| After this presentation, the information desks opened and tenants were given the opportunity to talk to the staff running them, log any issues they had with customer services, and have the chance to win prizes by answering questions on each of the desks. Tenants said that they found this chance to speak to the staff face-to-face very helpful and the information desks really useful. Lunch was then served in the room next door and seemed to be enjoyed by all! With a choice of roast chicken, grilled salmon or vegetarian lasagne, followed by a delicious choice of deserts, everyone’s tastes and specialist dietary requirements were catered for. To start the afternoon, tenants had a team quiz. There was much discussion and laughter from the teams as they tried to work out the answers. With self-named teams such as the “Blackwood Babes”, “The Martians” and the “Cala Sona Angels”, the winning team “Four of a Kind” finally won the prize. This was followed by a presentation from Portobello tenant Jennifer Evans. Jennifer gave an enthralling talk on how she and her fellow members of the Pipe Street Registered Tenants’ Organisation (RTO) had taken responsibility for designing, developing and maintaining the communal gardens around their scheme. The gasp from tenants as they saw the “before and after” pictures said it all! A wheelchair user, Jennifer described the strategies she had worked out for carrying tools, rubbish bags and sacks of compost, and planting bedding plants, shrubs, climbers and thousands of bulbs. She revealed how the success of the venture had encouraged the wider neighbourhood to take a greater pride in their immediate area, fostered a very positive sense of community, and how it had greatly reduced anti-social behaviour by thoughtless youngsters and problems like dog-fouling. Jennifer felt that what Pipe Street could achieve, any community could achieve. After Jennifer’s talk, Gordon Smith, a development officer for MBHA, presented the House Building Workshop. Teams of tenants were given a kit of different cardboard rooms – lounges, bedrooms, kitchens and bathrooms, all of different sizes – together with gas, electric or alternative heating systems and other features like shared, private, or no gardens. They then designed their ideal homes within a specific budget, making their own choices and compromises. There was much debate and great hilarity and every team came in under budget, but with very different solutions. Not only did it give tenants a chance to see how MBHA chooses their house designs, but Gordon found the outcomes really enlightening, especially the compromises tenants were prepared to make in order to fund alternative heating systems that were more expensive to install but much cheaper to run. | Tenant Day 2005 | 2 | 3 | |
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