As we continue our celebration of National Homeownership Month along with NeighborWorks Week, we want to spotlight one of our national companies, eHome America, and the role it has played in promoting home ownership nationwide. We recently sat down with one of eHome’s partner agencies – Trinity Empowerment Consortium, in Miami, FL, to hear about their experience using eHome for their clients.
Trinity is a HUD-certified housing counseling agency, working to revitalize low and moderate income communities by educating potential new homeowners and assisting existing homeowners with homeownership retention. Trinity was connected to eHome America through the National NeighborWorks Convention at NTI National Training Institute back in 2012. Since then eHome America has served as one of the greatest tools for Trinity as a housing counseling agency. “Since we began working with eHome, we’ve been able to offer our services to our clients who can’t meet with us in person. The online platform is necessary in today’s age of technology and clients need access to this information when they can’t be there in person every time” says Kraig Owanikin, Associate Director of Development.
Since 2012, they have been able to educate hundreds of potential home buyers regarding the process of home ownership. Trinity has also been able to couple their specialized services to their community and make sure that homeowners understand not only what the process looks like on a national scale, but what it looks like locally as well.
“We’re able to see people who thought they would never be able to experience the dream of home ownership walk into that dream, make that dream a reality for themselves, for their families, and for generations to come. What that does for me is something special that you can’t really describe, and the fact that we’re able to do this day in and day out, using the tools that we’re able to use, it just makes my work worth doing”, says Owanikin.
After seeing such positive results from their eHome partnership, Trinity then added more resources to its toolkit, by signing up for mPact Pro. mPact Pro is Community Ventures’ client management system, which Trinity uses to track their clients’ progress throughout the counseling process. “mPact Pro is a very complex and unique tool that really helps us understand where our clients are at, their needs, who they are, where they come from, and what it is that we need to best serve them.”
For Owanikin, the benefits of eHome America and mPact Pro are best defined by the access they provide to so many clients. “The access is not always there to these individuals, to these families. So we need programs like these to help us compile information as quickly as possible, and collect data as accurately as possible. Working with eHome and mPact Pro – they’ve definitely been on our side as a small agency.”
We are proud and excited to continue our work with Trinity, and we are happy to hear of the positive impact they are having on their Miami community. Through eHome America, mPact Pro, and through local agencies like Trinity, thousands of families around the country can now realize their dreams of homeownership.