OUR EARLY YEARS
‘In our first six years, we have accomplished great things such as the refurbishment of thousands of homes, huge improvements in our in-house repairs and customer support services. We have established our own gas servicing subsidiary, Homeforce and supported more than 1,600 unemployed people through work-based training through our work place based training subsidiary, Grow Enterprise Wales. It shows what can be achieved by a housing organisation when it focuses on the needs and aspirations of its tenants.’
Andrew Lycett
Chief Executive, RCT Homes
Our brands
Our diverse portfolio of businesses have seen us prepare for an exciting future. From our social enterprise GrEW, committed to providing quality learning and apprenticeship opportunities to our new housing development arm Porthcwlis, it is clear we have grand plans for our future.
Meadow Prospect is the charitable arm of RCT Homes, Wales’ largest social landlord and winner of the 'Business in the Community Welsh Government Responsible Large Business of the Year Award 2014. We deliver regeneration projects that compliment the organisation’s community enhancing goals by working with partner organisations to deliver projects, which support three core objectives:
- Community capacity building projects including youth work and supported employment programmes.
- Community-based renewable energy projects.
- Social enterprise development.
We seek to achieve these priorities through a mix of match funded grant programmes. We work with companies to achieve their corporate social responsibility targets and we’ve developed our own social enterprise, Grow Enterprise Wales (GrEW). To date we have secured over £2 million of charitable donations and hundreds of thousands of in kind donations from businesses. We also manage the Tower Fund, a community Fund set up by Tower Colliery to invest in local ex mining communities linked to their current open cast mining.
www.meadowprospect.co.uk
When the company that provided servicing and repairs of gas appliances in tenants' homes went out of business in 2010, RCT Homes stepped in to save 23 jobs by bringing the work and the staff in-house. RCT Homes set up a company - Homeforce - to carry out the work.
Since that date the company has grown in confidence achieving and maintaining 100% compliance with servicing obligations. Call centre operations and work scheduling have been integrated with RCT Homes. We are now moving towards implementing further mobile working and efficiencies.
Homeforce is now a significant supporter of gas fitting apprenticeships and contributes to the wider skills and training activities of the group. We are now seeking to develop and grow the business externally to build on expansion to date from its original servicing, as well as preventative maintenance works.
Established in March 2012 as a subsidiary of RCT Homes, Porthcwlis is our own property development company. Porthcwlis ran an OJEU compliant tender for a novel and innovative type of 'turn key' approach to developing affordable housing. The outcome is a Procurement Framework to develop affordable housing across the whole of Wales and the West of England. The model does not require any public subsidy and is accessible by public bodies, social landlords, local authorities and developers.
This is a ground breaking project that we anticipate will see our first multi million pound projects commencing on site in 2015. Look out for news over the coming weeks!
Going forward Porthcwlis will be the gate keeper for the framework as local authorities and housing associations step on to it. Future income will be in the form of joining fees for the Framework. It is also intended that Porthcwlis will be the vehicle that will deliver any outright sale and shared ownership properties built by the RCT Homes Group in the coming years.
Since Grow Enterprise Wales (GrEW) began operating in January 2010, we have offered local unemployed people (mainly aged 18-24) the opportunity to gain real work experience and work-based qualifications.
Sourcing our trainees through the Future Job Fund programme, GrEW was designed as a trading subsidiary of Meadow Prospect – the charitable arm of RCT Homes. During its early stages GrEW trained over 400 young people, across a twelve month period. This led to achieving a 42% employment rate – the highest employment outcome in the region. After this, GrEW undertook property maintenance work that involved working on void contracts for RCT Homes, cleaning and decorating properties.
Young Wales is the education department of GrEW who, to date have helped 384 vulnerable school children aged 14-16 achieve their GCSE threshold. In 2014 so far, we have 67 students from four local authorities and the number is steadily increasing. These young people, referred to Young Wales by schools, colleges, pupil referral units (PRU) and Local Authority EOTAS provision (educated other than at school) have not been able to settle in mainstream education for a number of social and/or emotional reasons and often require more intensive support.
www.grewcorporate.org.uk
What is Ziggies?
Ziggies is a special initiative that brings together children and their parents or guardians to enjoy activities based around storytelling.
It began as a one-off idea run by volunteers from RCT Homes staff. Ziggies has been such a success that RCT Homes’ charity, Meadow Prospect, has funded a full-time ‘Ziggies Co-ordinator’ and Ziggies sessions are now quickly spreading throughout South Wales.
The format is straightforward and the activities are simple to arrange and cost next to nothing to put on. No experience or special ability is needed to lead the sessions.
www.ziggies.org/
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