Vancouver (BC) Community Voice Mail Launches

We're very pleased to announce that Community Voice Mail is in Canada! We are proud to welcome Lu’ma Native Housing Society, our newest host agency in Vancouver, British Columbia. In just 60 days, Vancouver, BC CVM Manager Jamie Foster has recruited 25 providers of housing, employment, health care and social services in the Downtown Eastside neighborhood. They're in the process now of distributing numbers to their clients who need them, and clients are already checking their messages (we love it when the first calls start coming in for a new site). Listen to Jamie talk about why CVM Vancouver is such a source of community pride, and how it will help people who are homeless and the agencies that serve them.

From Lu’ma Native Housing Society, here's a brief overview of the project:

"The roll-out for this program started in February, 2010 when 25 service providers of housing, employment, healthcare and social services in and around the Downtown Eastside began receiving their banks of 20 DID (direct-inward-dial) local phone numbers. These numbers are then given to clients by the case workers who help them—fortifying these relationships and helping identify client goals."

"Enrollment is easy! The client and case worker sit down together and the client calls their new, local phone number. The client goes through enrollment, recording their own outgoing greeting and setting a new password. The client then walks out the door with a useful tool for self-direction. No longer will they have to rely on message boards and other people to manage their communication."

"Lu’ma Native Housing Society proudly brings this to the Vancouver “Community of Caring” for free. Cisco Systems, Vancouver Foundation, Coast Capital Savings and British Columbia Transmission Corporation are this year’s funders. If your organization helps people who are homeless and/or phoneless and you’d like to get onboard when the next 500 phone numbers are added, CVM project manager Jaime Foster would like to hear from you!"

Full contact information for Vancouver Community Voice Mail is here. All the other CVM locations are here. Want to bring CVM to your community? Here's how.