“What’s the best voice mail message you’ve ever received?”

Within a week, we received more than 100 amazing and moving messages, and you can listen to a selection of them below. Jobs, family, love, connection…there’s a lot of life that gets squeezed through the phone lines. We hope you find this as inspiring as we do. Enjoy!

Our profound thanks to the CVM clients in Houston who left us messages, and to the Seattle CVM clients who agreed to be photographed. Thanks also to volunteer photographer Rajiv Kapoor, who along with Daniel from the CVM National Office spent a lot of time with our clients to capture these images.

The AIDS.gov post includes a voice response we received from one of our clients, who heard the message, pressed the “4″ key on her phone, and recorded a comment. We love having this level of communication with the people who use our service, and I think we’re only beginning to tap into the power of this network. It seems strange to say in these Internet-fueled days, but there is great power in hearing a human voice, and maintaining that rich connection to another human being. This is particularly true for people who are experiencing homelessness or other problems that make it difficult to stay connected to others.

It’s been great working with AIDS.gov on this, and we look forward to working with more partners to distribute information to our clients and the agencies that serve them. What other information should we send to help our clients build better lives? Leave us a note in the comments if you feel so inclined…

We definitely weren’t the only ones working to increase awareness about National HIV Testing Day. Hundreds of organizations and countless individuals organized around this, and we’re glad to have been included. Oh, and here’s one other notable participant…

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• Veterans: Emotional or mental distress from military service can manifest in damaging behavior (drugs, alcohol, etc.) that leads to loss of permanent housing.

• Families: An unforeseen costly event (raise in rent, medical emergency, etc.) creates a financial hurdle that can push a family into homelessness.

• Youth: Homelessness often happens as a result of a family disruption (divorce, abuse, etc.). Those who leave foster care when they turn 18 or get out of the juvenile justice system find themselves without a social safety net.

• The “Chronically Homeless”: Most often the result of a physical or psychological disability, which makes it hard to secure permanent housing.

There is voluminous data and analysis about this question, available on the NAEH site and elsewhere, but these are reasonable nuggets to share the next time you’re on an elevator and the subject comes up. If everyone in America knew even this about the homeless, I believe things would change.

InvisiblePeople.tv records the voices and stories of “homeless” people, in their own words and without a lot of editing or editorializing. I learn a lot every time I watch one of these videos, and I can’t wait to see what they capture this summer.

Here’s a recent interview from the site:

Richard from InvisiblePeople.tv on Vimeo.

The CTK Foundation Philanthropic Fund is having a nationwide contest asking people to write a 4-8 line poem describing the “heart and soul” of their nonprofit mission. CTK will select the best poem from among all the entries it receives, and the winning organization will receive $10,000 and have their poem set to music and recorded by the Grammy Award-winning band Los Lonely Boys.

Any nonprofit can submit a poem, and CVM is looking for your help. We’re good with words, but we’re betting that among you (our clients, our agencies, our CVM Managers, our donors, our friends) there are some great poets who can write beautifully about Community Voice Mail. Here’s the deal:

Anyone can participate. Simply write your best 4-8 line poem about Community Voice Mail, and send it to us at info@cvm.org by Monday, July 13. You must include your name, phone number (of course), city and state. We hope we get a lot of poems by our clients!

The staff of the Community Voice Mail National Office will read every submission and pick our favorite to submit as CVM’s official entry in the contest. If Community Voice Mail’s poem is selected by the CTK Foundation, CVM will receive the $10,000 grant. If the winning poem is submitting by a CVM client, staff, participating agency or volunteer of a local Community Voice Mail program, CVM will split the $10,000 between our office and the nonprofit agency hosting the program in that community. Your poem can help a lot of people get a free voice mail box, and a new connection to information, resources and hope.

If you need any inspiration, learn more about Community Voice Mail at www.cvm.org, or on this blog. Maybe watch a fun animated film about us. Follow our tweets, see us on Facebook, or visit us in Second Life. Read who we helped last year. Or maybe just go sit under a tree and contemplate the beautifulness that is Community Voice Mail. (Or sit under a tree and think how hard it would be if you were homeless and didn’t have a reliable phone number). Get your friends involved. Be deep, be zany, rhyme, don’t rhyme. Poety, like Community Voice Mail, is versatile!

Remember, you have to submit your poem to info@cvm.org by July 13 to be considered as our entry for the CTK contest. Thanks in advance for sending us your words!

It was hot in Houston this week. Hot. As in 102 degrees hot on Thursday, with a heat index of 108 or so. It was hotter in Baghdad yesterday (113 degrees), but not by that much. Most people in Houston are probably finding some relief from the heat in air-conditioned offices, apartments and homes. But what about people who don’t have a place to live? High temperatures like this aren’t just uncomfortable when you’re homeless; they can be deadly. Your body can lose up to a gallon of water each hour through perspiration in such temperatures. There is danger from heat exhaustion, stroke and other health issues resulting from dehydration.

The City has issued a heat advisory through Saturday night, and more than 1,800 CVM clients learned what they can do to stay safe from a series of messages sent from the Houston Community Voice Mail manager. On Thursday, he sent a broadcast voice message that reached everyone, a broadcast email message that reached 568 CVM clients, and posted a message on the Houston CVM blog that reached others in the area. As with messages sent to Houston CVM clients before Hurricane Ike in 2008, it’s likely that these simple messages saved a life, or at least prevented someone from getting seriously ill.

Many of our clients are homeless, or may otherwise find it hard to get accurate information about important things in a timely manner. We used to think that providing our clients with a phone number made up most of the value of our service. Increasingly, it’s the ability to send information to our clients, and to get responses from them, that is making all the difference. And this is happening all over the country, in 45 CVM cities.

Bruce and Donna from InvisiblePeople.tv on Vimeo.

InvisiblePeople.tv has more video about Nickelsville that describes in detail how it is organized. (My thanks to Scot at Community Voice Mail Houston for letting me know about this).

I wish all of our clients had such an easy time getting a job and finding housing, but again, this is just a cartoon. In real life, a Community Voice Mail number is just a great and simple tool to help the client do what he or she is trying to accomplish (employment, housing, health care, connection).