Homes—our service members deserve better
Most are familiar with the ubiquitous slogans from our nation’s branches of service: "The Few, The Proud", "Born Ready", or "Aim High, Fly-Fight-Win." Television commercials do a great job marketing the resolve and steadfastness of service men and women working tirelessly at their craft—piloting Black Hawks, traversing mountains at the tactical edge, servicing F18s on aircraft carriers. However, something is conveniently left out of that narrative—the staggering amount of service members subjected to horrendous base housing living conditions. By horrendous, think black mold climbing up and down walls causing chronic headaches debilitating service men and women from doing their respective jobs, think rat droppings falling from the ceiling. Yes, the fine folks in charge of DoD marketing really were not, "Born Ready" or trying hard to "Aim High", by bringing light to what is now beyond a base housing crisis. Homes are in disrepair, falling apart, plagued with mold, rodents, and the list goes on. Besides the endangerment of service members (which is inexcusable as is), it is their families who suffer the most. These are the folks relegated to the physical home in which their living conditions are causing more harm than not. This goes beyond being a housing crisis and a major health concern affecting thousands of our service members and their families. This issue impacts our nations readiness.
The question now becomes how do we repair a national readiness issue and safely house our service members? By partnering with the best in breed, Monkton is able to provide the technology necessary to empower service members and their families to take back control of their home—to hold others accountable, provide transparency about the problem, and peace of mind that changes will be made.
Our combined effort is a turn-key mobile app solution named Homes. Homes, short for Housing Our Military Effectively and Safely, is a mobile app our service members and their families download from Apple's App Store and Google Play. Once securely authenticated, families can create reports of problems in their home with an easy tap of a button. Once in the app, a simple write up of what needs to be fixed, along with a few photos of the issues, and done—the report is off within a minutes worth of effort with the security we would expect when it comes to our service members and families.
Additionally, the Repair app provides the maintenance professionals a queue of repairs on their facility that need to be completed. The repair team can then perform the repairs, having been equipped with the proper documentation and photos of what needs fixing. Once repaired, service members and their families then have the ability to comment on whether or not the problem was solved with the simple 1 - 5 star rating. Base housing officials then have the power of oversight and can perform audits, approvals, and inspections themselves through this standardized rating system. This changes the balance of power from privatized housing companies back to our service members and the base housing offices.
Homes itself satisfied the requirements that were laid out in the 2020 NDA for resolving issues with base housing. From enabling our soldiers to file repair reports, to the work flow to ensure that the reports are completed by the privatized housing companies, to the approvals and inspections performed by the base housing offices—homes is a single pane of glass for everything, that the DoD can control. With Homes, the DoD will have unparalleled oversight, transparency, and accountability into base housing, from the local base housing office to Office of Secretary of Defense's office—instantly and securely.
Base housing has been on the steady decline for over ten years, so it comes as no surprise that it will take a while to be resolved. Regardless, there is no reason another ten years need to pass to make improvements. Technology itself will not solve the problem, but Homes is our way of doing instead of talking.
Homes is a Software as a Service ("SaaS") provided by Monkton, Inc.
