Moving Practitioner Training into the Vanguard
By
Paul Kealey, director of the NeighborWorks® Training
Institute
November 5, 2003 -- As part of Neighborhood
Reinvestment’s strategic goal of being in the vanguard of
the community development field, the training division of Neighborhood
Reinvestment has been planning a new focus and direction that
will let us expand our offerings and continue to meet the changing
and diverse needs of community development professionals.
We have assembled special committees and discussion groups, and
have sought and digested feedback from the community development
field, including NeighborWorks organizations. With this input,
we have put together a plan of new and exciting initiatives for
the next several years.
The highlights include greatly expanded homebuyer education training
and certification, new organizational oversight for community
development boards, new initiatives in rural development, Native
American community development, intermediate and advanced community
development training, and e-learning for community development
practitioners. We also will expand our offerings in Spanish and
enhance our training institute symposia.
Homebuyer
Education: A new NeighborWorks® Center for Homeownership
Education and Counseling
Homeowner education and counseling offer enormous economic benefit
to both lenders and homebuyers. Researchers with Freddie Mac recently
found that face-to-face prepurchase homebuyer education and counseling
have a measurable impact on loan performance, reducing loan defaults
by up to 34 percent.
Home-ownership counseling helps underserved populations including
low- and moderate-income, minority, new immigrant, and female-headed
households avoid foreclosure, ruined credit, susceptibility to
predatory lenders, and emotional distress.
Neighborhood Reinvestment is viewed by many as providing the
finest homebuyer training-of-trainers and certification in the
industry. Currently, we certify about 500 trainers and counselors
a year through our institutes and regional workshops. But the
unmet demand for such training and certification of trainers and
counselors is enormous.
Beginning in 2004, Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation plans
to greatly expand our homeownership education and counseling certification
program through the creation of a new NeighborWorks Center
for Homeownership Education and Counseling. The mission
of the Center will be to establish national standards, certification,
tools, and a voice for the homeownership education and counseling
industry and to significantly expand access to training for homeownership
educators and counselors both within the NeighborWorks Network
and beyond. Provided sufficient funding can be obtained, the Center
proposes to increase to over 2,000 per year (from 700 currently)
the number of homeownership counselors and educators trained and
certified by Neighborhood Reinvestment – and indirectly
ensure the education and counseling of over 2 million
individuals and families by 2007.
In
addition to greatly expanding training and certification of homeownership
educators and counselors, Neighborhood Reinvestment would also
provide financial and technical support to NeighborWorks organizations,
national and state intermediaries, and other counseling organizations
to help them expand their home ownership education and counseling.
Grants from the Center will help organizations employ new counselors
and educators, market their programs to potential minority homebuyers
(with materials in Spanish and other languages), produce new homebuyer
education and counseling services and tools, and serve consumers
in a more efficient and effective manner. In addition, support
will be given to nonprofit intermediaries and state collaboratives
to host and sponsor place-based trainings for certification and
continuing education for their members, to provide quality control
for affiliate organizations, counselors and trainers, and to submit
data on homeownership education and counseling activities nationally.
Board Strengthening
The role that boards of directors play in the fiscal and organizational
oversight of community development organizations is increasingly
important as these organizations strive to achieve new levels
of home ownership, affordable housing, and neighborhood revitalization
in their communities with limited but crucial private- and public-sector
resources.
Just as in the corporate world, appropriate scrutiny is being
applied to ensure financial soundness and operational accountability.
Neighborhood Reinvestment intends to enhance the training it provides
to community development board members and increase the skills
and tools that its management consultants provide to the boards
of network organizations.
The Corporation intends to expand its core classes for board
members conducted at Neighborhood Reinvestment Training Institutes
and delivered locally at NeighborWorks organizations around the
country. This new training will cover such topics as the roles
and responsibilities of a board; the board-staff partnership –
who is accountable for what; fiscal accountability and oversight;
and program assessment and evaluation.
In addition, we will develop a new course called Fiscal Oversight
for Board Treasurers. We aim to have all NeighborWorks board treasurers
trained within three years of the launch of this new course. We
hope that an additional 100 board members from non-network community
development organizations around the county will also benefit
from this training each year.
