The HECs project is our intervention for tackling worklessness among social housing tenants. The project has gathered a head of steam through a range of meetings with providers and our partners over the last 5 months. We are on course for a launch of our approach at the start of September following a period of rapid IT development.

“Combining best practice from within the Home Connections partnership with the creative brains in our team, will deliver a transformational project” Joe McLoughlin, Business Development Manager at Home Connections.

The following is a high level view of our plans:

When a home seeker logs on through Home Connections they will complete a survey regarding their employment and training needs. HECs will act as a gateway submitting their details to local Information Advice and Guidance (IAG) organisations and Learning and Skills (LSC) providers (with their permission and within the regulations permitted by Data Protection). These agencies will then work with the individual and/or signpost them to other agencies.

More than web links are offered. HECs will be able to track the progress of individuals too, in order to monitor the effectiveness of the project. Importantly, HECs will also assemble a list of jobs by grade (entry level etc) in the locality of the homes in which the home seeker is interested.

A final project report will detail all the learning, processes and results from the project as well as producing recommendations that can be shared with other CBL providers and policy makers.

Thinking beyond the 4-5 month live pilot period, Home Connections are already in discussions with its user base within the local authority and RSL sector about how the project can continue, be adapted to their local priorities and be expanded in its scope.

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• Enables like-minded people to find each other and create new communities of users around a topic
• allows a specific group of people (staff members in an organization for example) to share resources efficiently
• Can help you find new insights about a topic by seeing how others think and connect to it
• Creates contextual taxonomies or ‘folksonomy’ that have meaning for a particular community/group of people (good for different cultural contexts). We have started our own ‘folksonomy’ which is available on the home page and this will develop organically in the future.
• Most tools incorporate various mechanisms for sharing information outside of the tools (via RSS (Home Connections has it’s own RSS), integration with other tools such as blogging software

If you want to share what you’ve read on Home Connections with other people, we’ve added an easy way for you to do it. At the bottom of each article, you’ll see 10 buttons with logos, each of which will let you share that article with friends, online communities – and the rest of the web!

These sites – commonly called ’social bookmark’ or ’social news’ sites – have large communities of web users who share interesting, useful and fun things on the web.

These buttons will automatically add the address of the story you like to one of these sites, letting you share the stories you like best.

You’ll need to register for each of these sites – they’re all free and extremely easy to use – and then you can store, recommend and search for the websites and stories that interest you.

A bit more about the different sites:

del.icio.us is one of the most popular social bookmarking sites. It allows you to keep track of what you read online, but also to share those bookmarks with other users, letting others find the stories you like. You can add short descriptions and keyword tags to each article you bookmark – making it easier for you to find them again, for others to find them, and for you to find other websites that might interest you! Learn more.

Digg is another of the most popular community news sites on the web. Users add articles to it – as you’ll be doing when you click the button – and every user who then reads and likes that article can vote for it (’digg’ it). The most voted for articles then climb up the rankings of the most popular articles on the site. Learn more.

Reddit is a site where every vote and recommendation you make trains the site to know what sort of things you like and dislike – so it can recommend other sites and stories that it thinks you’ll like. You can submit sites, vote on ones submitted by other users, and explore sites recommended oth by the site and other users. Learn more.

Newsvine is a news site where the prominence of stories is decided by what the users think is most important, rather than by an editorial team. Like Digg, you can submit articles, which will rise up the site the more votes they get – but with Newsvine, you can also write your own articles and comment on articles by others. Learn more.

NowPublic is a news site where users not only share news stories they’ve found on the web, but anybody can add to that topic with their own pictures and videos – they can become ‘citizen journalists’. Learn more.

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Amazing, the internet. You can feed a phrase in one of the major world languages into a translation site like Babel Fish (babelfish.com), and out it will come another. Type, for example, “internet translation sites like Babel Fish are more trouble than they’re worth”, click the “English-to-French” button, and you get “les emplacements de traduction d’internet comme des poissons de Babel sont plus d’ennui que la valeur de they’re”. Put back into English, that yields “the sites of d’internet translation as of fish of Babel are more d’ennui that the value of they’re”, which, you will agree, is about as close to the original as to make no meaningful difference.

So when indignant officials at the Dutch foreign ministry received an email from a group of Israeli journalists that began, “Helloh bud, enclosed five of the questions in honor of the foreign minister: The mother your visit in Israel is a sleep to the favor or to the bed your mind on the conflict are Israeli Palestinian,” they might perhaps have guessed what had happened.

