Salix Homes’ Chair of the Board interviewsCustomer Committee

Newly appointed chair of the board, Jim Battle, turned ‘Parky’ for the day andheld a socially distanced interviewupdate meeting with two of the Salix Homes Customer Committee members, Cynthia and Keri in front of the camera.

The Customer Committee, which is made up of ten residents and two board members, began back in January with the aim of giving tenants a real voice by allowing them unfettered access to scrutinise the organisation.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the customer committee has had to do much of its training and meetings online via Zoom but have still been able to achieve tremendous work in the short nine months that they have been working together.

Committee member Keri said, “It’s been a little bit challenging not being able to meet in person together. Zoom is of course not as personal, but we have managed to still make all of the work happen.”
The committee has been undergoing a range of training programmes in the last nine months to bring them up to speed with everything they need to know about governance in the housing sector.
Committee member Cynthia said, “It’s been an exciting time getting started with the committee and the training programmes we have undergone are exactly what we needed in order to adequately perform our duties as customer committee members. I have found every single training module very useful.”

As well as undergoing training, the committee members have also been busy reviewing Salix Homes’ work in the last six months during the COVID-19 pandemic, scrutinising what has been done well, what could be improved on and ideas how.

Margaret Bryant who was acting as interim chair at the time of the activity said, “This piece of scrutiny work has given Salix Homes some of the key actions required to build back better and made clear how we should focus our efforts and resources.

We are passionate about ensuring that we build on the learning identified in this report about focussing on core service delivery, communicating with customers effectively and about how we work with our partners in the future.”

Find out more about the committee’s latest work here: