Post-Privets

Garden update (See Busy inside, busy outside post)

As you can see, our impressive gardening team has made a huge difference to our front drive/garden already. The old Privet bushes there until a couple of days ago dominated the whole area.

Messy Neighbours

There are a number of housing association properties on Chatsworth Way which regularly cause problems with rubbish being dumped or not disposed of properly. The real challenge is to get someone to take responsibility for the problem, as it does not fall to the council.

2 doors down from our office a refuse sack was not put in the large commercial bin provided, and unsurprisingly it was torn open and redistributed by foxes and other creatures. There are used nappies all over the place, spilling onto the pavement, and it has been like this for a whole week. One nappy was kindly placed in our back garden by a thoughtful fox. There has also been broken furniture dumped alongside the bin for at least two months.

We called the housing association on Wednesday to ask them to sort out the current mess, and they promised a housing officer would attend to assess and resolve the problem and put letters through the tenants' letterboxes. The mess is still there today so we just called the housing association again.

The officer responsible and their entire team are apparently on a team building day today and won't be back until Monday, so the good folk of Chatsworth Way, including our tenants and staff, will just have to put up with it for another few days.

It is a shame that many people seem to lack respect for their local environment and the people who share it with them.

Busy inside, busy outside

It's busy in our office today, as usual, but things are also busy outside as work progresses on improving and tidying our front garden/drive area. Two privets are in the process of being removed, and about time too. We will be able to see across the road for the first time in a while and people will be able to see our building properly.

8 Chatsworth Way was built in 1890 and retains loads of original features and Victorian character, although it was extended (where our office sits) in the 1980s, while many years as a care home naturally wrought significant changes to the interior of the building.The care home was de-registered in 2010 and now provides supported accommodation for 6 people with learning disabilities.

New employee starts

Rathbone's latest recruit to our Outreach Team, Ariel, started his induction today. He is reading up on policy and procedures, including our staff handbook and accessible customer handbook, learning about the way we work and our expectations of all employees. After gaining a full understanding of the his role within the organisation, Ariel will begin reading the files of the people he will eventually be supporting. Next week Ariel will begin shadowing experienced workers, and being introduced to service users and their families. After a minimum 2 weeks of shadowing we expect Ariel will be ready to start working solo, once he had a formal pre-lone-working supervision with the Service Manager.

Spring is nearly here...

Planned work has begun on the front and rear gardens at Chatsworth Way. Our gardening volunteer bravely spent yesterday (in the snow showers) up a ladder, shaping a Yew tree next to the front drive.

He also tidied up some beds and planted some Camelias. Once the front is ship shape, significant transformation work will begin on the large back garden by a team of professional gardeners. Rathbone sold a portion of overgrown and unused land at the property a couple of years ago, and the funds are being used to make the garden a more fun, interesting, stimulating place, and usable for 12 months of the year. Watch this space...

Welcome to our new blog

Welcome! We hope you find this to be an interesting glimpse behind the scenes at Rathbone.

We have a website, and have several groups who publish their own (blogger) blogs, which can be readily accessed via our website: www.rathbonesociety.org.uk

We think it will be a useful and informative illustration of what we do and why we do it; showing some of the people, personalities and systems we have in place to run a successful, person-centred organisation.

There is a lot of largely unseen hard work which goes into running Rathbone's services, social groups, activities and events.

Here is a picture of one of our meetings earlier today. It won't be the most exciting picture you see on this blog, but it does show some behind the scenes work in progress.