CVM...M? CVM Going Mobile

We provide free voice mail boxes to lower-income and homeless people who don't have a reliable phone number of their own. Our service and our clients are more successful when people check their messages frequently, to hear broadcast messages about jobs, messages from case managers about housing, and messages from friends and loved ones. We've asked our clients, and most of them (71%) find free phones to check their voice mail, or use payphones (19%). More often than not, this means that our clients are only checking their messages when they happen to be at a social service agency, and only when that agency happens to be open. Or, when they happen to find a payphone when more than 15% of all payphones disappeared in a single year (2007). I've talked with clients who had to take two buses just to find a phone. When phone access isn't ubiquitous, our service suffers, and so do our clients.

Last month, I wrote about mobile phones and poverty, and how we were embarking on a plan to bring lower-cost mobile phones to our clients. In addition to a lot of research about carriers, handsets and the economics of the industry, we've also started asking our clients what they want us to do. In mid-October, we organized a meeting with 11 Los Angeles CVM clients who own mobile phones, and spent a couple of hours gathering some great insight. Here are some of the important things we learned:

• First and foremost, although they all own mobile phones, every attendee said that their Community Voice Mail number is their main number, the one they give out to potential employers and others. They count on this reliable number in a way that they can't with their mobile number; if they can't pay for their mobile phone in a given month, the service can go away. Or, the phone could be lost, stolen or damaged. The CVM number, however, is always there.

• Most of the attendees use prepaid phones as opposed to phones requiring a monthly or yearly contract. This makes sense; prepaid allows them to add minutes to their phones when they can afford to, and there's no requirement to have an address or a credit card. Because prepaid is more expensive on a per-minute basis, our clients use their mobile minutes very judiciously; they don't give their mobile number out to just anyone, but reserve its use for returning important calls or staying in touch with family and others who can help them.

• "Cheaper minutes" was at the top of the list of what they'd like to see in a mobile phone program for CVM clients. Most prepaid services also carry a $1/day use fee (i.e. you get charged $1 on any day you actually use the phone, in addition to the minutes you use), and understandably, this wasn't very popular. Most were using very basic phones; cameras, MP3 players and other things weren't that important to this group. They just want a low-cost phone that works.

• All the attendees had email addresses, but only two accessed email on their phone, most likely because of the additional cost. We've found that about 59% of our clients nationally have email addresses, and we're going to try to make a lower-cost data plan and Internet-enabled handset part of our program. Our clients access computers primarily at libraries or at social service agencies, so access to the Internet is almost as inconvenient as access to a phone. We want to be able to send voice, email and text messages to our clients, and point them to web resources that they can instantly access. Some may say this is an extravagance for low-income people; we believe it's cheaper to provide an Internet-enabled phone to people who may be a long way away from PC ownership.

With this information, and a lot of thinking by CVM Managers around the country, we plan to implement a handful of projects around the country beginning in early 2009 that will help bring mobile phones to CVM clients. With 40,000 clients using CVM, and more than 2,000 agencies in 46 cities distributing numbers, we have the capacity to deliver a decent niche market to the right carrier. Tied to the CVM voice mail service, we believe the impact of this program will be of huge benefit to our clients as they move out of poverty and crisis.

Please post a comment if you have any thoughts about how we can bring mobile phones to our low-income and homeless clients. Email me if you'd like to help.

Phoneless Veterans

When I talk about Community Voice Mail, I sometimes find myself reverting to the simplistic view of what we do and who we serve: "We provide free voice mail boxes to homeless people." The reality is a lot more complex, and as it's Veterans Day, I wanted to write about the thousands of veterans who are using Community Voice Mail to improve their lives.

We ask for a lot of information from our clients, and below is some of the data about the more than 4,000 veterans who have used our service in the past few years. These statistics in no way captures the breadth of the veterans population we serve, but some of the data is astounding:

• 90% are male, and about 10% are female. We've provided voice mail to at least 7 transgender vets.

• 61% are between the ages of 45-69, with 31% between 26-44. Only 2% are younger than 25, and as soldiers return from Iraq and Afghanistan, we hope these numbers stay low.

• 27% have a disabling condition, presumably as a direct result of their military service.

• 71% tell us they have no monthly income at all, while 26% make less than $1,000 a month.

• Half are Black/African-American, 45% identify as White, and the rest are American Indian/Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander or Asian.

• 10% report having children as dependents, with at least 731 total kids dependent on our clients. Community Voice Mail is often a resource for entire families.

• 47% of those who identify as "homeless" live in emergency shelters , while 34% live in transitional housing and 15% live on the street.

• 17% have provided us with their email addresses, which we use to send messages about jobs, housing, events, and other local resources. It's likely that a higher percentage of these veterans use email; based on other client surveys, we estimate that 59% of our total clients have email addresses.

