Neighborlink Indianapolis Foundation Inc

Our mission is to help low-income seniors and those with disabilities who own their own home age in place safely and with dignity. This mission encompasses helping older adults retain their home, often their largest financial asset to pass to their younger generations. By helping stabilize homes, we are also helping stabilize the affordable housing units and retaining them within the low-income housing scope of our community. For our homeowners, the most affordable one is the one they already own.

No one organization can accomplish their mission alone, especially one that tackles such a wide spread issue as poverty and poverty related challenges. Through partnerships, volunteers, and funders we are able to provide low-income homeowners with home repairs at no cost. Often, it is older Black homeowners that are priced out of their own neighborhoods they have helped to build over the decades of living there. By providing critical home repairs, referrals to needed services, and shining a lot on this element of affordable housing, we are able to help them retain their homes and safely age in them. For our own stability, we provide our in-house repair services and general contracting services to other organizations that have similar clients and funding to support those clients just not the workers to do so.

We have been actively working to scale up our abilities to serve our clients. We have dedicated volunteers seeking and applying for funding while other volunteers are dedicated to more skilled labor needs. Staff handy people are focused on projects not appropriate for volunteers and we have dedicated programs with staffing, direction, and data to help grow. Those programs are:
1. Client Services - this program partners with a local university's social work students to meet and vet potential clients for our service as well as determine if we can refer them to an additional services that may not fall within our expertise.
2. Home Repair - We have a partnership with Indiana Construction Roundtable that provides handy trainees for projects. These projects provide construction work experience while also helping our homeowners. A single-source CRM maintains our database of projects, homeowners and allows us a more efficient way of tracking progress, costs and volunteer needs.
3. Group Volunteer Partnerships - with a dedicated staff member sourcing partnerships with organizations, churches, businesses, etc. we are able to match the group size and skill level to larger projects. These larger projects are typically citation cases for exterior painting or yard work and though no skill is necessary, they are very important projects to accomplish. Groups are able to do that quicker than our own staff ever could and we couldn't afford to hire out these larger jobs.

Since 2013 we have completed more than 4,000 home repair projects and helped more than 1,400 homeowners. We always have more requests come in than can be accomplished and are actively working on scaling up our ability to meet the need in Marion County. In 2020-2021 we began replacing key administrative volunteer positions with paid professionals that can dedicate their time and skills to the organization. In addition, we have built a CRM system that allows us to be far more efficient in our processes of evaluating, planning and accomplishing projects for homeowners. These efforts have begun to pay off already by allowing us to accomplish more projects than ever before in 2022.