Annual Report 2020
Letter from our Board Chair and CEO
Dear Acts Supporter —
Last year was one of great pain and sorrow for our community. In addition to the physical and mental challenges Covid-19 presented, it brought our organization to a crossroads; doing things the way we always had was no longer feasible and effective. We needed to decide whether to hit pause, taking a break from our work to wait until there was a return to “normal,” or re-imagine how to provide services in a safe way.
I am proud that we took the latter approach, and as a result, we have built a new way of both reaching families and providing services that will allow us to greatly expand our impact in the years to come.
- Through our new virtual, on-demand orientation, which we had in place prior to the end of March 2020, we saw a 200% increase in families accessing our services, with nearly 3,000 views of our orientation program.
- Our proactive outreach to Acts Lending borrowers experiencing job loss or a reduction in hours allowed us to keep loan delinquencies below 3%.
- By huddling regularly with our whole team on Zoom, creating a channel on the messaging platform Slack for celebrations of home purchases and other success stories, and otherwise simply recognizing and celebrating the humanity of each of our colleagues during a challenging year, we left 2020 with a stronger team and higher morale than ever before.
Because of your unwavering support, we had the resources to invest in talent and technology, which in turn positioned us to set an ambitious goal of 250 new homeowners in 2021, an increase of 36% over our organizational record. Thank you for all you do to make our community strong. We are confident that the best is yet to come.
Michael Gosman
President & CEO
Joe Schlidt
Board President