Tenant Support and Wellbeing Service
The first product we launched after becoming Citizen was our Tenant Support and Wellbeing Service delivered by Life & Progress.
The service is a free, independent service which gives our tenants 24/7 access to confidential telephone counselling, advice and support.
Through the service our tenants can get help with:
- Mental health and wellbeing
- Family matters
- Relationships
- Managing debt
- Workplace issues
- Their rights as a consumer and much
A central part of our transition to Citizen is to make sure our service offer creates an environment that supports our tenants to live successfully in their homes.
We know that many of our tenants are faced with a multitude of pressures that makes this increasingly difficult. Tenancies most often break down when the wider pressures of life become too great.
Staff across our organisation were frustrated that they couldn’t get help for customers quickly enough on a wide range of issues which would help to keep people in their homes during times of personal crisis.
We started to look at what existed in a range of other sectors but quickly realised we already had a service like this in our own business- our Employee Assistance Programme. We asked the service provider, Life and Progress, what we thought would be an impossible question, “how much would it cost to expand this service to customers?”
We started a two-year pilot of the service in May 2019 year. To date we have rolled the service out to a pilot group of new tenants and in the first year 374 customers accessed the service.
This confidential service is not just a responsible thing to provide for our customers, it also informs our work by giving us great insight into the issues they face in their wider life which we are using to inform the development of our services and our wider innovations.
We can already see, for example, that relationship breakdown and addiction are two considerable concerns that people are reaching out for help with.
Working with Life & Progress has been very positive, and they shared our enthusiasm for extending their services to provide help & support to our customers.
Investing in services to improve our tenant’s wellbeing through the tough times has never been more important than it is now.
Director of Housing
Citizen
