Lifelink’s IT Revolution Show Your Impact Story

Organization Information:

Organization Name:
Lifelink Corporation
City & State:
Bensenville, 
Illinois
Organization Website:
http://www.lifelink.org
Organization's Mission Statement

Lifelink Corporation is a 114-year-old human service agency in Bensenville, Illinois, and is the oldest faith-based agency in the state. Lifelink Corporation has been a leader in serving children, families and older adults since 1895 with innovative, high-quality and unduplicated human services in the many communities in which we operate. Lifelink has stayed true to its mission to provide compassionate and quality care to the most vulnerable members of society, regardless of race or religion, and to assist people of all generations to build and maintain individual well-being

Submission Information

Impact Essay

Lifelink’s IT Revolution Show Your Impact Story Lifelink Corporation is a 114-year-old human service agency in Bensenville, Illinois, and is the oldest faith-based agency in the state. Lifelink Corporation has been a leader in serving children, families and older adults since 1895 with innovative, high-quality and unduplicated human services in the many communities in which we operate. Lifelink has stayed true to its mission to provide compassionate and quality care to the most vulnerable members of society, regardless of race or religion, and to assist people of all generations to build and maintain individual well-being.

Lifelink annually touches more than 25,000 low-income seniors, the physically and mentally disabled and children and their families residing in urban, suburban and rural communities in Illinois, Iowa, Florida, Missouri, and Wisconsin. Our staff members are professionals in their fields and represent and reflect the diverse ethnic and cultural populations we serve. This ensures that Lifelink continues to provide culturally-appropriate and relevant programming that meets the need of each unique community.

 

Lifelink has earned accreditation from the Council of Accreditation (COA), which ensures that our organization is operating under extremely high standards, transparency, and best practices across all administrative and program areas. Additionally, Lifelink recently earned Hague accreditation under the Hague Inter-country Adoption Act. This makes us one of the first United States adoption agencies to receive this important certification that represents a worldwide effort to halt the trafficking and abuse of children through strict guidelines and parent training.

Lifelink Corporation serves as the umbrella agency for Bensenville Home Society (the Child and Family Services division (CFS)), Lifelink Affordable Housing for seniors and the disabled, Holyleton (Illinois) Youth and Family Services serving East St. Louis, and Lifelink Charities, the fundraising arm of the affiliate agencies. This particular story focuses on the Child and Family Service division.

Beginning in 2007, Lifelink developed an IT Revolution proposal to overhaul technology for the entire organization and its affiliates. This three-year, $1.5 million plan was essential to continuing to provide the high quality of services and transparency that the organization’s reputation rests upon.

The agency was using an antiquated Novell Network that had become a technology nightmare. Systems would crash, file sharing was impossible; there was no centralized access to shared software within agency programs, let alone the agency. Accounts Receivables and Account Payables was being recorded and turned in by hand and the timeliness, quality, and transparency of services was quickly becoming unproductive and inaccurate. The email server would crash constantly and made the sending and receiving of email communications impossible due to the fact that the server would be down for hours at a time.

Since then, we have replaced the Novell Network and converted every operating system to Windows Server 2003. We also replaced the mail server to Microsoft Exchange 2007. We implemented a Microsoft Terminal Server to allow our remote users to access company critical applications. We have also installed Microsoft SQL 2005 along with Great Plains to bring our Finance Department to current industry standards. We are currently working to get Microsoft SharePoint into our production environment. Since we have updated to Microsoft products, we have noticed an increase in speed and reliability.

Although we have made significant progress on the server side, we still have hundreds of computers that are antiquated and in need of replacement. Even with such equipment, Lifelink employees continue to deliver much needed assistance to those who need it the most.

The Child and Family Services division is responsible for large federal and state grants management and reporting requirements and thousands of children and families through two Foster Care programs, seven Head Start centers, and Early Head Start home visits, and a Healthy Families America program that serves 150 pregnant teens. Child and Family Services programs became the epicenter of disaster with ancient computers and printers, constant crashes, jammed and frozen programs, email failures, and redundant and time-costly reinventing of documents in different formats so that they could be read or accessed by colleagues. Since both Head Start and Foster Care are housed in over nine offsite offices, the IT Revolution plan immediately targeted these programs, as money permitted.

In early 2008, Lifelink purchased a Microsoft Windows server 2003 to create a new and enhanced environment that aligns with new share software it purchased for Head Start, Foster Care, and the Great Plains financial software environment, allowing the finance department to liaise technologically with billing reporting between the Foster Care department and the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, one of the first such linkages in Illinois.

Lifelink joined Tech Soup in order to access donated and/or affordable software, hardware, and licensing. Lifelink purchased 50 Microsoft licensing tokens to allow remote users access to critical company applications, and nine Adobe Pro licenses, saving the organization thousands of dollars and freeing up slowly incoming funds for the IT Revolution project. The reliability of the new equipment and software, including the email platform immediately stabilized communications and file sharing, saving the organization untold dollars in wasted staff time and provision of services to our low-income families.

Lifelink is submitting this story in hopes of consideration of the $5,000 and $25,000 of reliable Microsoft products. This new economy has brought our IT Revolution project to a halt until more funds are freed up to devote to this continuing effort to revolutionize Lifelink service provision across all departments.

Last year, a grant from the Grand Victoria Foundation allowed the IT Revolution project to purchase a share program and new computers for the Head Start program. This year, IT hoped to upgrade all of the Foster Care computers, which are running on a 2000 platform. Though the program now has shared software, ProFile, the old computers continue to freeze while staff uses this program to record and report data. Foster Care staff is still forced to send and accept files in radically different software that is a continued time waster and frustration for those staff. Just this morning, emails between the main campus and the Foster Care offices revealed that staff could not open even documents saved in 2003 formats, which made the two staff exchanging emails spend an extra fifteen minutes of trying to find a mutual communication format, and finally, used cutting and pasting to send the document by email.

Submission Category
Stable and Secure Technology
Project Image
Foster care.jpg