By The Tenant Involvement Team
We have been holding our Volunteer Get Togethers every 3 months for over a year now. The main panels are the Housing Involvement Panel, Screen Team, Tenant Scrutiny and the newest panel, Learning from Complaints Panel. The get togethers are an opportunity for volunteers from each panel to meet each other, find out what each panel consists of and are an appreciation from us for the work they do for us on a voluntary basis.
Our volunteer numbers continue to grow, and we now have more than 40 tenants who are actively involved with either one or two of the panels or trialing the panels. This number has grown significantly over the past year which has been amazing to see. Our last get together was held at the Rotherham Hospice Café on the Parkgate Retail Park. We had 14 tenants who were able to join us, and everyone enjoyed catching up and having some lunch together, some even had a browse around the store before they left. These get togethers are important to our volunteers as they get to find out about other panels, meet other volunteers and they all look forward to them. They also look forward to the social side of just general chatting too to new people. Our next one is booked for September at Springwell Gardens, where we will be serving pie and peas and having a Rotherham based quiz.
As the Learning from Complaints panel only meets quarterly, we decided to get together with the panel members separately in between the meetings as this will enable the panel members to see each other more frequently and to get to know each other. We held our first panel get together in April at the Coffee Pot in Rawmarsh. At this session we discussed the changes to the meeting structure which started from May’s meeting. Existing panel members completed some surveys about the proposed changes, and we spoke to new panel members who haven’t yet attended a meeting, about the format of the meetings and what to expect.