By Michele Weaver and Harold Branch, rural development specialists – RCAC Housing and Community Services

Greetings to all self-help grantees and other individuals within the RCAC service area interested in self-help housing rehab activities.

RCAC has set up a self-help rehab SharePoint site that will allow us to share documents with you. It also has a chat box (somewhat similar to Facebook) that you can use to share information, post comments and ask questions relative to self-help rehab activities. This is a closed site, available only for current and potential agencies we work with under our self-help contract, but you can identify as many individuals from your agency to participate as you like.

We are hoping that all agencies interested in self-help rehab activities will join the site as it provides an easy platform for us to share and store documents.

Since SharePoint is a Microsoft product, you’ll need to have a Microsoft account. Many of you probably already have that. If you don’t, you’ll need to set one up (much like creating a Gmail account). With the Microsoft account, you don’t even need to create a new email address—you can use your work email. There is no cost to set up an account.

Once you’ve completed this process, send the email address that is identified as your Microsoft account to Michele Weaver at mweaver@rcac.org. Michele will then send you an invitation to join the self-help rehab shared site. Again, this site is by invitation only.

If you have questions, please contact Michele.