 Hi, my name is Sharon Nelson, HR manager responsible for talent acquisition for the City of Columbia. Talent in the City is our effort to highlight and showcase the departments with the City of Columbia, the department's impact players, as well as the talent who make the city run every single day. These impact players and departments oftentimes don't get the spotlight that they deserve, but without them the City of Columbia would not run as a beautifully oiled machine that it is. I am Felicia Kilgore, director of community development. So community development, our mission is to provide assistance for local citizens to improve their way of living with housing, improving local economy for growth, and we do that by administering federal dollars from federal, state, as well as local dollars to provide various activities to assist residents in the City of Columbia, and we work with many non-profit organizations, as well as some internal departments with the City to administer those dollars to provide assistance to improving parks, building new parks, providing equipment. We've been working with our City of Columbia departments, parks and recs, those areas. And again, we work with non-profits to provide funding to carry out many activities within those particular organizations to provide services from assisting homelessness, to provide educational programs to help low to moderate income individuals as well to find jobs, to assist individuals maybe transitioning from being incarcerated that may need some assistance to get them back into the realm of living more independently. So we administer those dollars to ensure that those funds are used within the guidelines of HUD, which is essentially where those dollars are actually coming from. So the education requirement, generally all of our position requires a college educated degree. Many times on working with our federal programs, we are seeking individuals who have some federal background, some federal experience, some federal knowledge of the program as relates to work with HUD dollars. So they have a great understanding of the requirements and responsibilities that we have as we administer those dollars to support those barriers active. However, we have had an opportunity to where as if they have some other type of experience where they work with low income individuals and families, we will also look into those particular individuals as well and we will help them learn, provide educational training on the federal side so that they can come more familiar with those federal programs that we administer. My name is Addie Robertson and I am a QAQC program compliance specialist. I went to school in Florida for environmental science and then I switched to environmental studies and public management. So I've kind of always loved environmental. I love to be like in nature and everything like that. And so environmental reviews was kind of something that brought me in here and I was really interested in it. I worked for the South Carolina Emergency Management Division before I worked here. That was my first job, writing the state hazard mitigation plan. So I kind of went from there to learning more about HUD grants. So having that FEMA background and then working with federal grants there and then having a HUD background, I really saw the benefit in having both of those and I was really interested in it. So I actually just started this past summer. I started working here in August. I want to say like early August. So not very long, but I loved it so far. I'm the program manager of housing. So my role is to manage all of our housing programs for community development, which are the housing loan programs that we have. We also do rehabilitation and we also do affordable housing development. I've been with the city of Columbia a little over two years now. Previously I worked at Richland County doing the same kind of work. So I worked in building inspections. So I have a background in building, so construction, building and community development. And I started doing community development about 2008 when I lived in Illinois actually. So I worked in community development. So I started learning about the HUD funded programs, how the monies use the programs that it use. And then I have a passion for helping low to moderate income, become homeowners, the rehabilitation side, and the financial literacy that we offer and teaching people about building wealth. So since I've been here, we've helped about five or six people purchase homes. Two of those people are actually city employees and their first time home buyers, first generation home owners as well. And that is what drives my passion. I love to see that because, you know, for me, when I became a homeowner, it was struggle because one, I didn't have the education, so I didn't understand credit. I didn't understand the process. So I had to learn it on my own. I didn't know about different programs like we have and that that's out there to help people become homeowners and throughout my career, you know, even in Richland County and the other places that I've worked, just watching people become homeowners young, parents, families, purchasing their first home, the joy that they have. Sometimes people still say, hey, Miss Spads, you're going to be purchasing my first home. I'm just in a grocery store and people come up to me that I've worked with in the past. And I say, so are you still there? And they say, yeah, we love it. You know, that's what really drives me. For more information about this position and its department, please visit www.columbiasc.gov.