Staff
Karen Simonsen has just joined the Zebra team in the new post of Property and Facilities Administration Manager. Karen has worked in student housing at the University of London and at the International Lutheran Student Centre, where the focus was on international students – so she brings a lot of very useful experience to us. We have introduced the new post of Property and Facilities Administration Manager to improve our maintenance service and give greater clarity and coherence to all the functions around our buildings. She will also be involved in lots of other projects. Residents will get to know her because she will be dealing with their repairs.
Covid-19
At the time of writing, we are in the middle of a third phase of the pandemic. Infections, hospitalisations, and mortality rates remain high, although hopefully are now reducing, and the vaccines are also being rolled out rapidly.
New rules on travel have just been introduced and we strongly recommend that residents consult the government website https://www.gov.uk/uk-border-control before considering any international travel. Steve is regularly in contact with residents updating you all on the domestic scene and how we can all protect ourselves and our fellow residents.
We’ve scaled back the scope of the maintenance service to just dealing with emergency repairs, repairs that might endanger the health or well-being of residents, repairs which left would cause deterioration of the building, health and safety priorities and work to vacant flats. Staff mostly work alone at separate locations or are provided with appropriate PPE if it is necessary to work with a colleague.
If we have to go into an occupied flat, we risk assess the job beforehand and discuss what we are going to do with the resident.
Please remember that the new email address for all maintenance is repairs@zebrahousing.com
Our priority remains the safety and security of our residents.
Social Programme
We are re-scheduling our annual Garden Party – making it a late summer event – so we are thinking of a mid-September date. Here’s hoping! And again, hopefully this will be the start of a new social programme!
Wardens and deputy wardens
Please remember that our wardens are there to deal with emergencies, particularly out of normal working hours – evenings and weekends. However, they can also help residents with advice and information during the pandemic.
If you have an emergency, outside of normal working hours, you should contact your warden, who keeps a list of emergency telephone numbers and contacts. If you cannot locate your warden, or in their absence your deputy warden, and it is an emergency requiring the police, ambulance, or fire service then they should ring 999 and give details of the situation.
Our Wardens have been incredibly helpful to us over the last year and we are very grateful to them.
Scheme Meetings
Steve is organising meetings with groups of residents at individual schemes by Zoom. We want to find out what your concerns are, to see if we can help out, and what our priorities should be next year. It would be particularly good to hear from new residents.
A Final Word
Whilst just under 90% of our flat are occupied we are looking for new residents. Clearly it’s difficult getting into or out of the UK currently so we are now taking applications from UK post grad and post-doctoral students and have housed a few already.
If you know anyone who is a full-time student studying at a London university and fits our criteria please let them know about us.
