Good afternoon everyone.

A lovely, sunny bright (but cold) afternoon here at Fortunatus Housing Solutions.

We are all looking forward to Christmas and the Christmas Break. Although Fortunatus Housing Solutions is open to our tenants 24 hours, 365 days of the year, we have lovely firm called SPS who take care of our out of hours service. That means the rest of us can take a well-earned break and enjoy some quality time with our families.

Our Christmas decorations will be going up in the office on the 1st December, we are waiting until our Events Manager Sara’s birthday has been celebrated (29th November) and then the festivities can be begin.

November was a busy month, with our annual audit taking place (for the purposes of the charities commission) for a whole week. We had the lovely Tom and Stuart from Watkinson Black accountants on site and thankfully sailed through the audit.

My husband Julian (our Finance Manager) is sporting a rather jaunty moustache for November, as is our Health and Safety/Transport/Health and Safety Officer Gareth Langhorn and Ian Foster, one of our housing support officers.

I personally will be glad to see the back of Julian’s moustache, he currently looks like an extra in a World War I film.

November also saw the annual IRRV dinner dance in Chesterfield for the West Midlands Association. Julian and I attended along with some other Executive members to represent the Lancashire and Cheshire association and we stayed in probably one of the nicest hotels we’ve ever stayed in – The Casa Hotel in Chesterfield. Owned by a local business man, who also owns Global Brands, distributors of Amigos and Hooch beers. Julian was very happy to see Amigos on draught 🙂

I also appeared on stage in amateur dramatics as the Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz and landed a part playing the Wicked stepmother in Cinderella in February 2015 (typecast methinks)

The launch of our App ‘Engage’ is around the corner, we awaiting registration with Apple before we can encourage people to use it and with a free download and easily accessible forms, we know our tenants will be able to engage an interact with us via another medium that may suit them better than face to face or telephone contact.

Exciting times ahead!!

Catherine

Hello again and welcome to my blog.

I’m sat looking out of the office at a dark and dingy afternoon and can’t believe that it’s so dark and rainy. It doesn’t seem two minutes until we were still having sunny afternoons and sunny evenings.

Things have been really busy here this week. We’ve moved quite a few new tenants into properties, which means more vulnerable adults have been given homes for life and become part of our Fortunatus family.

Rachel, our Operations Manager is due to go on maternity leave at Christmas and is rushing around trying to get as many moves and problems sorted out as possible. We’ve just been feeling her bump to see if we can guess how big the baby is going to be!!!

Our Events Manager Sara is working hard on finishing her Introductory Certificate in Fundraising and has just sent in her last assignment. She is then starting on fundraising for our Coffee and Chat events and we’ll be announcing exciting news about a Unity Lottery, an online giving page and our new app very soon.

Christmas is round the corner and with November in full swing, our management accountant (my husband), our Transport and Warehouse Manager and one of our Housing Support Officer’s are all growing moustaches to raise awareness about men’s health this month.

Back to work now and thanks for reading!

Hello

My name is Catherine Nicholson and this is my very first blog.

I am the Managing Director of a small company in the North West of England. We house vulnerable adults with mental health problems in the community and offer then a Home For Life as long as they are in need of our services.

A bit about me…..I am 48 years old and have worked in Local Government all my life until 3 years ago when I decided to set up Fortunatus Housing Solutions

It has been an emotional journey and one that I didn’t always think would work out.

I will be updating my blog regularly to tell you about the journey to today and the exciting things that are happening now.

I hope you can follow me on this adventure

xxx