By Grace Oborne

As of early July, Places for People Housing Corporation Inc., a county-based affordable housing organization, released the details of the Good Hood project that has kicked off in Minden.

The Good Hood project is collaborative between three different community housing providers in Minden. The different corporations are not-for-profit and run their own businesses. Collectively, the different housing providers house about 200 tenants that range in age.
“The purpose of that organization is to basically help not-for-profits who provide community housing to improve their service, in whatever ways possible,” said Fay Martin of Places for People.
The project undertakes a participative research approach where people who are directly involved with the question under investigation, give expert input and contribute to how that input is interpreted.
“The intent of the project is to engage the tenants in all of the community housing buildings in Minden to come together and figure out what kind of ongoing mechanism would be useful to identify issues of concern and rectify them in an expedient manner, or maybe even prevent them by getting early identification by improving communication among the various parties that might be involved in whatever the issue is,” said Martin.

While Places for People is the host agency for this assignment, Community Housing Transformation Centre, a federally funded body, is funding the project.
The Good Hood initiative holds near and dear to Martin’s heart as she has a long history with housing communities. This is how the idea for Good Hood came about.
“I have a long history in housing, and care deeply about it. I think it is to everyone’s benefit if the community housing tenants are absolutely full-scale, good as gold, fully functioning members of the community. I think many of them are, but I’m not sure that we acknowledge that. Everybody needs to be acknowledged and as well as they can in this community. Anything that stops that from happening, I want to see that identified and ameliorated ASAP,” noted Martin.

COVID-19 is something that pushed Martin into the idea of the Good Hood project. She began thinking that with the housing and real estate sky-rocketing in the area, “a lot of people who always thought that they would own their own home, may now not be able to own their own home.”  

Martin has made clear that the ultimate goal for this project is to develop a resolution to continue making living in community housing the best experience it can be for everyone. “The eventual output of the project will be a sustainable mechanism of some sort, a resolution table, that can identify early and resolve quickly and efficiently any impediments to a positive living experience.”
“This will be of ongoing benefit to tenants, housing providers, service providers, and the community at large,” concluded Martin.

For more information on the Good Hood project, you can call Martin at 705-457-6912 or email her at fay@placesforpeople.ca.