Communicating the power of partnerships

“As Chief Executive of Trafford Housing Trust, I’m heavily involved with Greater Manchester Housing Providers (GMHP) – a partnership made up of THT and 26 other housing providers in Greater Manchester. Our purpose is to improve lives and communities across the city region.

But GMHP is much more than the sum of its parts because housing providers can’t work in isolation when it comes to tackling significant Greater Manchester-wide issues, such as homelessness, health creation, social inclusion, and the drive to zero-carbon housing.

Through working collaboratively and creatively towards common goals via several GMHP workstreams and projects, we’re delivering a range of initiatives together that enable us to go further and provide more than we would if we all worked individually.

That’s why I’m really pleased that Trafford Housing Trust and I have recently taken on the GMHP Communications and Marketing Workstream, with responsibility for coordinating all communications and PR activity for the partnership. There’s so much good stuff being done through GMHP, and we need to make sure we shout about it from the rooftops!

With initiatives such as GM Housing First which has supported over 250 homeless people into safe, secure housing; Let Us, our ethical lettings agency which is helping make more homes in the private rented sector available to vulnerable people; GM Homes Partnership, programme to tackle entrenched rough sleeping which has helped 356 people into accommodation; and Athena, a partnership born out of GMHP that offers training and employment opportunities to young people, we’re not short of positive things to talk about.

The aim is to share best-practice and creative ideas across GMHP and the wider housing sector, raise the profile of the partnership nationally, and contribute to the debate around how we improve and innovate as a sector. We also want to influence key politicians and decision makers so that we can shape housing policy and other national and local legislation to help tackle the housing crisis and improve the lives of tenants and the communities in which they live, both here in Trafford and across Greater Manchester.

You can find out more about GMHP here (new, improved website coming soon!) or by following the partnership on Twitter here.”