Passionate about Communities (Midland Heart Housing)

This short history traces the origins of Midland Heart to the 1920s when, as Copec, it first became ‘passionate about communities’, improving slum housing in Birmingham and campaigning for clearance. The history portrays developments in the inter-war period and beyond into the 1950s and 1960s, when a range of other housing associations - Coventry Churches HA, Midland Area HA, Wolverhampton HA, and Birmingham Housing Trust, were created as part of the response to the Shelter homeless campaign.

The book then depicts how these associations, alongside others created in the 1970s and 1980s, such as Normid, Shape, Harambee/Black Star and HAMAC, went through a series of mergers to create two large housing association groupings - Keynote based in Coventry and Prime Focus in Birmingham - that met changing community needs and increasing stakeholder expectations through innovation and promoting diversity of provision. These two groups came together to form Midland Heart in April 2006.

Eighty years on, the book describes how Midland Heart was created as a major social business, managing 32,000 homes with a value of £1.1 billion. It shows how Midland Heart is not only an historical product of like-minded organisations long in the making, but also a new and energetic organisation that is planning ambitiously for its next eighty years - Midland Heart is developing 2,000 new homes, investing an extra £10 million in the Midlands’ most disadvantaged communities, increasing customer satisfaction, and integrating its multi-million neighbourhood services. Midland Heart is still ‘passionate about communities’, supporting ambition, encouraging imagination, putting customers first, empowering people and communities, and promoting inclusiveness across the Midlands region.