On the Track to Self Sufficiency!

The more the government makes an investment into society, the more that success can breathe into the lives of those who benefit- especially when the investment puts primary importance towards the long term. I am always pleased to read news about government funded grants being awarded to programs (like HUD) that are aimed at lifting poverty- stricken US citizens from the burdens of being unskilled and uneducated.  What the government is trying to tell them, and all of us, is that there is hope and a solution.

There is a special grant that is awarded to Housing Authorities that succeed in placing their primary focus on the eventual self-sufficiency of living assisted tenants.  It is called ROSS (Resident Opportunities and Self Sufficiency Program). On March 4^th, 2008, a $50 million grant was awarded to Housing Authorities across the United States.   The larger portion of the grant money will be used to supplement already existing programs that provide job and computer training to assisted residents and their families, as well as home-ownership counseling.  The smaller portion of the grant will go towards the disabled and elderly residents, and will provide them with health and wellness programs, meal services and transportation to medical services. 

 
I often wonder if the assisted residents know about all of the options there are for them, and that there are so many people working in the system for them with the same primary focus: to help them eventually become successful members in our society.  They should know and they should be told!

I would like to dedicate this Blog to all of the decision makers and planners, all of those who implement and all those accountable for conceiving the vision of such a large scale and universal design for success.  Cheers! 

Leap Year: a day in error.

I know I wasn’t the only one that woke up last Friday morning with an odd feeling in the back of my mind. I saw it all over the morning news, confirming that today doesn’t really exist. It’s an anomaly, a once-every-four-years chance to break free from normality and quite possibly, every existing responsibility. Fat chance!

Normal day: Get up, go to work. Okay.

But then the troublesome phone calls started pouring in all over the country from concerned Housing Authorities. We were going crazy trying to figure out why they were receiving error messages when trying to navigate through their portals on the site. Our Gosection8 Programming Team investigated and brainstormed. Nothing was wrong with the codes, the links, the very structure that makes our site the best site it can be. We weren’t responsible. Then who was?

Microsoft. That’s who!

You would think that the smartest people on the planet (excluding the Gosection8 Team and all of you reading this, of course!) would be in favor of yielding to the ever-sensitive schedule of the seasons, stars and the universe, of all other things! (FYI: Leap year was created to accommodate the length of the solar year, which is slightly less than 365¼ days—by about 11 minutes. To compensate for this discrepancy, the leap year is omitted three times every four hundred years.)

Server errors, glitches, maladies, inefficiencies- in the system we rely on, all the cause for the disruption on this day, that we all just wanted to go away, anyway!

Well, they have four more years to get it right. We will see.