New Community Networks
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Wired for Change
People without access to communication technology - including telephones - are disconnected from the rest of society in many ways. Sometimes the implications are quite profound. Imagine a homeless parent whose child is ill, calling a clinic or information service for medical advice from a pay phone. In many cases, he or she may be told that somebody will call them back. But they have no telephone! Another common situation might involve a prospective employer who'd like to ask an additional question or even offer a job to a homeless person. In either case, the person without access to a telephone could find himself or herself seriously inconvenienced.
It has been noted that when people lose their residence, they often lose other connections with the rest of the community. Family, neighbors, friends, and social service agencies lose the ability to easily and reliably communicate with them. It has also been shown that without social links, shared physical spaces, and other accessible and dependable relationships, it is common for a homeless person to feel adrift and rootless, thus compounding the problem.
In Seattle, community activists, Pat Barry and Rich Feldman developed the Community Voice Mail (CVM) program which takes advantage of the fact that a person can "own" a phone number without owning a residence. Barry's colleague, David Harrison, asks, "Why should we tolerate human suffering that is easily avoidable?" The Community Voice Mail project provides free voice mail accounts to those in need, particularly homeless people, to help reduce human suffering. Barry suggests that we think of the project as a giant telephone answering machine for the homeless community. Working with dozens of social service agencies and a custom voice mail system (including computer, modems, special hardware and software that is made available at cost by the system vendors), CVM works towards providing a "stepping stone out of poverty." When a social service agency provides a client with voice mail, he or she is not given a physical telephone but a voice-mail account. When a person has a voice-mail account, he or she has a telephone number that potential employers, health-care providers, landlords, family members, or friends can call and leave messages. When the client dials the telephone number (from any telephone) of the voice-mail system and enters the password, he or she can listen to the recorded messages.
CVM is showing dramatic results. For one thing, the time that it took for clients to achieve their goals went from more than 30 days in over 75 percent of the cases, to under 30 days in over 50 percent of the cases. CVM also serves an integrating function. Generally one social service agency specializes in providing one type of service, yet homeless people rarely have just one problem. The voice-mail system provides a convenient way to coordinate information from multiple agencies as well as providing a tool to the homeless person for managing his or her own life in his or her own voice and language. The cost is now less than $2.50 per month per client, and economies of scale could drive this cost down even further.
Barry and Feldman started the Community Technology Institute (CTI) to promote the use of technology to help solve human problem improve delivery of social services. To this end CTI promotes "in-house" technologies that are owned and operated by the community. The institute has articulated a "best practices manifesto" that includes (1) interagency collaboration; (2) accessibility; (3) ethics (including dignity, self-esteem, and privacy of the client) and (4) maximal use of technological resources. CTI's core work is replicating the Seattle experience in other locations. San Diego and San Jose, California; Portland, Oregon; Waltham, Massachusetts; and Raleigh, North Carolina; Madison, Wisconsin; Minneapolis, St. Paul, Minnesota; New York City and Schenectady, New York; and Aberdeen, Washington are among these sites, with some 10-20 others in operation or planned. The Institute offers a variety of useful publications, and Barry has been traveling across the United States to set up programs and the actual voice-mail systems. There are many possibilities for collaboration between voice-mail service providers and other types of "community technology" providers.
I hope that this information is useful to you. Please feel free to send me (Doug Schuler) your questions, comments, and corrections. I will try to keep the information in these pages current.