Imagine searching for a job or a place to live without a telephone
when the first question you hear is "How can I reach you?"
Community VoiceMail provides the homeless and at-risk in Santa Clara County with access to personal, reliable telecommunications to connect to opportunities for jobs, housing and stability.
As one client, a formerly homeless disabled mother of three, told us, "I believe having our own private VoiceMail box helped us immensely because landlords heard my voice, not some motel operator or our friends' answering machine."
When a client was recently handed a card with her VoiceMail phone number on it, her demeanor completely changed - she beamed - and she said "Is this really mine? I haven't had anything that was really mine in a long time. Now I can go find a place to live and get a phone."
Community Technology Alliance provides the technical infrastructure shared by over thirty public and nonprofit organizations that serve the homeless and those at risk, including school districts, shelters, job training programs, medical service providers and domestic violence shelters, so that staff at these agencies are better able to concentrate on helping clients become self sufficient -- without duplication of effort or technology. We work very closely with case managers at partnering agencies and provide, along with the necessary technology, ongoing training on how to best identify appropriate clients and to assist those clients in using the technology to achieve their personal goal -- usually to find housing and/or employment. We report to case managers each month on each client's VoiceMail activity, as an indication that clients are working towards their goal. With two state-of-the-art voicemail systems in Mountain View and San Jose, and an 800 number for South County clients, we offer VoiceMail to clients throughout the 1,312 square mile Santa Clara County without incurring toll charges.
Once their new phone number is active, users can check messages from anywhere that works for them: pay phones, social service agencies, or the homes of friends and family. A Community VoiceMail number looks like any other local telephone number and therefore does not signal the client's status as homeless or phoneless. Once goals are achieved, the phone number is recycled to another client in need. In this way, a single voice mailbox number can be used two or three times per calendar year.
Last year, 64% of the 408 clients that used VoiceMail as a tool towards self-sufficiency reached their predetermined goal of finding housing, employment or both.
When assigned their VoiceMail number, seventy percent of our clients were homeless and sixty-seven percent had no income. Twenty-one percent used their VoiceMail number to connect to health care. Sixty-eight percent used the tool to connect with friends and family.
We are a founding member of the national Community VoiceMail Federation. Through a unique partnership between the National Community Voice Mail federation (CVM) and Cisco Systems, Community Technology Alliance is one of two programs chosen to pilot Cisco's VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) technology to better serve our clients while reducing operating costs. More information about the CVM/Cisco partnership can be found at www.CVM.org.
Produced by Community Technology Alliance
115 East Gish Road, Suite 222
San Jose, CA 95112
Tel: 408-437-8800 Fax: 408-437-9169
Copyright © 2008 - All Rights Reserved
