Other courses

Making meetings work

Your experience of meetings can influence whether you want to continue to be involved in a group or committee.  Running meetings can be difficult, although with guidance you can improve the way you currently do things. 
This session explains what makes a good meeting. It explains how to get people to attend and also to come back next time. The session also explains techniques for controlling meetings, effectively dealing with conflict and making meetings an enjoyable experience.  

Negotiation skills

Setting out your aims and objectives seems straight forward enough, although inevitably you will have to stand your ground and negotiate effectively if you want to achieve all your goals. 
This session introduces the concept of negotiation and outlines the steps to effective negotiation. It looks at useful techniques and tools such as partnership agreements.  It explains how negotiations should take place and importantly what should be avoided.   

Customer care

This session explains what customer care is, what should be expected of landlords and why as tenants and service users we should expect high standards of customer care. The course explains what good customer care involves and how this links with the best value regime. 

Scottish housing quality standard (SHQS)

All housing associations and local authorities are required to bring their housing stock up to the Scottish housing quality standard by 2015. But what does this actually mean? This short session will outline the requirements of the standard for the physical condition of housing, energy efficiency, facilities, health and safety and the implications that achieving the standard may have on you. 

Stock transfer

Landlords may investigate the option to transfer their housing stock to another organisation. Whether this is a large scale voluntary transfer (LSVT) of council houses or the transfer of a portion of houses from a housing association it is important that the tenants involved are well informed about the process. 
If your landlord is looking at stock transfer, we can provide this training session to your tenants and residents association explaining what stock transfer is, what the implications are for tenants and what your rights to be consulted are. 

Setting up a tenants and residents association

Setting up a group from scratch can be a daunting task if you have no previous experience. This session explains the key steps and how to achieve them.  It provides advice on how to get local support, explains how to plan and run a first meeting, how to hold a public meeting, set out your aims and objectives and plan your first activities.

Running a tenants and residents association

This session provides advice and techniques for running a tenants and residents association. Content includes the role of the committee and office bearers, developing a constitution, setting an agenda, running meetings, good chairing skills and taking minutes.  The session also looks at how to get people involved and keep them interested and what sort of activities you can get involved in as a group. 

Developing a constitution

Groups should always tailor their constitution to meet their own needs – not just copy someone else’s.  This takes time and requires planning and good working between individuals. 
This session will teach you how to design an effective constitution.  Participants will learn what the requirements of a constitution are, the rules for running your meetings and annual general meetings and how to make changes to the constitution. The session will identify some of the common pitfalls of developing a constitution and how these can be avoided. 

Training needs analysis

We have a lot of experience in carrying out training needs analysis for tenant and resident associations. We will come to your organisation for an informal meeting and assess what skills and training needs your group, members or representatives need to realise your full potential.