Keeping the Focus on the Service User

Andrew Jenkins - Chief Executive

Welcome to the Cardiff YMCA Housing Association’s website where you can find a great deal of information about our work. It is also one of the ways we distribute our Annual Report - a greener and less expensive way than printing and posting them out!

The Annual Report is a summary of our assessment of our four housing projects through detailed internal audit systems. As one may expect finance is one of the top priorities which we as a team carefully manage so that we could continue to develop our frontline services to homeless people. Although we gratefully receive a major grant from the Welsh Assembly Government, we are just as grateful and pleased to receive financial support through voluntary donations – which we specifically aim to providing a direct service to our service users. If you wish to support our work in this way, please go to our “support our work” fund-raising pages on this web site.

But of course, as important as they are there is much more to an annual review than the accounts. Throughout every year the staff team is gathering statistics; regularly monitoring and recording key performance indicators and measuring whether we are fulfilling our aims and objectives by reviewing our performance against our Strategy and Business Plan. This includes occupancy levels; rent collection performance; service user satisfaction surveys; repair response times; numbers of complaints and how quickly and effectively they were dealt with; move-on results; file checking and much more. Whilst this measuring and monitoring is taking place, it remains the Cardiff YMCA Housing Association’s main aim to ensure that we keep our focus on the service user being the centre of our work.

A couple of years ago we approached the Tenant Participation Advisory Service (TPAS) to help us improve our resident and tenant involvement. This always has been very difficult in temporary accommodation. As soon as someone starts to become interested in being involved, they usually are about to move on to a permanent home of their own. The fruits from the TPAS scheme have been seen ever since. This has included enjoyable consultation events, our highest ever turn out at an Annual General Meeting, the formation of our Tenant & Resident Involvement Group (TRIG) and even the recruitment of an ex-resident onto our management committee.

On this web site and in our Annual Reports we feature some real life stories which will probably say more than all the statistics, graphs and accounts put together will ever do! We are a very busy active YMCA operating round the clock every day of the year on two sites in the City Centre. The YMCA’s presence in Cardiff goes back to 1853 and we endeavour still today to meet the local needs as the YMCA has done throughout that time. In recent years we have been proud to be at the fore-front of new initiatives such as our award-winning Work Incentive Scheme and very popular Pets Room scheme; our partnership in the Cardiff Foyer; our own Private Rented (bond/ move-on) Scheme; direct access emergency room and working liaison with the Homelessness Bus Project; and Outcomes Star Monitoring.

We have an excellent team of dedicated professional staff keeping everything running constantly day-in day-out, but I would like to acknowledge the hard work of the members of the Management Committee who meet regularly and serve in a voluntary capacity throughout the year.