Our customers, colleagues and partners bring our purpose and values to life. Here’s more about our people, and some of the innovative ways we are supporting people to settle and live well in their community.
Customer voice and experience
Our newly formed Customer Engagement Team creates meaningful opportunities for customers to collaborate with SYHA and influence decision-making. The team ensure that Customer Voice genuinely shapes and improves our services.
They support the Customer Scrutiny Panel, the Customer Committee and our Involved Customers, as well as capturing feedback from surveys and complaints.
Read the Customer Voice Annual Review
Involved Customers
Our Involved Customers help us shape policies and services by regularly contributing their feedback through various channels. This includes attending our online forum ‘Your Voice’, completing surveys, asking us questions, and attending one-off events.
This year, our Involved Customers have:
- Supported our Scrutiny Panel reviews, including an exercise to assess how well we deliver our Customer Service Standards
- Helped shape our new Customer Newsletter – if you have any feedback about the newsletter or want to be added to our mailing list, please email customernewsletter@syha.co.uk
- Improved a policy to better support customers who need to be temporarily rehoused
- Explored how we make sure customers are treated fairly and respectfully.
If you like to join our Involved Customers group, please get in touch by emailing getinvolved@syha.co.uk or call us on 0800 1380 380
Creativity and celebrations in LiveWell
LiveWell’s care and support services empower people to improve their health and wellbeing, live independently, and develop new skills – you can find out more about our services in the impact report we published earlier this year.
Since publishing the report, there have been even more updates as teams continue to develop innovative new services and support, and build great connections with local people and partners. For example:
- Our Good Practice Mentors team have celebrated supporting an incredible 1,167 organisations – and you can find out more about their work in this report.
- And our Changing Futures team have worked with Sheffield City Council to co-produce Sheffield’s new Lived Experience Council (LEC) to place people with lived experience at the heart of strategic decision-making. The LEC will work alongside strategic leaders from across Sheffield to drive forward the Multiple Disadvantage Strategy, helping to shape priorities through genuine shared power and decision-making.
A shared priority across all our LiveWell service is creating opportunities for connection, expression and joy. In June, The Meadows, one of our extra-care homes for older people in Sheffield, celebrated 20 years of providing community, friendship and a safe place to call home.
And, over at Beaufort Project, a home for customers who have long-term mental health conditions, customers worked with local artists to design a beautiful new mural for their garden.
Listening to LiveWell customers
This year, our Quality and Impact Team worked with our extra care homes to collect feedback from satisfaction surveys, one-to-one conversations, and group workshops. Customers, stakeholders, family members and colleagues were invited to share their experiences and suggestions for improvements.
The conversations confirmed that our homes and services are well-designed, with the safety and needs of our customers at their heart. It was great to hear positive experiences from the people we spoke to, as well as insightful suggestions for what we could do better.
Responses from the LiveWell customer satisfaction surveys
Very satisfied or satisfied with my living arrangements
Very satisfied or satisfied with communication from SYHA employees
Felt safe always or often
Ending homelessness
This year is 60 years since the release of Cathy Come Home, a film that inspired our founder and first CEO, John Belcher, to set up SYHA. Decades later, homelessness is still prevalent in our society – as recognised by Andy Burnham’s recent commitment to ending rough sleeping and the ongoing work of The Royal Foundation’s Homewards programme.
Providing safe spaces for people to live, as well as other services and support to help them to flourish, is still integral to our organisation’s work and purpose.
From April 2025 to April 2026, we rehoused 23 people and families experiencing homelessness (nominated by local authorities). We are delighted that 22 of these households are still SYHA customers, and that they are all settled in their homes. Our teams have offered financial guidance, health and wellbeing support, and helped with the transition from temporary accommodation to a secure, long-term home. We are proud to provide homes that people and families can enjoy spending time in, and that provide a stable space to both recover from the trauma of experiencing homelessness and build aspirations for the future.
We’re also developing new homes, and customers have recently settled in to five new, eco-conscious homes in Waverley. We have also submitted three applications for a total of 73 new homes in Sheffield and Doncaster. The planning applications have included engaging with neighbouring communities to share more about our plans, and we have used local people’s feedback to shape the final designs.
We are proud to be contributing to tackling the housing crisis by building high-quality and affordable homes, and our partnership with Places for People will support us to fulfil our ambitions to build more much-needed homes. We have an ambition to build 50 additional new homes in the South Yorkshire region every year, increasing to 100 new homes a year by 2036.
