Together4Bristol : Happy Christmas from the Housing Festival Team

Happy Christmas from the Housing Festival Team

Dear friends and prayer supporters,

We wish you a wonderful festive season ahead, and are so grateful for all of your prayers and support in 2025. As we look back, our team is humbled by the incredible strides taken in our mission to drive systemic change in the social and affordable housing space. We know that we do this by the grace of God - so thank you again for being part of our story.

In 2025, one of our highlights was the New Homes in New Ways exhibition and Summit at the Building Centre in London. Our work had already started to shift to a national focus, but to host an exhibition highlighting the deficit of social rent homes and temporary accommodation crisis in the centre of London felt significant. We were able to widely share the thesis of the Social Rent Housing at Pace Playbook, which was the work of 60 organisations working towards solutions to these problems. Many of these organisations and more gathered for the New Homes in New Ways Summit, and it is encouraging to see the appetite for solutions and willingness to collaborate.

In another significant highlight, Jez is now involved in testing some of the Playbook thesis in a national pilot programme called the Small Sites Aggregator being led by MHCLG.

Our team has been talking for some time about the need for a Community of Practice that could drive lasting change over time. We were therefore delighted when the opportunity arose to join forces with our friends at Building Better to form the Building Better: Community of Practice, which launched this October. We're now welcoming professionals from across the social and affordable housing ecosystem to join this community to drive collaborative action, and we're very excited for what this will mean in 2026. Please do keep the Community of Practice in your prayers as it grows.

We are pleased to say that Andrew welcomed his new son, Jesse, into the world last month. Jessie Wilde and Jessie Hayden are both also expecting new additions in the next couple of months, so do keep us all in your prayers, the new parents and the team members that will feel the absence in such a small team during our maternity leave!

Finally, our team has been reading Jon Tyson's Creative Minority together over the past few months, and have been freshly impacted by the call to redemptive participation. I have written a few statements from the book below that I feel capture who we aspire to be - and I hope it inspires you in your own life, work and journey as you partner with God to see his kingdom come.

The Creative Minority aims to:

Live from the revelation of the full story of God’s redemption - not just salvation but restoration of all things.
Live as heirs called into the work of redeeming God’s good creation wherever we are.
Contribute to the world by sharing hopeful vision of redemptive participation.
Live set apart from the prevailing culture of this age to answer the deeper longings of a generation.
Step into the brokenness of the world and release a prophetic imagination about what life can be like.
Live with an integrity of faith that is not just embodied in doctrinal statements but in actions.
Make the gospel visible through the quality of our lives and work.