076 - Providing Supported Accommodation in Rural Areas with Carolyn Howell MBE

In this episode Carolyn Howell talks about the challenges of delivering supported accommodation in a rural area. Carolyn is CEO of Solo Housing Association who specialize in providing accommodation for single people with a range of support needs. Carolyn talks about some of the new and innovative ways they have developed to deliver support and how they are working with landlords to be able to support more people. Carolyn joined Solo Housing as the CEO in 2017 and since then the level of provision of accommodation for single people has grown 40%. Solo currently delivers 145 bed spaces of supported accommodation, 10 general needs flats and over 30 Lodgings placements, with a turnover of £1.6 m and 25 staff working across Norfolk and Suffolk Prior to joining Solo Housing Carolyn was National Homelessness Advice Service (NHAS) Coordinator working for Shelter. Responsible for overall delivery of NHAS in Shelter, including consultancy line, training, information resources and a Housing Debt Advice team, delivering a high quality housing advice support service for professionals and volunteers in both local authority and independent advice sectors. She worked for Shelter for 18 years and during this time had a range of jobs from Area Manager in Norfolk, Regional Development Manager, fieldworker and caseworker. She was seconded to Dept. of Communities and Local Government Preventing Repossessions team between 2008 and 2010 working on the preventing repossessions and Mortgage Rescue team and again in 2013 to support the development of the Local Authority Homelessness prevention Gold Standard programme. For 10 years she was also a trustee with Diss, Thetford and District Citizens Advice Bureau, including 4 years as board chair. Solo Housing: Home The jewellery that was mentioned can be found here: Bespoke jewellery collection created by Solo Housing residents in partnership with Make Pivot. Lisa became a property investor after a long nursing career. She initially developed heritage properties and then a chance encounter led her to discover supported living. She realized this was a powerful way to invest in property while creating homes for those who need them most. Lisa set about discovering why property investors struggle to let their properties to supported living providers and why providers struggle to find property to let. She has been educating people, raising awareness and working on solutions to this problem ever since. Lisa is the host of the Supported Living Property Podcast and YouTube channel and hosts a Facebook Group where people can learn, network and discuss supported living. You can find out more about Lisa and how you can work with her at her website: www.lisabrown.uk Download your free guide to Supported Living Property here: https://lisabrown.uk/supported-living-property-guides-to-download/ To find the video versions of these episodes please go to: https://www.youtube.com/c/LisaBrownProperty Thank you for listening, please do leave a review and subscribe to keep up to date with future episodes