Rural Development
The need for community development efforts to assist low- and
moderate-income individuals in rural communities is great. Too
often, however, support for these efforts is lacking. Neighborhood
Reinvestment intends to grow its rural development training program,
currently consisting of five courses, to a full curriculum of
12, focusing on home ownership and lending, economic development,
and community revitalization.
In addition, we plan to offer again in 2004 a regional, Rural
Chautauqua June 22-25 in Black Hills, South Dakota, which would
involve 100 individuals working in rural community development,
including the executive director and a board member from each
rural NeighborWorks organization. The Chautauqua will involve
skill-training from experienced trainers, peer-learning sessions,
presentations by rural experts, and a visit to single-family and
multifamily developments.
Native American Community Development
Two courses specific to Native American home ownership were offered
at the Minneapolis training institute in fiscal year 2002. In
2003, Wells Fargo Home Mortgage provided NR a generous grant through
its Wells Fargo Housing Foundation that makes Neighborhood Reinvestment’s
new Native American Community Development Training program possible.
The first offering of this program will be in San Francisco in
December and will feature four courses specifically tailored to
address community development issues unique to Indian country.
Full scholarships will be given to 60 participants. The program
will be offered again at our Training Institute in Minneapolis,
May 3-7.
Intermediate
and Advanced Training
Neighborhood Reinvestment will develop a stronger selection of
intermediate and advanced level courses, for which there is a
tremendous demand among experienced community development practitioners.
These intermediate courses for experienced practitioners and advanced
clinics for senior staff will offer hands-on courses on timely,
relevant issues.
Neighborhood Reinvestment also offers an Advanced Practitioner
Program (APP), a series of programs designed to help seasoned
community development practitioners learn about cutting-edge issues
and apply them to themselves and their organizations to help move
the community development field forward. APP courses are designed
to meet the needs of busy and successful professionals; all learning
is applied and performance-based. The APP has three components,
Achieving Excellence in Community Development, Contemporary Issues
Program, and Advanced Clinics, each designed to contribute to
a burgeoning foundation of knowledge for practitioners and organizations.
Through these courses of study, APP encourages organizational
stability and performance, professionalism, and an enhanced understanding
of the opportunities that exist for community development in the
marketplace. The APP is made with support from the Fannie Mae
Foundation.
E-Learning
As a leader in community development education, Neighborhood Reinvestment
must
respond to the burgeoning demand from community development practitioners
for e-learning opportunities. The Corporation will develop a set
of Web-based courses that support programs of study and classes
offered at institutes. Both facilitated live on-line and self-instructional
modules will be developed and offered as follow-up to face-to-face
trainings.
Courses will be developed in each of the eight curriculum tracks:
affordable housing, community building, community economic development,
construction and production management, home ownership and community
lending, management and leadership, neighborhood revitalization,
and rural development.
Training Offered in Spanish
Neighborhood Reinvestment’s five-day homebuyer education
training was delivered in Spanish at the San Francisco 2002 institute
and at an earlier regional training event cosponsored with Fannie
Mae. The course was delivered again in Spanish at the Washington,
D.C., institute in August 2003, and will be delivered again in
San Francisco in December along with a two-day Housing Counseling
course in Spanish. As the demand for courses in Spanish continues
to grow, the Training Division, with support from MetLife, is
addressing this demand by translating a series of additional courses
and associated materials into Spanish and offering them in Spanish
in fiscal year 2004 and beyond.
Training Institute Symposia
In addition to training courses, NeighborWorks Training Institutes
also present one-day symposia on cutting-edge topics and issues
in the community development field. These centerpiece events draw
close to 200 experts and practitioners from across the country.
"Working Together to Change the Face of Home Ownership"
was held August 20 in Washington, D.C. A symposium on rural community
development issues and strategies is scheduled for December 10
in San Francisco, and a symposium on "Achieving Excellence
in Community Development" is scheduled for February 26 in
Atlanta.
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