Our mission is to build successful, sustainable and diverse communities by providing housing and well-being services in a culturally sensitive way to our current and our future customers.
Nehemiah has a portfolio of 1100 properties serving the multicultural African Caribbean, Asian, Irish and European communities within the West Midlands. The Association provides homes for single people, families, couples and elderly people in Birmingham, Coventry, Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall and Wolverhampton.
As a landlord, we pride ourselves on being accountable and accessible to the communities we serve. As a support and wellbeing provider, we assist people to obtain and maintain tenancies, and make a major contribution in the prevention of homelessness. We have responded to the needs of our customers by providing large homes for those with extended families, specially designed homes for people with disabilities or specific religious/cultural needs, and energy efficient homes to minimise the impact of fuel poverty.
Nehemiah is committed to serving the community and aims to build it into a thriving social unit in which people of all ethnic backgrounds feel at home and valued. The provision of good, affordable housing is the platform from which the Association has committed itself to the community at large, conveying the idea of value and a sense of caring.
History
In the 1980s growing housing needs, urban deprivation and an aging African-Caribbean population posed problems, exacerbated by riots in Handsworth in 1981 and 1985. The African-Caribbean community through a variety of churches responded with the creation of the Nehemiah and United Churches Housing Association (UCHA) in 1989. Nehemiah took its name from the biblical rebuilder of Jerusalem.
Throughout the 1990s Nehemiah and UCHA begin to develop sheltered schemes for black elders and family housing and accommodation for singles. Nehemiah expanded into Wolverhampton. UCHA worked across Birmingham including Moseley and Kingstanding.
Nehemiah then went on to develop further in Wolverhampton, Walsall and Dudley with mainly sheltered schemes. UCHA spread further into inner city Birmingham and into Smethwick. Both increasingly offered services, ‘more than bricks and mortar’, to more diverse client groups and to aid their respective communities.
Following discussion with Black Star and HAMAC, which were subsequently subsumed into a mainstream housing association, Nehemiah and UCHA merged in 2007. The new Nehemiah United Churches Housing Association’s mission was ‘create successful diverse communities’. From 2010 Nehemiah UCHA expanded further into community ventures while developing housing steadily for a variety of general and special needs.
We introduced a Customer Engagement Framework and established the Nehemiah UCHA Academy and Charitable Aid Foundation in 2013. We also started to cater for the Irish community with the transfer of properties from Central & Cecil Housing Trust in 2014.
