Member Profile: Dwell Housing Trust

Dwell Housing Trust (Dwell) provides affordable, quality homes to people on low to moderate incomes.  They provide a range of housing services including supported housing for people experiencing mental illness, group living for single people, general needs affordable rental housing and has recently launched a shared home ownership programme for first home buyers.

Dwell currently manages around 70 tenancies, housing approximately 150 people in properties Dwell both leases and owns.  Dwell is in the process of building and purchasing 14 additional new homes with eight for their pilot shared home ownership programme.

Dwell works alongside an extensive local network of support and service providers. Dwell is more than a landlord ensuring their tenants have access to the support they need and want to “live well, do well and be well”. 

In 2013 Director Alison Cadman was awarded a Winston Churchill Fellowship to travel to Australia, the UK and USA to study the growth of not-for-profit social housing organisations – the growth in the provision of social and affordable housing by not-for-profit organisations has significantly changed the landscape of social housing in the UK and now increasingly in Australia. Alison’s report “Unravelling Housing” looks at how the scaling up of these organisations through government financial investment, the transfer of stock, and other initiatives has proved to be a highly successful method of increasing the quality and supply of social and affordable housing – evidence-based experience New Zealand can learn from.

Read Alison’s report “Unravelling Housing” here.

Read more about Dwell Housing Trust on their website www.dwell.org.nz