• When our clients are provided with a voice mail box, we ask them what their goals are for using the service. 87% of our veteran clients have goals related to employment, 73% list housing, and 58% list health care or social services. For those vets who reported an outcome to us, approximately 65% said they had achieved their goals, and 95% told us that having a Community Voice Mail box was either "very helpful" or "somewhat helpful" in this pursuit.

The US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) estimates that 154,000 veterans are homeless on any given night, with perhaps twice as many experiencing homelessness over the course of the year. The number of homeless Vietnam era veterans is actually greater than the number of service persons who died during that war. It is estimated that veterans account for 23% of all homeless people in America.

Most veterans, of course, are not homeless or in danger of becoming so. Especially on this day, however, it's important to remember that nearly 1/3 of the homeless people you see on the streets where you live have worn a uniform and served this country.

If you'd like to hear the story of a particularly inspiring veteran who uses Community Voice Mail as a tool to rebuild his life, I suggest you listen to this.

We're proud to be able to help...

"Advice for the New Paupers"

In a previous post, I wondered how people who find themselves newly poor will learn how to navigate the social services that might help them. Asking one of my CVM colleagues this question, I was told "things tend to crumble, not collapse, for those entering poverty," which seems pretty close to the mark. It's not often the case that someone suddenly finds themselves broke, homeless and on the streets; it's more likely that they live just above the line but dip beneath it for periods of time as they encounter more problems. Assuming people in this position can get specific help (with a job, housing, etc.), it may be that they can avoid the kind of poverty that leads to homelessness.

Jon Dolan recently published an excellent article on Alternet called "5 Pieces of Advice for the New Paupers" describing his experiences living in poverty. The article doesn't go into a lot of detail about what caused this descent (in his case, a three-month process), but instead focuses on what he learned once he got there. It's a fascinating and scary article, covering everything from the primacy of warmth and why it's necessary to be somewhat pushy at food banks, to the way your sense of shame fades once you've experienced cold and hunger and how you eventually won't mind the smells anymore because everyone smells.

Dolan describes the bitterness you'll feel living like this, and how you have to find a way to shut that off. After describing a job interview that didn't go too well, he says

After months of being a bum, I was the wrong volume, the wrong temperature....You'll find that if you want to get back into that quiet, odor-free, polite world, you're going to have to decompress for a few months. What happened to us is that we fled, found a basement apartment on borrowed money, and stayed there, keeping the heat on high for months. Then we were ready to try again for a job.

This article, and the many follow-up comments, are worth reading. Let's hope those slipping into poverty find their right volume, their right temperature.

Mobile Phones and Poverty

Today is Blog Action Day (see my previous post about this), with the focus this year on poverty. As I write this, we're getting ready to conduct a focus group in Los Angeles with 18 Community Voice Mail clients who own mobile phones. Because we offer voice mail to low-income and homeless people in 46 places in the U.S., it's important that our clients have access to phones. Payphones are increasingly not a solution (200k, or 17% of the total in the U.S., were taken out of commission in 2007), and through surveys we've learned that our clients mostly rely on free phones at social service agencies to check their voice mail. Because 21% of our clients own mobile phones, we want to talk to them and find out more about how they're using them, what they pay, where they buy them, and a host of other questions. Our goal is to figure out an economically feasible way to give mobile phones to tens of thousands of our clients around the country, and tap into the power of mobile access to telecommunications (and email, the Web, etc.) to help our clients climb out of poverty.

A lot of effort is being made to use mobile phones in developing countries to bring people out of poverty (read MobileActive to get a good overview of some of what's being done). But there doesn't appear to be a lot being done for poor people in the U.S.. I guess it's assumed that even the lowest-income Americans can afford a phone now, or maybe there just isn't the business opportunity with low-income people in the U.S. that there is with the billions of people in developing countries. To us, there remains a huge gap in the U.S. between those who have access to basic telecommunications and those that don't, and this is most powerfully represented as an information gap. Without a phone, or reliable access to one, it's very hard to stay in touch with the people you depend on for support (friends, family), help (social workers, doctors), or your livelihood (employers and potential employers). Moreover, for our clients, lack of access to a phone makes it harder to take advantage of the information we're sending over broadcast voice messages every day; messages about jobs, housing, food, health care, emergency weather alerts and other information most people take for granted. There is tremendous opportunity in the U.S. to bring affordable mobile phones tied to the right information services to low-income people in the U.S.. And we're going to do this.

We sent a broadcast voice message to 800 active CVM clients in Los Angeles, seeking 18 people who own mobile phones to come to a meeting and talk to us about their experiences. Within 48 hours, we received more than 80 responses from people willing to spend the time to help us figure this out. I'm looking forward to tomorrow as the start of a big change, and can't wait to meet our clients.

Newly Homeless, New to Social Services

This image, which I found on PATH's always good LA Homeless Blog, speaks volumes about the current economic crisis in the U.S.. As the economy deteriorates and jobs are lost, there will undoubtedly be a huge influx of people seeking "services" from government and nonprofit agencies, and it's likely that many of these people may never have sought such services before. While many people have been without work at some point in their lives and may know how to look for a job, how many have had to seek shelter? Or free health care? Or food? Or any of the other basic services most people usually take for granted?

