Last week, as part of a working visit to the Netherlands, Managing Director Jacquil Pandt and Supervisory Board President Monica Smith sat down with the team at NabijWonen, a Dutch housing corporation based in Doorn, for a day of conversation about social housing — what works, what's hard, and what two organisations an ocean apart might learn from each other. Joining the delegation was Elizabeth Jones, a Policy Advisor for Statia Government, whom SHF had invited along for the visit.
On paper, SHF and NabijWonen could hardly look more different. NabijWonen manages thousands of homes across the Utrechtse Heuvelrug; SHF manages 113 on an island of roughly eight square miles. One operates inside a mature Dutch regulatory system; the other is still working toward formal recognition as a Toegelaten Instelling (a legally registered social housing institution) under the Woningwet BES. And yet, as the conversation went on, a familiar shape kept appearing beneath the differences.
Common ground, despite the distance
Much of the day centred on three questions every housing organisation eventually has to answer: how do you build and hold together a real community, not just a collection of rented homes? How do you honestly assess demand when a waiting list keeps growing? And how do you finance construction and renovation when the money involved rarely comes from one source alone?
On that last point in particular, the conversation felt close to home. SHF's own renovation work is financed by VRO, the Dutch Ministry of Housing and Spatial Planning, while the Rent Subsidy programme runs through the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations — a web of partners that NabijWonen's own financing structure, despite its different scale, clearly recognised.
“Geographically far apart, but the moment you actually talk to each other, it turns out how close we really are.”
That line, shared by the NabijWonen team at the end of the visit, captured the day well. Housing associations managing a few dozen homes and those managing thousands are, in the end, solving the same basic problem: how to give people a stable, decent place to live, inside whatever constraints the system hands them.
Why these visits matter
For SHF, conversations like this one are part of a broader effort happening across the current Netherlands working visit — building the relationships and practical know-how that support our push toward TI status, and bringing back ideas that could genuinely help on Sint Eustatius: how larger organisations structure tenant communication, manage waiting lists fairly, and blend multiple funding sources into one coherent renovation plan.
Our thanks go to the full team at NabijWonen for hosting us, and to BMC, Marcel, and Henk for helping make the visit happen.