Sadly, they did not. Nor did the follow-up questions (”Why we did not heard on mutual visits of main the states of Israel and Holland, this is in the country of this” and “What in your opinion needs to do opposite the awful the Iranian of Israel”) enlighten them. And now, according to the Jerusalem Post, the aforementioned journalists’ planned fact-finding trip to the Netherlands as guests of the Dutch government is in jeopardy. “How could this email possibly have been sent?” an anguished Israeli diplomat asked the paper. “These journalists have sparked a major, major incident.”

Blame Babel Fish, bud: it mistakes the Hebrew word for “if” (ha’im) for the Hebrew word for “mother” (ha’ima), and reckons “the Dome of the Rock” can reasonably be rendered in English as “bandages of the knitted domes”. So let that be a lesson to you. Or, as Babel Fish would have it in German, “Lassen Sie so einfach, daß eine Lektion zu Ihnen seien Sie.” Which apparently means: “Leave so simple that a lesson to you are you.” Amazing, the internet.

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The closing date for applications is 5pm, Monday 4th August 2008. Please submit a copy of your CV along with a minimum of 2 sides of A4 detailing your skills, abilities and experience based on each item of the person specification.

Please download the following:

Advert (pdf)

Person Specification (pdf)

Job Description (pdf)

Please send applications by email only to paul.robson@homeconnections.org.uk

We look forward to hearing from you.

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We are working very closely with Camden on our Housing Employment Connections demonstration pilot. This is the Greater London Authority sponsored project and we will be piloting our approach with Camden, Haringey, Islington and Peabody Housing Trust in the late summer.

The 12 successful council trailblazers are:

1) Camden, 2) Croydon, 3) Greenwich, 4) Hammersmith & Fulham, 5) Southwark, 6) Norwich, 7) Nottingham, 8. Kettering, 9) Blackpool, 10) Calderdale, 11) Ashford, 12) Bournemouth

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We are really looking forwarded to Harrogate this year and will be promoting our latest government sponsored project on worklessness and the work we have been doing around overcrowding. Worklessness and overcrowding are two of the big themes in housing at the moment and our new project is very forward thinking and timely.

Worklessness

The project now has a name and a logo; good starting points really but also a whole lot more and is well into development.

The project is called “Housing Employment Connections” or HECS for short and is sponsored by the Greater London Authority (GLA).

Please come and visit us at Harrogate this year we will be in the main Hall M, Stand 303. We will be available throughout the conference 17,18,19 June 2008.

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“After extensive research the City of London have selected Home Connections as our preferred CBL provider. The package they offered was the most flexible, allows for a comprehensive I.T. based approach, and is excellent value for money. The City look forward to working in partnership with Home Connections to provide our tenants and housing applicants with a first class CBL scheme.” Jim Barber, Head of Needs and Resources at City of London

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“Home Connections is excited about forging links between CBL and jobs. We want to transform the culture of housing lettings services from one of dependency to empowerment” said Chief Executive of Home Connections Ninesh Muthiah.“We’re looking forward to working with our partners on this project to create a new dynamic between employment services and CBL opportunities” he adds.

Peabody Trust Chief Executive Stephen Howlett said: ‘’we are working in communities with long-term unemployed people to help them gain the confidence and skills they need to get a job through our network of neighbourhood learning centres.

‘’This project is an excellent way of supporting and encouraging those people who are able, to enter the world of work.’’

The practice and functionality developed in this project may be incorporated into existing CBL schemes and any future pan London choice based lettings and mobility scheme. Cambridge University will be involved in monitoring and evaluating the outcomes from the project.

London has the highest proportion of adults in England outside the formal labour market. Within the capital there is a growing link between worklessness and housing tenure: almost two thirds of all workless households in London now occupy social rented accommodation. Just over 50 per cent of all social renting working age households are not in work, compared with 19 per cent of private renters and seven per cent of owner-occupiers.

-Ends-

For further information visit www.home-connections.co.uk

Or contact:
Ninesh Muthiah, Home Connections Consortium (07984 884 343)
Ninesh.muthiah@homeconnections.org.uk

Joe McLoughlin, Home Connections Consortium (07939 825 164)
Joe.mcloughlin@homeconnections.org.uk

Notes to editors:

• Home Connections is a not for profit company owned by Local Authorities and Registered Social Landlords (RSLs). Home Connections provides CBL directly to a third of London Boroughs, Birmingham City Council (Europe’s largest social landlord) and 15 RSLs.
• The department of Communities and Local Government expects all registered social landlords to be operating a choice-based lettings service by 2010.

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