One Big Housing Conference #chchousing15

Brett Sadler, Assistant Director of Neighbourhoods at North Wales Housing, blogged about our recent One Big Housing Conference... 

I hadn’t been to a Community Housing Cymru (CHC) event for at least a few years, so when I saw the agenda for the One Big Housing Conference, I thought it looked worthwhile attending.

First a bit of background. CHC are the representative body for housing associations and community mutuals in Wales, which are all not-for profit organisations. The venue for the event is the famous Metropole Hotel (trust me – if you have been there, you’d understand why its famous). It’s a sprawling hotel in Llandrindod Wells, often jokingly described in Wales as ‘equally inconvenient for the North and South’. For me personally it was a 2½ hour drive from North Wales to get there – fact. It’s also the only hotel I know where there is no mobile signal within the hotel…..anywhere.

And so to the conference itself. If you have never been to a CHC event before, they are very professionally run. Everything electronic (rather than the usual half a ream of papers given at the start of a conference), screens with the latest tweets up on the wall and clearly signposted rooms for each session.

The first conference session was from Andy Crowe titled ‘I’m a Housing Exec, GET ME OUT OF HERE!’, talking about his experience of working on the island of St Helena and the uphill struggles this entailed, although as I tweeted below, its not all work...

To read more, please visit Brett's blog to read his original post.