The Community Housing School (Housing School) is a bold initiative to unify the sector around a pan-Canadian agenda for the advancement of community housing sector workers’ professional development.
For too long access to high quality professional development has been a challenge. With growing demand for too few offerings, gaps in learning opportunities, and a lack of national recognition for professionals across Canada the ability of the community housing sector to retain and grow its workforce capacity has faced numerous hurdles.
The goal of the Housing School is to bring a cohesive, efficient, and impactful answer to this challenge. It aims to achieve four objectives:
- Become the go-to destination for sector professionals seeking to build and obtain recognition for their expertise.
- Act as a catalyst for strengthening professional skills and abilities of the sector.
- Act as venue for establishing sectoral standards of practice.
- Support community housing educators across Canada.
The Housing School will offer four initial services to educators and learners alike:
- Certification processes establishing the value of the current and upcoming offerings, starting with greater access to the Chartered Institute of Housing Canada’s home for professional standards in housing, with more to follow.
- An online learning platform provided at low or no-cost to trainers so they can concentrate on content rather than IT development.
- A unified portal, generating standardized registrations and report cards, issuing certificates, and generating individual and organizational training plans and reports (time, attendance, results, costs, etc.), allowing users to navigate and compare the offer between service providers and feedback from previous attendees.
- A data collection tool, allowing partners to see the overall training offer, identify missing pieces, and detect the successful formulas as well as the not-so-successful to better assist trainers to improve their offerings.
These services are just a start and will grow as our collective strengths grow. The Housing School will be guided by an Education Committee made up of representatives from leading sectoral organizations. The Housing School is a solution by the sector for the sector.
The Centre and CHRA in partnership with CIH want to build the Housing School with YOU!
We welcome your input!
Next Steps:
- Please provide your contact information if you would like to receive future updates about the Housing School and the future pilot launch in Fall 2024.
2. Reach out if you have questions or concerns. And feel free to tell us what you want to see as part of your Housing School or professional development needs. This input will help us to build a better future for the sector’s workforce.
3. Partnership opportunities: The Centre is actively seeking partnerships with Indigenous communities, governments, funders, sectoral organizations, and education content providers to support the Housing Schools’ development. The Center invites organizations to reach out to discuss partnership opportunities.