IPS for Homelessness
The IPS for Homelessness trial is funded by the Centre for Homelessness Impact and ran across three sites across the country, with SYHA providing the service in Rotherham, Sheffield and Barnsley. The project tested the effectiveness of IPS employment support for people experiencing homelessness.
Participants were randomised into one of two groups (IPS or Control). An amazing 34 people in the IPS group engaged with the service and have been supported into work.
Individualised Placement Support (IPS) supports people by looking at their skills, goals and preferences to identify roles that are right for them. The service recognises the unique challenges people experiencing homelessness face and offers a range of personalised support – including help with job applications, funding transport and training, and settling into their new role.
The trial ended in September 2026, but we are pleased that the service has been re-commissioned and will continue to help end homelessness and support people to thrive in work.
Finding good work in Maltby
And, in more good news from Work and Wellbeing, here’s an update from our JobsPlus service in Maltby, Rotherham. JobsPlus is a new model of employment support – defined by being…
- provided by social housing organisations in areas with a high concentration of social housing
- based in community hubs, with great links to other services (like social services, education, childcare and transport providers)
- open to anyone age 16+ in the local area, and adopting a community-led approach where residents shape and enhance the services on offer.
We’re delighted that the service has been extended by the Department of Work and Pensions until at least March 2027.
0 people
have secured employment through JobsPlus Maltby.
125 local people have taken part in JobsPlus, 53 of which are young people aged 16-24. So far, they have achieved 61 job starts and 33 volunteering, education, or training outcomes!
JobsPlus Maltby offers one-to-one sessions with Employment Specialists, as well as art groups, wellbeing sessions, and has partnered with Northern College to provide a smartphone skills course – as well as benefitting from the support of their fantastic Community Champions and the local Job Centre.
Through a range of activities, events and partnerships, JobsPlus Maltby has helped customers build confidence, meet new people and access opportunities, and make positive changes in their lives.
Our new Hardship Fund
Our Income Management team support customers to make their rent and service charge payments, and signpost to financial services and support.
Ultimately, the team help to fulfil our organisation’s vision by working with customers to achieve financially independence and stability. Their compassion and expertise also reduces customers’ stress, worries or limitations created by financial pressures and debts. They have supported our customers to claim over £95,000 of backdated benefits they are entitled to, as well as supporting local communities by fundraising for Maltby Foodbank.
We are incredibly proud that the team were shortlisted for Early Intervention Excellence Award at the Mobysoft Customer Awards, and for Team of the Year at the Northern Housing Awards.
If you need any support with your rent or other payments, please get in touch – we’re here to help. Our partnership with Places for People has also enabled us to offer a new Hardship Fund for our customers.
Our Hardship Fund aims to support our customers’ wellbeing by preventing them from experiencing homelessness, crisis, or escalating debts. It provides one-off payments alongside support to identify effective long-term solutions.
For example, the Hardship Fund could make a one-off utility bill payment for a customer – but our teams would also help to identify the reason that bills weren’t being paid and help resolve this. This could mean helping the customer to access debt advice, find a cheaper tariff, or sign up for employment support.
If you’d like to talk to us about the Hardship Fund, please get in touch and ask to speak to the Income Management Team or a Neighbourhood Officer.
“I’m earning as well as learning”
Earlier this year, we shared more about our fantastic apprentices for National Apprenticeship Week! Our apprentices are sharing and growing their skills with our HMT and NEAT teams, and enjoying the confidence, connections and financial independence they are building at work – watch the playlist of all our Apprenticeship Week videos here.
Diversity and belonging
Our Diversity and Belonging Steering Group leads on events and activity that supports causes close to the hearts of our customers, colleagues and communities. They also identify opportunities to celebrate cultural events, raise awareness about important issues, and support initiatives that improve inclusion and equity and SYHA.
This year, we’ve hosted events for Refugee Week and Eid, fundraised for South Asian Heritage Month, and supported the local Andro and Eve by purchasing copies of their zine for Pride Month (available to colleagues, customer and partners across our workspaces). We’ve also learned about Supported Lodgings and Refugees at Home from colleagues sharing their experiences of welcoming people into their home. Our GiveWell impact report shares more about what we’ve been up to!
Read the impact report
Following insight from our employees, the Diversity and Belonging Steering Group has also led on the development of a statement to demonstrate our commitment to being an anti-racist organisation. The commitment has been created using feedback from our customers and colleagues, and will be shared on our website soon. The work has been progressed alongside reviewing our Customer Behaviour Policy, and setting clear expectations for behaviours for both customers and colleagues.
Next section – a message from Matt Harrison