Fresh from the Field

Community Voice Mail Boxes
BEST Corporation—Hotel Training Center Initiative

In their second year of operation, the BEST Hotel Training Center Initiative (HTCI)is planning to work with the Community Voice Mail Project (www.cvm.org) to set up voice mail boxes for WCTF participants who have lost phone services or are about to lose services.

The Community Voice Mail Project started in Seattle in 1991 and now has “hosted” phone services in 45 cities. The CVM Project believes people with a constant telephone number find work a lot sooner than those with intermittent services. They work with organizations in communities across the United States to set up “host agencies” that provide mail boxes, and have made voice mail possible for homeless persons, laid off workers, disabled veterans, domestic violence victims, foster children displaced at their 18th birthday, migrant or day workers, and parolees. The Boston hosting agency is in transition at this time. The new host site will be the Massachusetts Housing and Shelter Alliance. BEST HTCI will be working with this new host over the next few months to set up mail boxes for WCTF participants in its hotel training program.

For more information on how CVM works, please visit their web site.  For more information on the BEST project’s efforts to connect WCTF participants to voice mail, please contact Rachel Raven (rraven@hoteltrainingcenter.org).