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Housing association workers pitch ideas for £15m of innovation funding
A spare room-finding service for homeless people, a new sector-owned modular housebuilding plant, and a property website for social housing tenants are among ideas pitched to win £15m of funding through a National Housing Federation (NHF) programme.
The NHF is conducting a ‘Creating Our Future’ programme which it hopes will result in a handful of new products and services to battle aspects of the housing crisis.
Big Society Capital, the UK’s largest social investment bank, has earmarked the money for bids from the best ideas, to be finalised in the autumn.
Last week, 50 housing association staff members took part in a three-day ‘Future Hack’ in London as part of the programme, where they worked up and presented pitches on 10 models of potential new tools.
Around half of the people involved will now be selected to take part in an intensive 16-week process to develop the ideas into prototypes, with a view to bidding for a portion of the £15m.
“We are organisations with a shared sense of social purpose, with assets in a business model that works, with roots into communities and relationships with people with the problems you need to solve, as well as relationships with the people you need to make change happen,” said James Green, Futures Programme director at the NHF.
“This is about how we as a sector can collaborate across the country across all the different organisations, to deliver on our social purpose in new ways.”
The Future Hack follows a series of events to come up with initial ideas, which were attended by 300 people from 150 different housing associations.
David Orr, chief executive of the NHF, said: “I would like to see a further embedding in the psyche of housing associations the idea that not only are they innovative organisations, but they have huge capacity to be innovative and to be their own providers of permission.
“They should not have to wait for someone else to say ‘have a go at that’. They should be saying, ‘I can see a problem there, in our organisation we can work out how to resolve this problem – we’ll just crack on and do it’.”
