Australia’s largest not-for-profit community housing provider, Community Housing Limited (CHL) has launched first of its kind framework to measure the impact of safe, affordable, suitable, and quality housing on people’s lives.
Developed over a two-year period with broad customer consultation, CHL’s Social Impact Framework aims to better understand the change that is experienced by customers and communities, where the organisation provides housing.
Managing Director of the CHL Group, Steve Bevington said, “CHL is embarking on this exciting long-term journey towards creating an organisation that is impact led.
” Understanding where change is occurring gives us a powerful insight into how housing creates a long-term impact on people’s lives and their communities. Gaining this understanding will help us improve our services, set national strategic and development directions and provide valuable information to our partners.”
As part of this project, CHL has begun surveying its over 16,000 customers currently living in its housing across the country. The surveys will include questions on the changes experienced by customers since they have been provided with stable and affordable housing, in areas of their lives including health, economic participation, social connection, livability, education, and empowerment.
“Roll out of our first national survey will enable us to test our approach with our customers and other stakeholders. Over the next few years we will continue to adapt our framework as we better understand where change is taking place and make informed decisions that will improve the overall wellbeing of our customers through the provision of safe, affordable, suitable, and quality housing.
“It is our aspiration to use the findings to inform governments of the impact occurring through the provision of community housing to better inform decision making and policy changes in the future,” said Steve.
