Working for housing and community development agencies gave me many glimpses of health and human service agencies, both governmental and non-profits. As a result, I know many case managers, folks who’ve dedicated their professional lives to helping others through programs like homeless prevention, nutrition, vocational rehabilitation and foster care. What’s so hard about dedicating your life to this profession? The job itself is a challenge: these case managers deal with a never-ending line of people, people who are in the throes of the most difficult and painful human experiences. If you can believe it, actually doing the job is sometimes even more difficult. The regulatory complexity for their efforts – establishing eligibility for various types of assistance – is off the charts. While it’s formulated that an unemployed person needs temporary financial assistance, access to some food, eviction prevention and job retraining, the actual process to access those programs is needlessly complicated.

I caught up with Fran (again, don't judge my video skills), who works in the IT department at a city in the western U.S. I wish I had chatted with her before adding the last post - she was all about offline ECM capabilities! Off camera, Fran mentioned many, many more field workers that could benefit from offline capabilities. In particular, she serves the Parks and Recreation department, so the first two that came to mind were the people who make inspections, such as to playgrounds, as well as the tree trimmers.