My name is Lisa Taliano and I’m a Senior IT Manager for the National Urban League, one of the oldest civil rights organizations in the US, founded in 1910.
It is dedicated to empowering African Americans and other underserved urban communities to secure economic self-reliance, equality, power and justice by providing human services in education, employment, housing, and healthcare. NUL operates 25 national programs through their local affiliates network, re-granting 25 million dollars annually to 95 affiliates in 36 states across the country.
I was hired by NUL 3 years ago to help them develop an online program management system. When I came on board, they were running their programs (tracking eligibility, enrollment, activities, and outcomes data) using a huge array of paper forms and excel spreadsheets. After reviewing the different program and grant management systems, we selected CiviCRM because: it was designed specifically to meet the needs of non-profit organization, it has a case management and grants management component, and it is free/open source software that integrated with our existing Drupal platform.
I started working in isolation, implementing CiviCase for three of our workforce programs - customizing templates, creating extensions for custom reports and modified the system for multi-level organization ACL permissions. It was a success.
Last Year I went to my first CiviCon in Denver and attended the Developer’s training session. Afterwards I went to the Code sprint in the Rocky Mountains National park. I was a little intimidated at first to go to the sprint because I didn’t know anyone and I thought that it would be way out of my league, but Dave Greenberg encouraged me to go, and I took the plug. It was a mind-blowing experience. I should have connected sooner. I couldn’t believe the level of dedication, passion, generosity, and brainpower in the room. It was very exciting to be working with such high-minded intellectuals dedicated to making the world a better place. I look forward to working with the team and the community to take both the Urban League Movement and CiviCRM into the future.
Due to our multilayered permissions requirements, we’ve contracted with the Core Team and PalanteTech to develop CaseType ACL hooks to control access across programs and affiliates, and to extended our use of CiviCRM to make it and it’s components available to all our affiliates and the Urban League Movement.
Lisa Taliano
Senior IT Manager
National Urban League
A CiviCRM member
I look forward to working with the team and the community to take both the Urban League Movement and CiviCRM into the future.
