About Us
Resident Support and Advocacy Services
The Creation Southwark Team offers one to one advice, support and advocacy services around housing and benefits to Aylesbury residents. Our bespoke services are tailored to individuals using a person-centred approach to maximise the effect of the support on your well-being.
What We Do
At any one time, we are working with around 80 residents on the Aylesbury estate. This includes secure tenants, people living in temporary accommodation and private tenants. We offer advice, information, practical support and advocacy.
Our casework service is provided on a one-to-one basis, which means we are free to tailor the service to the individual needs of the person or people we are working with. The service is free and confidential and open to anyone living on the Aylesbury estate.
The Practical Support We Offer
We help residents fill in forms and make phone calls on their behalf, often mediating with organisations such as benefits agencies, energy companies and landlords. We have also helped with family mediation and intervention, where it helps to involve someone impartially.
- Assisted bidding: A lot of the people we work with do not use (or do not have access to the internet) so they can feel disempowered, particularly when it comes to bidding for a new home or logging onto benefit systems. We offer assisted bidding in the office or over the telephone
- Assisted Viewings: Going with people to look at potential new home offers reassurance and helps people to think practically about how a property would work for them. It also takes some of the stress out of looking. We can even arrange transportation to and from a viewing.
- Packing and settling in: Additional support with packing is available for those people that require it. We also support families with settling into their new homes for 3 to 6 months after they move.
How we work
For us building relationships and trust is the most important part of the Resident Support Team work. We work in a positive, non-judgemental and supportive way to get the best result for the individual.
Our Ingredients
We are fierce, passionate and persistent
Our Success rate of resolving our client's issues is 100%, no matter how long it takes. Some of our clients have been with us for years, which is a testimony to the complexities around resolving certain issues. While being respectful to all in our work.
We have the Heart of a Lion
Being a small team and having clients with multiple needs, the success of our work relies on working with many varying professionals in statutory and non-statutory organisations. As non-statutory, we do not yield the power or authority that statutory organisations have. To balance that we have developed strong working partnerships across the board and have gained huge resect, acknowledgement and support for our work. Our team may be as small as a jack russell, but we have the Heart of a Lion.
As a CIC, we will expand
The word of mouth is powerful - our service is approached by many others that are outside of our footprint who we are not able to support other than to sign-post, which shows the need and want for our type of service.
We make time and space to look after each other's wellbeing
We have developed a service built on a way of working that is equally caring for each other as it is for our clients. Working up close and personal with clients, who while with us share their lives with us, can be extremely stressful and impact personal wellbeing. Through caring and sharing we have an extremely low incidence of sickness, absence or job turn-around.
We are here for everyone
We constantly strive on providing a quality service to all of our users. We are anti-racist, inclusive, flexible, approachable and accessible.
We Support, We Advocate, We Educate
In the main, we are a one stop, hand holding service. We work very closely for and with our clients, we manage their expectations through being transparent, create a support plan together that identifies actions that we will each take, so giving some responsibility to them for their own outcomes, continually keep them updated, explaining what we are doing and why. We strive to make our service enabling so that our clients can develop enough skills, knowledge and confidence to be better equipped to deal with issues that occur in the future.
Access to our Services
There is no age limit to the people we work with, it is open to anyone on the Aylesbury estate, who feel that they need some additional support. We receive referrals from other organisations including social services, housing officers and day care centres. But people can also refer themselves.
Sometimes we may have to refer a resident to a more specialist organisation, but we will always make sure that you are provided with the right information and that you get the assistance you need.
Our History
NEW DEAL for COMMUNITIES (NDC)
The Aylesbury estate in South London was one of the 39 areas in the UK chosen by the government in 1999 to receive New Deal for Communities (NDC) funding. The 10-year NDC programme was designed to bridge the gap between some of the most deprived neighbourhoods and the rest of the country
CREATION TRUST
Creation was set up in 2007, as a resident led organisation, supporting people through large scale regeneration and is the successor organisation to the Aylesbury NDC. We have been independent of the NDC since 2010, but we continue to work on the same principles, outlined in the Area Action Plan, honouring the commitment to the neighbourhood that the council will oversee through the development process. Helping people reach their full potential and building a neighbourhood that they want to live in. One of the many projects created by Creation Trust was the Resident Support Team, a team of Caseworkers supporting people through the regeneration who have ongoing issues in one or more areas of their life. This Team has now gone forward to become Creation Southwark CIC the successor of Creation Trust.
CREATION SOUTHWARK CIC
Creation Southwark CIC is a Resident Support Programme that offers in-depth, one to one support to any resident on the estate, including those residents living in temporary accommodation. We offer support to older people, residents with long term health conditions, those experiencing mental health issues or those with complex family arrangements. We can also support people through the regeneration process to find housing that suits their needs.
