Service Manager Nicola Edwards manages safe accommodation at Honeycomb Group’s domestic abuse specialist, Glow. With so many residents living under one roof, her busy role can come with challenges. She’s shared how Group-wide partnership working overcomes them and creates positive outcomes for families living in refuge and community homes.

I wear a lot of hats in my role. In the morning you might find me at a professional meeting, or safeguarding a family that has fled abuse, and by the afternoon I could be outside litter picking to keep our outside areas clean, tidy and safe.

As a safe accommodation manager, my job is varied. It’s about supporting families, but it’s also about building safety. This means managing our refuge and community properties and making sure that we are compliant.

Currently we support 43 customers - 15 women and 28 children. With so many people, there can be challenges, so we have support from internal teams to keep everyone safe.

Being part of a Group puts us in a unique position to seek the in-house expertise of our brands. We work with fellow Group brand and affordable housing provider, Staffs Housing, as our landlord for refuges and community homes across North Staffordshire. This partnership means that we can provide safe accommodation, which in turn enables families to flee domestic abuse and reach safety.

We can also utilise the specialist knowledge and skills of other teams across the Group, such as the bids and grants team – who secure funding for support projects and exciting days out. If I need advice or have a question about health and safety, I’ll go to the Staffs Housing compliance team. We have repairs and maintenance support from Unitas, Honeycomb Group’s repairs provider, and Revival’s handyperson service. I’ve also been lucky to have lots of help from the Staffs Housing gardening team, who are very supportive of our green spaces.

My team at refuge provide their own specialist support too. Families have often travelled miles, from other parts of the country, to flee abuse. This can be particularly difficult for children and young people, who have left everything familiar to reach safety. It’s a total uphaul of their lives, but a necessary one. The settling in period is really key. We make sure they have everything they need, and work with our local contacts to get them enrolled in school and start receiving therapy. That’s really important to us, that children can have a voice and talk about their experience.

From a compliance and health and safety perspective, good communication with families is essential, including highlighting ‘house rules,’ which exist to keep residents, and the building they live in, safe. When families arrive, we’ll ask parents to sign them. It does sadly mean that we can’t have ball games, BBQs or paddling pools in the summer. It’s anything that could potentially be a risk and cause injury. Despite these rules, we still make sure that young people can have fun. We head off on day trips, such as the local park, or further afield to the seaside. It’s all about giving children the chance to actually be children, as well as strengthening that family bond between mother and child – all while keeping them safe too.

Back at refuge, with so many children around, it’s vital that the property is clean and tidy, with communal spaces and corridors clear at all times. I’ll undertake regular compliance checks, including flat checks, to make sure appliances are all in working order and everything is as it should be. I’ll also carry out fire alarm tests and head out to do building checks, where I literally walk around the outside of our refuge and community flats to make sure nothing is amiss.

I’m constantly looking for things that could cause an accident. With lots of young children around, it’s vitally important to me and my team to keep an eye on things and get any issues resolved as soon as possible.

It’s a lot of partnership working. I couldn’t do my job without the support of my team, internal Honeycomb Group staff and external partners. All of this comes together to have such a positive impact and make a real difference to the lives of those that we support.

We create a happy home while they are with us, and support and encourage them to find their own happy home once they move on.