For the past few weeks, our team has been focused on preparing for CIH’s Housing Conference. The three-day event promised to be an exciting opportunity to share ideas about the past, present and future of housing. Last Tuesday, the day finally arrived.
Five members of our team headed up to Manchester for the conference. As a global solution, it was exciting for us to connect with old friends and future clients from around the country.
We were up bright and early on the first day for the Welcome to Manchester talk with Cllr Bev Craig and Zoopla’s Richard Donnell. With the cost-of-living crisis, providing affordable homes with suitable regulation is becoming more difficult than ever. Many of the talks throughout the day addressed these challenges and how we can overcome them.
After such an engaging introduction, we headed over to the Connecting Futures stage, where Convene’s consultant Arturo Dell collaborated with Julian Beaney of Orbit and Jenny Danson of Disruptive Innovators Network to deliver a great talk on SRS reporting. We learned so much about how organisations need to transform their reporting as they move towards sustainable governance.
Arturo developed these themes even further on the second day with a breakfast briefing on the Sustainability Reporting Standard for Social Housing - a voluntary reporting framework for ESG concerns. Arturo led us through how ESG reports that meet the SRS criteria can help Housing Associations secure sustainable funding. He explained in detail how Housing Associations can improve their reporting and outlined the steps they need to take.
Throughout the event we had Julia Michaels working on a visual representation of what the SRS means to Housing Associations. Those who visited our stall gave us insights into how the SRS has changed the Housing Sector and the hopes they have for its impact in the future. If you would like to receive a digital copy of the final result, please contact us!
At Convene, we’ve been working on our own reporting tool to improve your organisation’s sustainable management: Convene ESG. Our aim is to alleviate some of the challenges of data gathering, performance tracking, and reporting, so organisations can move towards net zero.
We are currently working with a number of existing Convene housing customers, including Orbit, as part of our early adopters programme. Through their valuable feedback, we will together continue to develop and fine-tune our platform, delivering a robust end-to-end ESG experience.
The third and final day of the conference was focused on the exciting parts of the future. From creating more inclusive communities to centring tenant voices, the speakers considered how we can move forward into the future. Across the three days, we were inspired by hearing so many optimistic voices for change.
Over the two days, we got to hear many inspiring talks on the importance of change. Thank you to everyone involved in the conference! We can’t wait for our next conference, which will be the CGI Governance Conference on 5th-6th July.
If you’d like to learn more about how Convene can help you, don’t hesitate to contact us and book a free demo today!