Supporting Community Housing Aotearoa to strengthen capability, consistency, and understanding across the community housing sector.
The Challenge
Community Housing Aotearoa (CHA) exists to strengthen the organisations that support some of New Zealand’s most vulnerable communities. Through its members, CHA helps ensure people have access not only to housing, but also to the stability and support that allows individuals and whānau to thrive.
As the community housing sector continued to grow and evolve, CHA recognised an opportunity to strengthen capability across its member organisations. It wanted to support more consistent approaches to housing management, tenancy support, and professional practice, while also helping members navigate an increasingly complex operating environment.
The challenge was scale and diversity.
CHA’s audience included frontline tenancy managers, housing support workers, operational leaders, and policy professionals. Organisations ranged from large providers with established systems and learning infrastructure to smaller community-based organisations with limited resources and digital capability. Levels of experience, education, literacy, and access to technology varied significantly across the sector.
CHA needed an approach that could deliver consistent learning outcomes while remaining practical, accessible, and relevant to people working in very different contexts. At the same time, it wanted to strengthen understanding of the community housing sector among government and policy stakeholders, helping decision-makers better appreciate the complexity and value of the work being delivered across Aotearoa.
Our Partnership
Synapsys partnered with CHA to design a capability programme that could work across the full diversity of the community housing sector.
Rather than relying on a single learning format, we developed a flexible ecosystem of learning experiences designed to meet learners where they were. Core learning could be accessed through e-learning modules, facilitated workshops, podcasts, mobile-friendly resources, and audio-based content, allowing people to engage in ways that suited their role, environment, and access to technology.
To support long-term adoption, we created practical tools, templates, and facilitation resources that organisations could adapt to their own operating environments. This enabled providers with different levels of organisational maturity to implement learning consistently while retaining flexibility for local needs.
Beyond capability development, we also supported CHA’s wider sector leadership goals. This included creating an interactive infographic and a short animation to help explain the complexity of New Zealand’s community housing system and build greater understanding among government and policy audiences.
The result was an approach designed not simply to deliver learning, but to strengthen capability across an entire sector.
The Impact
CHA now has a scalable capability programme designed to support organisations across the full diversity of the community housing sector.
The programme provides a consistent foundation for capability development while allowing learning to be accessed through multiple formats and adapted to different organisational contexts. This flexibility helps remove common barriers to participation, particularly for organisations with limited resources, varying levels of digital maturity, or geographically dispersed workforces.
Importantly, the programme has established a shared capability framework that can support greater consistency across the sector while remaining responsive to local needs. Alongside the learning programme, the supporting advocacy resources provide new ways to communicate the value and complexity of community housing to government and policy stakeholders.
Together, these resources create a stronger platform for ongoing capability development, sector collaboration, and informed decision-making across New Zealand’s community housing ecosystem.
