September 18, 2003 | Read Time: 2 minutes
The Cisco Systems Foundation, in San Jose, Calif., has awarded a five-year, $2.5-million grant to Community Voice Mail, a charity in Seattle that works with social-service organizations in 37 cities to provide free voice mail to people who do not have telephone service. In addition to the cash award, Cisco is also providing equipment and software worth $54,000, as well as office space and volunteer assistance.
Community Voice Mail started in 1991 as a way to give homeless people a constant telephone number to use as they apply for jobs. Clients receive a local telephone number that connects callers to a voice-mail system. The charity’s clients record their own greetings for their voice mailboxes, which means callers to the system never know the mailbox is part of a charity network. As a result, homeless people can compete for jobs without having to worry about the stigma that often comes with being homeless, organization officials say.
Jennifer Brandon, the charity’s executive director, says having a reliable phone number is “really the difference between having a job interview and a job offer.” She adds: “Employers don’t want to try to call you a second time if there’s no answer.”
The charity’s clients also use the voice-mail service to look for housing, stay in touch with doctors and their children’s teachers, and seek help in escaping a violent domestic situation.
Each of Community Voice Mail’s 37 sites across the country operates its own voice-mail system. But as the organization converts to the Unity voice-mail system that Cisco is donating, it will be able to move all of its sites to a single computer server, which the national office will maintain in Seattle. Centralizing operations will reduce costs for local sites, and should free up employees to spend more time working with clients and spreading the word about the program, charity officials say. In addition, messages in the new system will move over the Internet, rather than over phone lines, which the organization expects will further cut costs.
Community Voice Mail hopes to expand the number of people it serves from 24,000 in 37 cities last year to 65,000 people in 65 cities by the end of 2007.
For more information: Go to http://www.cvm.org.
