Scottish Homelessness Involvement and Empowerment Network

What is your activity?

Producing a newsletter by service users and staff for service users within a supported accommodation service.

What were the benefits?

From a service user’s perspective, the benefits are:

Feeling of being involved

Being useful

Contributing to something that was important to the other residents

Learning skills, e.g. about computers

From the service’s perspective:

Service users can identify information that will be relevant and interesting to their peers.

A means of sharing information.

What were the pros?

From a service user’s perspective:

Feeling that I was good enough to be asked to help out gave me confidence.

What were the cons?

From a service user’s perspective:

Motivating myself to engage in activity

The working space was not dedicated to the newsletter

From the service’s perspective:

Consistency in producing newsletter, when busy with other tasks.

What resources were required?

Ideally a lap top dedicated to the newsletter, which has now been sourced for this project.

Other resources include:

Staff time to support

Training to upskill, e.g. use of computer packages.