Scottish Housing Day 2023 is all about celebrating housing as a career and the variety of roles and routes into the sector.
One of the key roles in helping create value for tenants and customers is Tenant Participation. It involves engaging with tenants to ensure they have a real say in the decisions that affect their homes and communities. It gives our tenants opportunities to share opinions, give positive ideas or voice any concerns they may have. Tenant Participation enables us to work harder to shape our services to fit the wants and needs of everyone who rents a home with us.
Here’s what Debbie Bayne, our Tenant Participation Coordinator, has to share about her journey into the housing sector:
“I’ve come to housing very late in my career – I think my current role as tenant participation coordinator will be my last job before retirement – but I’ve still got time to use the transferable skills I’ve built up over 40 years to make a difference to how we involve our tenants. I’ve done lots of different jobs in lots of different sectors (quality management in whisky production, organisational development for a poultry breeder, freelance training and development for everything from arts charities to the NHS, project and volunteer management for a disabled people’s organisation), but the thread that runs through all of them is involving people in decisions that affect them, so this job makes perfect sense.
I like that Harbour is local to north Edinburgh – we can more or less walk to all of our homes from our office – and that we’re part of the local community. I love that I live and work here, so I know what’s going on locally through first-hand experience. I also love learning new things and meeting new people, so starting out again in a sector that I knew very little about is exciting.
We talk about housing, but really it’s home that matters and over the years I’ve come to realise how important it is to our wellbeing. Without a safe, stable place to make our home, everything in our lives is going to be harder and we’re going to struggle, so doing my small bit to contribute to people having stable homes feels very good. “