New Toolkit for Social Housing: Tenant Recruitment

Transforming retrofit starts with meaningful resident involvement—and our new tenant recruitment toolkit shows how to make that happen.Designed to help housing providers build effective, people-centred strategies, the toolkit draws on Lancaster West’s pioneering tenant recruitment model—an approach that has built trust, improved services, and delivered retrofit success. It makes the case for recruiting tenants into … Read more

Talking heat decarbonisation and flexibility with housing professionals

Authored by Dr Rowena Hay and Sabina Dewfield from Shortwork, with support from Helen at Carbon Co-op. Towards the end of our Project Heat Pump (Socialising Flexibility) project, we brought together a cross-sector professional workshop online, facilitated collaboratively by Shortwork and Carbon Co-op. The session brought together 17 participants, including the wider Carbon Co-op team, … Read more

Bringing the People to Project Heat Pump

People engaging with activity sheets as part of a participatory workshop.

Authored by Dr Rowena Hay and Sabina Dewfield from Shortwork, with support from Helen at Carbon Co-op. Project Heat Pump (Socialising Flexibility) was a two-year programme funded by Energy Redress and delivered by Carbon Co-op in partnership with Shortwork and Manchester City Council. The project explores how heat pumps are working in practice for social … Read more

Celebrating the end of the Innovate UK: Calderdale Retrofit Challenge project

We recently completed the Calderdale Retrofit Challenge project! Funded by Innovate UK over a period of two years. This project was an initiative undertaken by Calderdale Council, Carbon Coop, and Todmorden Learning Centre and Community Hub (TLCCH). The Calderdale Retrofit Challenge project aimed to better understand the significant challenge of decarbonising Calderdale’s housing stock, particularly … Read more

New toolkit for Social Housing: Resident Liaison Officer

We’re excited to launch our Resident Liaison Officer (RLO) Toolkit, designed to help housing providers build engagement strategies that work — and make them easy to put into practice. Retrofit projects often face refusals, access issues, scheduling challenges, and customer concerns.  The toolkit draws on housing provider Broadacres’ in-house Resident Liaison Officer model – an … Read more

New guidance for tenants with heat pumps

Over the past two years we’ve been working with social housing tenants in Manchester, to better understand the challenges households face in the transition to heat pumps. As part of this project we’ve developed a range of guidance to help tenants to reduce their bills, we’re sharing some of this general advice here in the … Read more