Announcing VAHC’s New, Accessible Website

The Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition is excited to announce the launch of its new website! With technical support from extraordinary volunteers from Code for BTV, our website features a fully accessible layout, new features, and revised content. 

For the past five months, we have worked with several volunteers from Code for BTV. One stands out in particular: Christina Hamilton. Christina was always willing to meet us where we were – as a small nonprofit, it’s easy to lose sight of bigger projects when there’s millions of tiny tasks swirling about. When we dropped the ball, she was ready to help us out when we came back to it.

Christina was patient, helpful, and always took time to explain what worked, how, and why. We are so grateful for her work and expertise as this project could not have been completed without her.

Here are some of the features and content we’re most excited about.

Accessibility

Our new website, which is powered by WordPress, now has a fully accessible theme that is compatible with all sorts of accessibility needs. Unlike our previous website, we are now site-reader friendly. The theme also has many display options depending on your vision needs.

While accessibility has always been a part of our definition of safe, decent housing, we are excited to have a website that reflects that commitment. Indeed, as federal courts weigh in websites’ need to meet ADA guidelines, we’re excited to be compliant.

If You Need Housing

Although VAHC is an advocacy- and education-based organization, we receive many calls from people looking for affordable housing or those on the verge of homelessness. Our new If You Need Housing page is an extensive – but not exhaustive – look at all of the resources and organizations available to those seeking housing and shelter throughout the state, formed in part as a response to the calls we get.

We hope that this page can offer some direction for ways to proceed for those who need it. If you see something that’s missing or have suggestions for more resources to link to, don’t hesitate contact us so we can add it to the list.

New Events Calendar

Our new Events Calendar is a big step up from the limited capabilities of our old website, and we hope that this additional functionality will help it serve as a hub for all things housing in the state of Vermont.

With the new calendar, we can add venue, organizer, and additional event information for each post on the calendar. If you have an event you want to see on the calendar, feel free to email kenda.vahc@gmail.com so we can add it.

Updated Resources

Historically, our website has served as a hub for educational resources about the state of affordable housing and homelessness in Vermont. In designing the new website, we had to evaluate the organization of our extensive resource archive. In doing so, we came up with four new sections: State Policy, Federal Policy, Housing Needs, and Housing 101.

The state and federal policy pages link to many resources to help you navigate each of those respective legislative landscapes. The housing needs page is meant to be a primer about housing and homelessness in Vermont. Finally, the Housing 101 is a hub for resources for VAHC’s biennial Housing 101 presentation at the Vermont Statewide Housing Conference. Overall, we hope this new organization will make the information on our website more useful to our readers.

Last but not least! If you spent any time on the old VAHC website, you may know that we had quite an collection of links, documents, and other resources. Although they are not listed the same way they were on the old website we now have a public Google Drive folder that is home to all of those resources.  

We are so excited to usher in this new era of VAHC’s online presence, and we hope you’ll contribute to help us make this website great by submitting events and providing feedback on what’s helpful to our visitors.