy Guide
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Community Gateway is a new model of housing organisation set up to provide a range of tenant and community empowerment opportunities.
The model was developed through the Co-operative Movement to respond to a need for a large scale organisation that tenants and communities would see as an acceptable form of housing association.
The model enjoys support from Government and financial organisations who lend to housing associations. Most importantly, whilst it can be difficult to get across the cultural shift that Gateway is, the model is gradually winning support from tenants across the country.
Aims & objectives
Community Gateway's primary aim is to place community generation at the heart of the housing organisation and to use the strength of the organisation as a catalyst for community.
Its objectives are therefore:
- to generate community pride and vision through providing opportunities for local tenant and community involvement in decisions about homes and neighbourhoods at a pace right for them and on issues that matter to them
- to establish a tenant democracy by enabling tenants to become members and owners of the organisation and, through that membership, get involved in decision-making
- to generate a cultural change that tackles the us and them mentality, where tenants lead the organisation and work in partnership with staff to deliver the quality homes and neighbourhoods they want
- to build all of this into the fabric, rules and structure of the organisation
The essential components
Community Gateway's components are:
- a tenant and leaseholder membership - a sense of ownership and identity and community guardianship of the key values and directions of the association
- a membership which can shape the association's strategies and policies
- tenant board members elected by the membership
- defined Local Community Areas reflecting community perceptions
- a structured programme of Community Option Studies carried out in LCAs to define community vision and aspirations, to develop the ability of communities to achieve their vision, and to enable communities to engage with service providers
- a staircase of housing options available to local communities - from informal engagement to tenant management and community ownership
- working with partners to provide options wider than housing to local communities
- all of this set out in a written Community Empowerment Strategy and built into the rules and structure of the organisation
The benefits of this approach
The benefits of this approach are:
- developing community fabric, and encouraging a sense of community responsibility, ownership and identity
- enhancing the quality of life for people who get involved
- building individual & community skills
- getting things done that people want
- better quality decision-making
- better efficiency - in the long run
- requiring less regulation
- people in this country want to live in communities
- democracy and a participatory approach to local government
Background to Community Gateway
The Community Gateway Model was initially developed in the Empowering Communities report, written by Tribal HCH, published by the Confederation of Co-operative Housing, Co-operatives UK and the Chartered Institute of Housing, and funded by the Housing Corporation.
In Preston, where tenants and councillors previously hostile to stock transfer united to support a Gateway transfer (with an 81% tenant vote for transfer), the Council's 6,500 homes were transferred in Nov 2005 to the Preston Community Gateway.
With more than 750 tenants now signed up as members of the Preston Gateway, retired nurse Freda Olsson, aged 72 and one of the first to join up, said: "My greatest hope is that Gateway will help to bring a little more dignity back to the life of Preston's impoverished neighbourhoods. If people feel pride in where they live, they will look after it."
Hot on Preston's heels, Watford, Tamworth, Braintree and Brighton Councils are shortly to ballot their tenants on Gateway transfers to establish tenant democracies to steward their homes.
Gateway enjoys growing Government support. The tenant ownership principle central to Community Gateway lies at the heart of DCLG's thinking in relation to the future of their sustainable communities agenda, and Ruth Kelly, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, on launching the 2006 transfer and ALMO programme highlighted Community Gateway as a means of achieving tenant and community ownership.
Context for Community Gateway
Research carried out for the National Housing Federation showed that 56% of over 10,000 plus families surveyed across England rated having a friendly community as being their most important priority in deciding where they wanted to live, above transport, access to shops and amenities, and even living in a quiet area and low crime.
The research suggests that we need to ensure that housing programmes facilitate the development of friendly communities as a key objective to meet the aspirations of ordinary people.
David Miliband, Minister for Communities, said last year that housing associations "need to share power & control with tenants and put tenant involvement at the heart of their organisations - and an ethos of mutuality, self-help & voluntarism."
He said that stock transfer should be "a catalyst for community"
and he identified that the reason for all this was to make associations "more effective social businesses"
.
The National Housing Federation's in Business for Neighbourhoods campaign recognised that there were serious problems both in the perceptions and the realities of the housing association sector, and are currently looking at methods of raising community empowerment higher up housing association agendas.
So Community Gateway sits at the forefront of an exciting new tenant and community led movement that aims to redefine the way that we provide homes for those in housing need (and possibly others) in our society.
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