In Western Maine, Marjorie Millett is often face-to-face with clients. But not this year. When the pandemic forced many housing counselors and financial coaches like Millett to switch to Zoom, she and her organization faced the daunting challenge to continue providing their services in an online-only format.
"The struggle here is: We're in Maine," says Millett, senior financial coach and educator for Community Concepts Finance Corp. (CCFC), a subsidiary of Community Concepts, a NeighborWorks organization. "We have a lot of clients who are in rural areas and don't have great internet access, so we're still struggling with trying to keep and get them engaged."
To meet the challenge, the small staff in the CCFC office made two key decisions: to make their homebuyer education and other classes available online as soon as possible and to increase their organizational capacity. They chose to receive training from NeighborWorks America, an organization very familiar to Millett.
NeighborWorks America is the nation's leading trainer of community-development and affordable-housing professionals, awarding more than 18,000 certificates in fiscal year 2020. NeighborWorks has developed a strong curriculum of online courses that specifically address a wide variety of issues and topics related to COVID-19. Beginning in June 2020, the Wells Fargo Foundation has partnered with NeighborWorks to provide complimentary scholarships for these trainings. To date, more than 9,000 scholarships have been awarded.
This past August, Millett attended the first-ever NeighborWorks Virtual Training Institute (VTI). She took as many of the COVID-19-related trainings as she could. The VTI attracted 1,301 people, and the COVID-19 offerings were among the most popular. The timely, relevant content was a key factor in attracting 432 new attendees who had never participated in a NeighborWorks training before.
"At NeighborWorks, we strive to create time-relevant training to meet the needs of the field of community development. It is because of this focus that we quickly pivoted to offering a more robust set of online offerings to meet the community's needs, especially amid the pandemic," says Cristi Ford, senior vice president of training for NeighborWorks America. "As we work to continue to be a trainer of choice with online-relevant trainings, we are always looking for new ways to be more inclusive and thoughtful of the communities we serve."
NeighborWorks training has helped Millett deal with what she was seeing in her Maine community. For two months, her organization cancelled all their classes as they tried to regroup as the pandemic hit. "We had to pivot all of our homebuyer education classes to online, which were typically always in-person, and so that was a big challenge," she says.
The COVID-19-related trainings offered tips on how to better interact to keep clients engaged when they weren't sitting across the table from one another. Millett says those tips have been especially helpful. One class, Counseling Solutions for Vulnerable Populations and Homelessness amid COVID-19, was especially helpful because it focused on how to help older clients, a key demographic for her work.
Another class that was particularly helpful was Effectively Managing Money and Debt During COVID-19. "I loved how they broke down the budget really well, saying ‘Hey, this has gotta go, it's not a basic need right now,'" she says. The class will also be helpful in shaping the online version of CCFC's Seeking Change money management course.
"We're in the middle of fuel assistance time, so the fuel assistance folks can qualify for a credit on their electricity bill by taking my class and having follow-up sessions one-on-one." Millett says that's a key money-saving program for many of her clients during Maine's cold winters.
NeighborWorks online training scholarships – underwritten by the Wells Fargo Foundation
The complimentary online training scholarships underwritten by Wells Fargo have been key to CCFC's small staff building capacity and preparing to serve clients as the challenges of the COVID-19 crisis continue. In anticipation of the heavier case load, CCFC's part-time staff member took several NeighborWorks America online COVID-related courses for free, including Remote Homeownership Counseling amid the COVID-19 Crisis, Counseling Solutions for Vulnerable Populations and Homelessness Amid COVID-19, and Effectively Managing Money and Debt During the COVID-19 Financial Crisis. "She's been taking courses the last couple of months. Our administrative assistant was also able to take the Foreclosure Basics online course with a scholarship, so she can be ready if and when those floodgates open, to be able to triage them and know how to serve clients better." It's going to have to be "all hands on deck," she says.
With the increased workload, it's imperative to stay fresh to manage the change in working conditions, so their administrative assistant also used a NeighborWorks America scholarship from Wells Fargo to attend a Stress Management for Counselors webinar training.
Like many NeighborWorks organizations, Millett expects to see more foreclosure clients in spring. To prepare, she recently completed the Best Practices to Improve Your Foreclosure Intervention Counseling Program self-guided training offered by NeighborWorks – again utilizing a Wells Fargo scholarship to take the course.
The scholarships funded by Wells Fargo have enabled CCFC to better serve their clients, strengthen their organization, and be prepared for COVID-19-related challenges. Without the scholarships, this amount of training simply would not have been possible due to time and cost restraints.
Although internet connectivity has been a challenge for some of her clients, remote learning has also provided opportunity. "I actually think that doing our homebuyer education classes by Zoom may not change. We've had astronomical numbers," Millett says. Before COVID-19, in-person trainings would be held in a neighboring county, and people would have to travel anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours to attend the trainings. Millett even recounts a time when a couple stayed overnight in a hotel so that they could attend a training the following day.
It all comes back to training
Previously a dispatcher for 17 years, Millett attended her first NeighborWorks America training a couple months after she was hired at CCFC as the foreclosure prevention counselor in 2015. She quickly earned her certification in homeownership counseling and took her foreclosure prevention course. She has been a regular participant in NeighborWorks training ever since.
Millett earned her HUD Housing Counselor certification in 2018. In preparation, she attended a NeighborWorks HUD Certification Preparation place-based training in September 2018. She took the exam two months later in November. "I said, ‘Ok, I just had this course and it's fresh in my mind.' I passed my first time," she says. Millett and her supervisor also finished the Financial Capability Intensive Training, and they're using information and tools from that training to revamp their Seeking Change money management workshop. Millett is currently one class away from receiving her financial capability certification.
"Everything that I've gotten for where I am now, most of the training—well, actually all of it—came from NeighborWorks," Millett says. "It has really had such an impact on my career."
"The faculty doing the trainings are amazing. You feel welcome, they always make you feel like they know you, and you're not just a number," Millett says. "It's a nice feeling when you attend a [now virtual] NeighborWorks training."
Millett says her organization's mission is to help clients dissect their financial choices and ensure their financial security. They need tools, she says. Her job is to see that they get them. She feels she's met that goal when clients come back to her after they've bought a home to tell her they'd learned the right things.
"I had a pre-purchase client that I was working with for about a year and a half, and in July she was able to purchase her home," she says. "She and her two daughters live there." The client found a place in the district where her oldest daughter was already attending school, so there was limited upheaval when they moved. The family loves pets and they often foster dogs. "Their dream was to have a house so they could have as many pets as they wanted. Now their home is full of dogs—their last foster was pregnant and gave birth to nine puppies," Millett says.
Millett's dream is to help more people, and the NeighborWorks online training scholarships from Wells Fargo are providing thousands of housing counselors, affordable housing and community development professionals like Millett the opportunity to learn new skills, enhance their community impact and make that dream a reality.
Many of the courses that helped Millett will be available during NeighborWorks America's Winter Virtual Training Institute.
02/15/2021
