Neighborlink Fort Wayne Foundation Inc

Goals for 2019: 1,400 home repair and maintenance projects completed for low-income and disabled homeowners, retaining 100 volunteer communities, and recruiting and training 30 new volunteer communities.

NeighborLink Fort Wayne is an organization dedicated to fulfilling unmet needs for home repair and maintenance for vulnerable homeowners in our community. The 2018 ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) report released by the United Way of Allen County revealed that 36% of working families are struggling to afford basic needs. For these families, any type of home repair presents a financial crisis. For elderly homeowners and those with disabilities, the challenges of maintaining their home can be overwhelming. These are the people NeighborLink steps into help – our communities most vulnerable homeowners who may be faced with financial or physical constraints or disability. We help them fill needs that no other social service agency or government program is able to meet. We help ensure the home is safe and well-maintained and does not violate any neighborhood code enforcement requirements so that the homeowner can continue to live independently.

Requests range from yard work, snow removal, and household cleaning to exterior painting, broken furnaces, and leaking roofs. Local social service agencies and government programs help with personal needs (food, clothing, medical assistance, transportation, or financial support for utilities). Those programs don't have resources to help vulnerable homeowners maintain their homes in safe, livable conditions. NeighborLink steps in to fill this gap. We have the unique ability to connect people who are willing to help with those who have a need. We match people to project needs.

Helping homeowners maintain their home and property has a positive impact on the entire neighborhood. Keeping individual homes in good repair elevates and encourages the entire neighborhood. Home values are better preserved and a sense of pride and community is restored.

Volunteer Support and Recruitment: Our website is vital in helping volunteers find a project that fits their team’s skills and abilities. NeighborLink has full-time staff who recruits and connects volunteers with projects. Increasingly, we are also connecting with local businesses to help them plan and execute volunteer projects as a team building activity for their staff.

Website Development and Video Storytelling: Our website is the workhorse that keeps NeighborLink functioning. Projects are posted on the website for volunteers to select. The website also allows us to share stories of our homeowners and volunteers through video storytelling. Our videos communicate our mission in a unique and powerful way. We are working to develop funding to make our videographer position permanent. This will enhance our ability to recruit volunteers and corporate partners. It could also generate additional revenue for our projects by hiring out our video team to other not-for-profit agencies in the area.

We want to further enhance our website with a centralized database to collect more data on our homeowners, volunteers, and donors. These enhancements will allow us to more proactively follow up with volunteers, actively promote and track volunteerism, and increase communication with donors. It will also allow us to deepen our relationships with corporate partners by providing them a tool to track employee volunteering at any community organization, not just on NeighborLink projects.

We continue to add staff in key positions related to volunteer recruitment, mobilization, and retention. In the past year, we've leveraged the AmeriCorp program to add key staff positions that are helping us with research, events, and communication.

We continue to invest in building our website to help make it easier for volunteers to self-select and organize their own projects as we build our decentralized volunteer methods.

We have been working on building our research and community engagement team as well. We're learning what makes neighborhoods healthy, how to support existing groups of neighbors through associations, and how to measure impact and growth through their goal development.

In 2018, NeighborLink volunteers completed 1,307 projects for vulnerable homeowners. We worked with 169 different volunteer groups in 2018, up from 120 in 2017. Our primary growth area came from businesses and corporations looking for opportunities to mobilize their employees to gain service experience. We also grew in number of churches and families looking for opportunities.

In total, NeighborLink has seen volunteers complete almost 10,000 tangible home repair projects in Fort Wayne since it started in 2003.

We've also been fortunate to help 12 other US Cities start their own NeighborLink through our NeighborLink Network.