Embed colleague-led learning in your organisation with a CIH Club. This organisational forum connects staff at all levels, focusing on the knowledge and skills important to your teams. Supported by CIH but owned by you, it's a development tool that demonstrates your organisation's commitment to growth, professionalism and CPD.
What a CIH Club can achieve
A CIH Club is a key way of supporting professional standards by ensuring colleagues keep their knowledge up to date through continuous professional development. We all have a duty in the sector to share knowledge where we see the opportunities to.
Your CIH Club can:
- Maintain professional standards: Keep your colleagues' knowledge current and relevant
- Stay ahead of sector developments: Get expert insights on policy changes, best practice, and CIH initiatives
- Foster collaborative problem-solving: Create an open forum where staff share challenges and solutions across your organisation
- Shape CIH's priorities: Feed-back on what matters most to your organisation and region
- Maximise your CIH membership: Help colleagues fully understand and navigate the benefits available to them
- Grow CIH membership: Demonstrate your organisation’s commitment to professionalism by growing membership and ensuring all members harness its value
- Career development: Support apprentices and students with peer learning and collaborative study environments
Abri | CIH Club attendee
The CIH Club gives me the opportunity to stay connected to our purpose within housing and gain an understanding of what’s happening across the sector. I always feel like my enthusiasm gets a new burst of energy afterwards.
How CIH will support your club:
- Help you form an agenda
- Support you in sourcing expert speakers on topics that your colleagues want to learn about
- Make sure your colleagues get the most from their CIH membership
- Submit your feedback on wider CIH products that come out of club discussions
- Create promotional materials for your CIH Club.
- Seek executive team sponsorship of your CIH Club. This will help highlight that learning and sharing knowledge is an important part of your culture within your organisation
- Where possible, ensure responsibility for the CIH Club initiative sits with two colleagues – your CIH Club Champions. This provides support to these staff members and helps to sustain the success of the club
- Take the opportunity to shadow another CIH Club in advance of setting up your own. Existing CIH Club Champions are open to others taking part to observe and learn in advance of committing to your own club
- Set dates well in advance to maximise attendance. We recommend holding clubs every two months. Encourage attendance as an investment in colleagues’ learning and development from the organisation
- Encourage participants to ‘vote’ or give ideas for topics they wish to hear about to gain more engagement from colleagues
- Build in the opportunity at each CIH Club to discuss CIH membership to ensure colleagues are using their membership productively
- With your CIH engagement manager, agree at an early point what your mutual measures of success will be.
CIH and your CIH Club Champions work together. Evaluation of success is measured in areas, such as:
- Regular attendance and engagement with the CIH Club
- An increase in knowledge and awareness as a result of participation
- CIH membership growth and retention in the organisation
- Participant satisfaction with topics covered
- Increased engagement with CIH through sharing case studies and good practice examples
- Participants and others talking positively and publicly about their CIH Club experience.
Aspire Housing embraced the concept of a CIH Club four years ago and it has been going from strength to strength ever since. Their meetings incorporate ‘a view from the region’ alongside wider policy updates from guest speakers.
Their CIH Club is open to both CIH members and non-members. Aspire Housing is currently theming each of their CIH Clubs around the CIH professional standards; their most recent meeting focused on the standard ‘Advocacy’, as well as the current presidential campaign, CHOOSE Housing which encourages housing as a career of choice.
The regular club at Abri has covered topics including the Renters Rights Bill, Better Social Housing Review, the Grenfell Inquiry report, professional standards, and Awaab’s Law.
What's next for CIH Clubs
We’ll continue to raise awareness of CIH Clubs and encourage organisations to take up the initiative. We want to see the number of CIH Clubs increasing across all nations.
We’re continually reviewing how they work and how we can efficiently resource the growth of the Clubs for housing organisations. We’re also excited to be exploring ways of bringing individual CIH Clubs together, so that CIH Club Champions can learn from one another, share ideas and jointly host CIH Club sessions on shared areas of interest.
See what a CIH membership can do for you
As a CIH member you will gain professional recognition across the sector and gain access to the latest sector-leading knowledge and best practice in housing policy, free attendance our events, discounted training, and much more.
Member benefits