Here at Community Voice Mail, we've been talking a lot about the information needs of people living in poverty, and how they gain access to this information. Chris Le Dantec, a Ph.D candidate in the Human Centered Computing program at Georgia Tech, spoke last week at our national conference. He talked about his research with clients of two social service agencies, and the role that technology (broadly defined) plays in how they access information and in how they manage their own identities. Mobile phones, for example, have great value for low-income people not only as communication devices but also as a sign of some life stablility and as a social symbol. Other researchers, such as Julie Hersberger and Donna Beegle, have also written about how people living in poverty access and share information, and this is helping to shape the future direction of our information delivery system (formerly known simply as "our voice mail service"). It seems there is a learning curve for figuring out how to function within this social service world, and how to access the things you need to survive. The longer you've been in this state of crisis and transition, the more knowledge you've acquired about how the "system" works, and the more you've learned about how to access the information you need.

I wonder, however, about the people who may soon experience homelessness for the first time due to foreclosure, or those who lose their jobs and have no financial or social safety net to protect them from poverty. If this is the first time they've needed the kind of help provided by nonprofits and government-run agencies, how will they find out about them? And will the help available meet their expectations, or (more likely) will they find resources scarce, agencies underfunded, and demand exceeding supply for all things? What would I do if I woke up tomorrow and had absolutely nothing? Where would I start?

There has been a strong undercurrent of poverty in this country that has largely been overlooked by those not directly experiencing it. I fear this undercurrent may become more of a tsunami in the near future, with a lot of people seeking information about services and finding out how difficult it is to find. We have a lot of work to do, and quickly.

Community Voice Mail in Second Life

Update: Jessica, who wrote this post, spoke about CVM's use of Second Life at the N2Y3 NetSquared conference earlier this may. Here's a video of her presentation.

Jessica Dally here at the Community Voice Mail National Office has been working on our presence in Second Life. Recognizing that many people don't know what Second Life is (aren't we all still trying to live our First Lives?), she's written this brief primer about Second Life and why CVM has a presence there:

What is Second Life (SL)?
Well… to quote from Second Life itself, it’s a "3D virtual world imagined and created entirely by its residents. " But really, that doesn’t explain it very well does it?

Think of Second Life kind of like a game. It’s a bit like The Sims, but instead of each person you interact with being a computer-generated character, each person you interact with in SL is a computer-generated manifestation of an actual person somewhere else in the world. In that way it’s a bit like a 3D Instant Message. A person downloads a computer program and runs it, just like any other “game,” but once in this game they can interact with other people all over the world, build stuff, program stuff… you name it.

Why is Community Voice Mail in Second Life?
While it’s easy to think of Second Life as a game, it’s really more like a whole new version of the internet or an incredibly intense social networking site. And just like having a website, more and more business, nonprofit communities and even funders are operating in this Virtual World. But unlike most websites, Second Life is free.

CVM National first established an office in Second Life at the Nonprofit Commons, an area set up specifically for nonprofits by Ashne Chung, the first person to earn 1 million real dollars in Second Life (as opposed to Lindens, the in-world SL currency) . Now our office has moved to the Nonprofit Commons 2 site, put on by Taking IT Global. This office gives us a bit more room to explain what we do and the space has allowed us to build an interactive exhibit to answer questions CVM is often asked, such as “how do clients access their voicemail?” or “why can’t clients just use cell phones?" It’s a place where people can come to check out what we do and learn more about our organization. It’s also a great way for us to meet with other nonprofits/NGOs around the world, to find partners and make connections.

To date we’ve found champions for our cause in many areas. People who are helping with Hurricane Ike, Military vets, people from the telecommunications industry and others have all been introduced to CVM thanks to the presence we’ve established in Second Life. We’ve found new agencies that want to provide free voice mail boxes to low-income and homeless people in their (real life) communities, and people who would like to volunteer in some way. While we have no real way of knowing what will come in the future from our presence in Second Life, thus far it has been time well spent.

Try it yourself! Once you’ve registered for Second Life and downloaded the client, and you can find our our office space at this SLurl (Second Life URL). Have fun, and see you in Second Life (or perhaps in First Life if you happen to be in the Seattle area).

Blog Action Day (focus on Poverty)

Here's a good idea. Ask bloggers of all stripes and from all countries to post about a single issue on one day of the year, to increase awareness and trigger conversation about the issue. This year, Blog Action Day is all about poverty. Through the posts of thousands of bloggers (and podcasters, and videocasters), a conversation about poverty will occur that hopefully will lead to new knowledge, new solutions and new collaborations. As of today, nearly 5,000 bloggers have registered, reaching at least 9.5 million of their readers.

If you blog, please consider participating on October 15. CVM is, and we look forward to reading your post about poverty. And please tell your friends (bloggers and otherwise).