Housing Development Alliance

Friday, October 15, 2010

We are Back!

Hello, after a few months off, we are back! We want to honor the work done by John Rasche while he was here (oh, how we miss him), and start updating our blog and Facebook account more regularly. We now have a schedule with a different staff member posting each week – and since this was my grand idea, I get to go first.

For those of you who do not know me, my name is Chris Doll and I am the Assistant Director at the Housing Development Alliance. I do many different tasks as part of my work, but my primary job is to get our clients from the point they first contact us to the point that either their new home or repairs begin; which is both easier and tougher than it sounds. I will probably post more on that later, but for now this is what’s been going on recently -

The weather in Perry County turned cold, or at least “chilly”. The leaves are starting to fall and the number of calls from folks needing help has picked up. Every year with the first cold snap HDA gets an increase in calls from folks needing to get repairs completed before winter. This means that my department (mainly Pam, our Housing Counselor) scrambles to try to match people up with funding and get applications through the system as quickly as possible, so it has been an exceptionally busy week.

Last week we were very excited, we sold Claude Neace his house. Some of our summer volunteers worked on his house, and we hope to have some pictures of the finished home posted soon. When Claude first contacted us he was nowhere near being eligible for a home. Through a lot of work on his part he got a good job, became eligible, and was able to buy a new home. As I stated, I do many things as part of my job, and one of them is that I get to be the person that hands our clients the keys to his/her/their new house. Being there to give Claude his keys is one of the reasons that I enjoy what I do, and it reminds me of the importance of our work. It was a wonderful day.