Northside Neighborhood House has worked in the neighborhoods north of the Tennessee River since 1924. It is based in Chattanooga and runs stability services for households across North Hamilton County, with coordinators in ten Community Schools in the same area. Its 2025 report to the community counts 654 households served through stability services in one fiscal year, and 1,780 people living in them.
The organization brought in Sumac at the end of 2025 with a specific requirement. It had two programs to track, and wanted them to share what they knew about the same households without either being able to change the other’s records.
Whitney Glaze, Chief of Executive Strategy, sets the system up and pulls the numbers that go to leadership and to funders. Tina Williams, Lead Case Manager, works in it every day.
Stability services
Stability came first and is the larger of the two programs. Case managers record emergency assistance against the household: the need, the case note, and the disbursement that follows for rent, mortgage, utilities, medication or gas. The 2025 report puts that at $349,765.65 for the year, alongside more than 1,700 referrals to over 75 partner agencies. Glaze has described the program as “an onion — it has so many layers.”
The second program, Rooted Together, began as a pilot in April 2026 with a cohort of ten mothers. It runs six months of one-to-one case management alongside monthly group sessions on a theme, starting with financial literacy, and participants work through four steps a month for a stipend. That work is kept as case notes and case plans against the same client records the stability side uses.
Assessments
To place a household on a common scale, NNH uses the Arizona Self-Sufficiency Matrix. The matrix was loaded into Sumac in full and went live with every client on 4 June 2026, so the assessment is held on the client record rather than in a separate document.
Monthly reporting
Glaze builds a monthly report on stability services. She runs a saved search in Sumac for the month, exports the results, and drops them into a spreadsheet whose summary tabs and formulas carry over from last month’s file. One tab counts households and the people living in them, so the total reflects individuals served rather than cases opened. Others break the month out by zip code, rent and mortgage, utilities, and thrift vouchers, which come from a separate report so case managers and the front desk do not double-count them.
The zip code tab does a second job. It lists every zip code in the export and then summarises them, so a mismatch shows up immediately and Glaze sends corrections back to the team before the report is final. For aggregate counts she works in Sumac directly, through Quick Count and Outcome reports. Community Schools joins the same monthly report from the end of July 2026.
Case work
Tina Williams came to NNH from an organization that used a different case management system, so Sumac meant learning the work again. “There’s always a new curve of learning and a barrier to overcome when you’re working through a new case management platform,” she said. The first two months were the hardest, because the old system had become muscle memory.
The interface is what she likes. “I’m already a fan of the cleanness, the visual, the way that it is easy to navigate,” she said. She expects it to become second nature the way the last one did.
Two things have made the daily routine easier. Reminders open straight from the list to be marked complete and dated, and the dashboard’s reminders list appears at login with everything overdue or due. Glaze is also building out action plans, which hold a set sequence of follow-up steps and stamp each attempt with a time.
[QUOTE PLACEHOLDER — Whitney Glaze on what holding both programs in one system has changed for her monthly reporting / to be sourced and approved]
Most of the configuration behind this has been done with Olia, NNH’s contact since implementation, and with Judith on the support team.
