NeighborWorks America tackles the housing crisis with Azure

In Puerto Rico, a homeowner worked out a plan with his lender to avoid foreclosure. A grandmother in Louisiana, whose mobile home was destroyed by a hurricane, moved into a new disaster-resistant house. First-time homebuyers in Connecticut finally found affordable condos in a community shared trust, enabling them to stay rooted. These happy endings were made possible by the nearly 250 housing organizations in NeighborWorks America’s network.

NeighborWorks America advances housing equity, strengthens communities through housing investments, and empowers individuals to secure and maintain affordable homes. “The housing crisis in America is very real. The divide in housing equity is getting wider,” says Arturo Weldon, CIO of NeighborWorks America. “Our work is critical to bringing equity wealth to individuals through housing.”

The Washington, DC-based nonprofit trains and certifies network organizations, provides counseling resources on topics such as mortgages and avoiding eviction, and informs Congress with housing data that informs national policy. Last year alone, the organization’s network helped nearly 19,000 people become new homeowners.

However, aging IT infrastructure, security concerns, and insufficient backup processes threatened to hobble NeighborWorks America’s efforts. That’s when Weldon reached out to Microsoft to help transition to the cloud and modernize the nonprofit’s work. 

A tight deadline lit an even more urgent fire beneath the NeighborWorks America-Microsoft collaboration: The nonprofit was due to move headquarters, leaving its hosted data center behind, in just four months. With the support of Microsoft Tech for Social Impact and the no-extra-cost FastTrack service, NeighborWorks America successfully moved to the cloud on budget and 1.5 months ahead of schedule. 

“Microsoft brought the tech expertise for us to migrate our on-prem environment to the cloud in drastic time,” Weldon says. The nonprofit’s digital transformation is improving productivity, empowering network organizations, and informing national housing policy. Here’s how.

Boosting productivity through the cloud

Due to old hardware, NeighborWorks America experienced monthly downtime incidents. These hardware failures were hard to fix, as the team had to turn to secondhand parts to repair no-longer-made equipment. As a result, internal staff and partner organizations would lose access to mission-critical applications, systems, and data. 

“You can imagine the urgency for someone who is facing foreclosure,” Weldon says. “The last thing you want is to have to wait a day, or even three, because the system is down.” Yet that’s what was happening.

NeighborWorks America turned to Azure VMware Solution to migrate its VMware-based workloads and tools from its headquarters-based datacenter. Now nearly 100% of NeighborWorks America’s IT infrastructure is in the cloud. Since transitioning applications, data storage, and daily systems to a custom-designed Azure environment in late 2022, the nonprofit has not had a single downtime event. The cloud also eliminates the headache of managing and maintaining hardware and on-prem infrastructure. 

"It fits us perfectly from a performance and cost standpoint,” Weldon says. The move to the cloud saved NeighborWorks $300,000 in expenditure in less than a year, and the pay-for-what-you-use cloud service ensures the nonprofit doesn’t spend more than it needs to. Savings translate directly to helping more people secure and keep affordable housing. He adds, “Those dollars go back to the housing community. As we reduce our overhead, we’re also improving our operations, so it’s a double win.”

The nonprofit is phasing out other productivity tools in favor of the Microsoft Cloud platform—including Teams for video conferencing and VoIP, SharePoint, and other Microsoft 365 applications—to shave costs and streamline their work. Collaborating in the cloud, rather than relying on a confusing mix of email attachments and varying versions, helps NeighborWorks America staff get more done, faster. “It’s easy to collaborate when we’re all on the same platform,” Weldon explains. “As we work more efficiently, we can provide better service to housing organizations. We’re more responsive.” 

Empowering network organizations to scale impact

NeighborWorks America’s backing helps their partner organizations—which invested $16.8 billion in their communities in 2021—run efficiently and impactfully. The nonprofit’s digital transformation is raising their support to a whole new level.

Now that NeighborWorks America’s apps all run in Azure, partner organizations have 24/7 access to counseling and educational materials. The always-on service ensures partner organizations’ clients, who may be on the brink of eviction or foreclosure, get the support they need immediately. Being able to rely on NeighborWorks America resources means network organizations can focus on direct service, for example, running more than 415,000 financial and housing counseling sessions in one year alone. 

NeighborWorks America’s cloud-based systems also keep partner organizations in compliance with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Staying up to date with HUD regulations keeps these housing organizations in business—and keeps low-income housing available to those who need it. The nonprofit tracks everything from apartments building owners reserve for low-income renters to proof of certification for network organization staff, all of which HUD requires. They keep this documentation securely in the cloud, ensuring organizations can demonstrate compliance at any time. This, in turn, keeps funding flowing to housing organizations in all 50 states, Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico.

As Weldon says, “Moving to the cloud supports our work building up communities.” 

Informing national housing policy—reliably

As an independent agency funded by Congress, NeighborWorks America helps Members and their staff better understand the country’s housing landscape so they can appropriately balance competing priorities. By acting as an expert resource that works closely with 247 chartered housing nonprofits across the country, NeighborWorks assists legislators in creating effective national housing policy. “Getting and curating data helps Congress optimize solutions for critical housing challenges facing communities across the nation,” Weldon says. 

Yet before the nonprofit’s digital transformation, the systems and data for providing this support were at risk. When Weldon joined as CIO in 2022, he realized the organization wasn’t properly backing up its resources. A data loss disaster could have put the nonprofit’s mission—and its commitment to address housing and community development needs -- in jeopardy.  As Weldon explains, “Our data and its integrity are key parts of the success story we deliver for our largest funder, Congress.” 

In response, the Microsoft team built in automatic backup processes that disaster-proof this vital data. The cloud environment and Microsoft 365 platform also ensure all updates and patches are current—a far cry from the nonprofit’s previous on-prem hardware and the software it ran, some of which was more than a decade out of date. The security safeguards free the nonprofit’s roughly 300 staff to focus on value-adding projects that make a dent in the country’s housing crisis. 

Weldon says the big effects of NeighborWorks America’s digital transformation, on a nonprofit’s tight budget, have set the organization up to make an even greater difference for individuals and communities. He continues, “Microsoft has been a great partner. It supports not just us and what NeighborWorks does, but the country. It supports America.”

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