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Orange County Affordable Housing Advisory Board (AHAB) Meeting Agenda November 14, 2022, 6:00 PM Chamber for a Greater Chapel Hill Louise Beck room 04 S Estes Dr, Chapel Hill, NC 27514 Hope is very young. Incorporated in 2017 but launched in 2020. Grown from 5 to 14 people since 2020. Orange County was the right community to get started in. COVID actually fueled a lot of the need for Hope’s work. Affordable Housing + Workforce development. Underemployed women and non-binary folks. 49 have graduated. Will be 65 as of this year. Also help older adults and folks with disabilities. Helping Trades employers by creating workforce. Have curriculum that teaches basics; want to provide them with skills, experience, and confidence to enter workforce. Participants receive OSHA10 certification. After basics, they go into basics of carpentry, plumbing, HVAC. At that point they sort of know what they enjoy. What they really bring to the table is working on professional skills (critical thinking, mock interviews, conflict resolution, etc). Lots of social workers on the Hope teams. Folks generally go into entry-level jobs or apprenticeships OR continuing education (community colleges). Construction program geared toward aging in place. All work done on sliding scale. Higher income folks will pay market rates, which can help subsidize the work for lower income folks. Program will be changing a little in the coming years. Participants sometimes struggle to transition to jobs (especially as women and non-binary folks). They will be coming on site a lot more. Hope Renovations works all over the county. Just finished their first tiny home. Want to be able to fund more of the free jobs for people who need them. Work with a lot of homeowners who don’t feel comfortable talking with “normal” construction workers who will talk above their heads. Hope works in a lot of rural areas. Work with the coalition database—folks who have been waiting a really long time. Habitat doesn’t work much with the rural areas. Unique because they can get to urgent needs more quickly than other entities. Had one client who had been waiting in a rehab bed for a ramp to be built; they were able to get to it quickly. Do every kind of repair, big or small. A lot of bathroom repairs. They try to do 30% AMI for free; if they don’t have funding, they refer to the coalition. Completed over 160 jobs. Did the renovations for the Chamber of Commerce. Large majority of clients are lower income. Hope will be hiring Hope members as paid interns for 6 weeks. Adding a third crew this upcoming year. Paul asks if he could receive assistance even though he’s over AMI. They say yes. They would assess and give pricing. Really important for them to have revenue generating model because you can’t always rely on govt funding or donations. Often run into issues where someone who doesn’t know what they were doing tried to make repairs. Mae really appreciates the outreach that’s being done. Hope Renovations’ FB page is great. They have an intern who takes care of a lot of the social media.