Listening And Learning From Our Clients And Tenants

Posted on 16 November 2023

Listening to our clients and tenants and creating opportunities for them to share their opinions and influence how we do things is important to us. So much so, it is one of our four strategic business priorities.

Across Southdown, there are lots of great client involvement activities happening – within our support services across Sussex as well as to support our central services’ activities.

Recently, three clients of our learning disability services were invited to be part of the interview panel and process to recruit a Practice Development Trainer. All involved contributed enormously to the successful recruitment of the role and expressed how much they enjoyed the experience.

One of clients involved said,

“We interviewed people today for a Trainer job. They did a presentation to us, and I asked questions. We wanted to find out how they could communicate with clients. We worked out what was good and was not good and filled out a scoring sheet. I was a bit nervous coming into the building and meeting new people, but it was quite good actually! I enjoyed it.”

Another recent example was the involvement of six of our clients and tenants to review and help shape the language we use to describe Southdown – who we are, what we do, and what we stand for.

Our Communications Manager, Alice Clements, shares more:

“We held a workshop with six of our clients and tenants joining members of our Communications team to discuss how we describe what we do across Southdown. Having the right language to say who we are and what we do is important to help us increase awareness of the support we provide as well as the job opportunities there are to join us. Our clients and tenants were amazing. They shared what Southdown means to them and how we’ve impacted upon their lives. Everybody had their say and was heard, and it was lovely to see the group interact and enjoy getting to know one another.”

In the coming months, we’ll be exploring how we can build on current activities across Southdown to create more opportunities for our clients and tenants to express their opinion and influence what we do and how we do things. To keep up to date with developments follow us on social media (see our website footer and header for links to our pages) or sign up to our newsletter.