Breakfast with the Fabians

by Chris Dornan on September 24, 2008

The CCH were asked to to provide someone for a Fabian breakfast meeting, Building Sustainable Communities: Can housing policy tackle worklessness?, at the Liberal Democrat conference. Being the closest member of the CCH General Council to Bournemouth yours truly was in attendance.

There were no gaps around the table with about a dozen in attendance, the panelists being Lembit Opik, the Lib Dem spokesman on housing, Anabel Palmer, Director, Southern Housing Foundation, and Kevin Browne, Reed in Partnership. With attendees from the sponsors, the Chartered Institute of Housing and Groundwork and others the Fabian Society had collected a representative sample of folks both thinking about and working to address problems related to exclusion and social housing.

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Welcome!

by Chris Dornan on August 14, 2008

Welcome to the new CHIBAH Blog.  This photo of me was taken at the recent CCH conference, so discreetly that I didn’t realise it had been taken until it appeared on the CCH website.

The CHIBAH Website: Work in Progress

First I would like to say a bit about this website which is more than just a website to us.  Some of our member co-operatives are also looking to develop or redevelop their websites and we are looking at how we can help, and looking at ways we can offer this as a service to housing co-operatives and similar organisations.

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The CCH Conference

August 14, 2008

I have posted my notes on the CCH conference in the CCH area of the CHIBAH Intranet (cch.chibah.org).
The conference started with Nic Bliss, the CCH chair, reminding us of how favourable the political climate has become for co-operative/tenant-managed housing, and featured Adrienne Roberts of the Housing Corporation reminding us that housing [...]

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Double Trouble

August 14, 2008

When I was press-ganged elected into the position of treasurer of Monkey Puzzle H. C. I dealt with it with my usual stratagem: procrastination. I had been bored senseless by book-keeping at school and had managed to avoid accounts ever since. This worked for a while, except we were running up an [...]

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Open Co-operatives

August 14, 2008

The discussion around the recent CCH conference reminded me that while co-operative housing is a much better way of delivering housing, with a powerful potential for regenerating and nurturing communities, it has some obvious challenges around governance.  Clearly housing run by full-time professionals will present a lower profile to the authorities [...]

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A New Website Collective

August 14, 2008

At CHIBAH we have had websites very much on our mind.   Most importantly, we needed to sort out our own website, but also some of our member co-operatives were looking to launch new public websites and internal intranets. (An intranet is a digital home for the co-operative’s documents accessible to the membership.)  This has prompted [...]

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