Onboarding new staff members is a critical business process made even more challenging during a pandemic. When faced with this situation, Windham & Windsor Housing Trust (WWHT), a community land trust in Brattleboro, Vermont, chose NeighborWorks America online training to provide their new hires with industry updates and resources to help them succeed.
"I have hired two housing counselors during the pandemic. Both passed the HUD certification exam on their first attempt. Getting them onboarded and trained alone, not to mention the HUD certification, would have been impossible without NeighborWorks online training," says Bruce Whitney, director of homeownership for WWHT, a NeighborWorks organization. Both new hires were able to hit the ground running and have made immediate impacts with their work.
Homeownership specialist Kayla Bernier-Wright started work on March 30, 2020, just as businesses were transitioning to work-from-home operations. At the time she came on board, Whitney told her that she was hired to provide homebuyer education, but that he thought they may be pivoting to foreclosure prevention in a big way. It didn't happen immediately, but as COVID-19 foreclosure and eviction moratoriums end, prevention work is now a priority. Over her first three months in her new role, Bernier-Wright took more than a dozen webinar and self-guided trainings to bolster her core industry knowledge and prepare for the HUD certification exam.
The second new hire for WWHT was Marie van Drunen, who filled the housing retention specialist position, fund by a community development block grant. In this role, she helps people with both mortgage and rental assistance. "As early as during the interview process, I let candidates and new hires know that high-quality training will be available," Whitney says. "There's always sort of a 'drinking from the fire hose' experience when you're starting a job, so having all of that training available helped structure it for them."
Since van Drunen's February start date coincided with the start of the NeighborWorks Winter Virtual Training Institute, she spent her first week on the job attending trainings. Within the first three months in her new role, she took eight webinar and self-guided trainings, focusing on building her core knowledge of the latest industry trends and mastering the competencies featured on the HUD certification exam. When Whitney recently asked her what the biggest surprise has been in her new job so far, she responded, "The training. It's so needed and so well done."
WWHT got its start in August of 1987 when a group of interested citizens organized and incorporated
Throughout the pandemic, WWHT has seen a large increase in demand for services, particularly in rental assistance. Whitney says the NeighborWorks training has been instrumental in helping them to respond to the challenges of the pandemic. Much of that training came at no cost, thanks to scholarships. This allowed the staff to take the money they would have spent on training and use it to support the needs of their clients.
NeighborWorks Online Training Scholarships – Underwritten by Wells Fargo
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 address a wide variety of issues and topics related to building capacity and strengthening counseling services, especially related to the COVID-19 pandemic and preparing counselors to take the HUD certification exam.
Beginning in June 2020, the Wells Fargo Foundation partnered with NeighborWorks to provide complimentary scholarships for these trainings. Over the span of a year, the foundation awarded more than 17,000 scholarships.
"The ample scholarships from Wells Fargo are much appreciated, as they allowed us to reallocate our resources and use them to meet our mission, providing direct services. And of course, the training increases the impact we have as we provide those direct services," Whitney says. WWHT is proud that they created over 115 new housing opportunities in 2020. They are continuing to utilize NeighborWorks online training to adapt and improve their services to meet the changing needs of their community.
