Transcript
My name is Ayanna Kennedy, and I am the director of the project management office for the Atlanta Housing Authority. We were actually the very first public housing authority in the nation. So we have a very proud legacy of serving the citizens of Atlanta. I was actually around when we chose Voyager. And so at the time, what we were looking for was a system that would pull us all together. We were like, a lot of places have disparate systems and spreadsheets, you know, it's not it's not technically a system, but everybody has spreadsheets. And so we were looking for something that could solve multiple problems. And so what we eventually settled on initially was Voyager for our Housing Choice voucher program and for our financials. I really appreciate our partnership. And, and it does feel like a partnership. I can call whenever we need something. There's give and take. I'm sure we get on. We get on your nerves because we always want something special. We never want the standard. We always want to do it a little bit different. So I really appreciate the partnership. We are voucher based. So we primarily serve, housing choice vouchers and property based vouchers. We actually two weeks ago completed a conversion of approximately 9,000 units of property based vouchers to Yardi. We were using it for primarily for our Housing Choice voucher program and finances about 20 years ago. Started this voyage where we went into eliminating what used to be large public housing, communities, with the thought that mixed use developments with serve our families more. Our former CEO didn't believe you could eliminate poverty if you continue to concentrate for people. And so we did was now in the industry called the Atlanta model, where we partner with private developers. We don't always have a lot of money, but we do have Lane. And so we form partnerships with our private developers. They build and run, different properties. And in exchange for that land. They make sure they have so many units of public housing, available for our families. Is made our lives easier, right. In also improve communications. One example would be we have a contact center where if participants, landlords, anyone has questions, they call in by having Voyager and having simple things like the notes section. Those people receiving the calls can go in and see what's happening and inform our participants and our landlords about the status of maybe it's an RTA or a voucher. May communication better, which always improves efficiency. And also with our recent conversion of our property based units, we have a manual payment process. And it took our team a little bit over a week to prepare those payouts because we have over 120 partnerships. That is going to be a matter of a couple of days to accomplish. We have all the information in one place now, right? So before it was spread all over the place and now it leases in a single place and we can go get the information, pull it out and use it. However, however we need, if we have an audit, you know, our files are now digital and so we can go in, we can pull the files. Nobody has to go. We call boxes and nobody has to dig through file drawers. So definitely, it helps us with communities in that an area, you know, if you get an audit, they want to see the file. The fact that it's digital, we don't lose things. So the that's just one of the types of things has made that whole process so much easier for us. We use property management partners. They handle more the application process, but for us it's allowed our participants to have visibility into what's going on. Like they have questions about their status, if they need to submit paperwork, they no longer have to come down to the office or mail things in and hope we get it. They are able to see in real time what their status is, and that's been one of the the biggest changes for us. So if our participants feel like their needs are being met, we're winning. Because we had so much paper, we had a whole scanning team that had to take those documents and then scan them into SharePoint, and they saw them in the Voyager and vice versa. Well, now we no longer have to do that scanning because participants are able to upload their documents directly. They're already in a digital form, and now we just have to move them over to Voyager. The less time I have to spend pushing paper around, that's another resident that I can help. The less papers I have to push, there's less money I'm spending. That's another family we can help.