History

Community Voice Mail: The Spark

Community Voice Mail was born in Seattle in 1991 from a seemingly simple idea that had an unpredictably potent impact.

How One Boilermaker Ignited a Great Big Idea

The time: 1991.
The Place: Seattle, WA

A boilermaker entered the Seattle Worker Center looking for a job. No leads that day, but he was personable, qualified and friendly.

Two weeks later, the Center got a call from an employer: “I need a good boilermaker.” Bingo! Now they had a worker AND a job. Problem: their boilermaker was qualified, but he was also homeless. The obvious way to reach him: Voice Mail.

The Big Idea

Give unemployed and homeless people a telephone number that stays constant even if they can’t. The theory: they’ll find work much faster.

The Test: Our workers brought this idea to a Seattle-based voice mail company called Active Voice in 1992. The company thought their idea had merit, and donated a voice mail system. The workers distributed voice mail numbers to 145 people over 6 months, and

a whopping 70% found jobs within 2 months!

Ignition

Inspired by their initial success, the program applied for and received the 1993 Harvard/Ford Foundation Innovations in Government Award and a cash grant of $100,000 – to replicate their initial success in other communities. And replicate we did.

Expansion

Each year, Community Voice Mail serves more than 40,000 people in 400 towns/cities nationwide.

In 2007, we completed the migration of 32 CVM sites to a new technology platform that allows us to centralize our voice mail system, improve our technical capabilities and support, and enable us to launch new sites much faster than before. Our goal is to double the number of people with access to CVM by the end of 2011. We'll do this by launching new sites, identifying regional/national organizations that can distribute numbers, and work with new technology partners to expand our offerings to those in need.