Blog Post: My Experience as a Rural Housing Enabler

As Cambridgeshire ACRE’s Rural Housing Enabler, Jenna Brame’s time at the charity comes to an end, she reflects on her role and discusses the importance of Rural Affordable Housing in the blog below.

After four years as a Rural Housing Enabler for Cambridgeshire ACRE, I have gained a wealth of knowledge and experience from working with Cambridgeshire’s rural communities to help them to meet their affordable housing needs. As my time in this role has come to it’s end and I move onto new challenges, I felt it was an ideal opportunity to reflect on some on the most important things I have learnt from the role and share them.

The importance of affordable housing to rural communities

As simple as this might sound, living in a market town myself, I don’t think I appreciated the true value of affordable housing to rural communities until I started engaging with them as a Rural Housing Enabler. These aren’t just simply dwellings, building the right homes in the right places enables a much wider range of benefits. These include allowing families to remain living nearby to one another, greater support for local businesses and maintain support networks that reduce issues such as isolation and loneliness. I think this really emphasises the importance building the right homes has for health.

Community support is the key to a successful development

Developments where the community has been engaged, consulted and informed are always more likely to be a success in my opinion, showing that success shouldn’t always be measured in numbers. Where a community has felt that their opinions matter, whether this is on the land where the homes could be built, the layout of a development or even thoughts on the materials that should be used to ensure village character is maintained, there is a real sense of pride when the homes are complete and people move in.

Communities are their own experts

From working with numerous communities across Cambridgeshire, I have learnt that as much as I can prepare myself with facts, figures and information about an area, the local community will always know more. Whether this is where traffic is an issue, which fields and roads flood or the significance of certain aspects of a village – these are things that could simply not be seen by visiting an area once or twice or looking at data sources and maps.

Slow and steady wins the race

Rural exception sites take time and patience to develop, but the results are worth the wait. In my opinion, the resulting schemes show the dedication of housing associations who deliver rural exception sites have to rural communities as well as high quality building standards.

There is always something new to learn

I think this applies to all aspects of life, but as a rural housing enabler housing policy is always adapting and evolving as are rural communities. Being kept on my toes is what has made this job so engaging and as someone who likes to learn new things I will always dive head first into finding out as much as I can I thoroughly enjoyed it.

To summarise, I believe the role of a Rural Housing Enabler is one which leaves with you an immense sense of pride and gratitude as you become part of building something really valuable to rural communities. It might be challenging at times but you truly reap rewards through persevering.