Welcome to the Trust Fund's new website! Please have a look around. Everything is basically in the same place, but we have a spiffy new design, and a few new bells and whistles that we hope will make it easier to find the information you're looking for.

For starters, you'll notice the search bar in the right-hand column of every page. This feature is based on Google's index of our website, so it may take a little while to work out some of the bugs. Once Google re-indexes our website, you'll be able to search for anything on the site just like you would search for something on the web.

Also, we've made it easier to subscribe to our blog content. Just above the search bar on this page, you'll notice links to our RSS feeds. For those who need a primer on RSS (which stands for "Really Simple Syndication"), please have a look at this Wikipedia entry. Basically, it's a way of subscribing to the content of a website so that you automatically receive updates as they get posted. The idea is that you won't have to spend time checking websites to see if they've made changes. The easiest way to subscribe to multiple RSS feeds is to use an aggregator, like Bloglines, Google Reader, My Yahoo, or Newsgator (all of which are free). Or, if you prefer, you can also subscribe to our blog and receive updates via email.

The same thing goes for our new eNewsletter, which is where we'll be cross-posting all the articles from our Community Quarterly Newsletter online. Like the blog, you can subscribe to the eNewsletter's RSS feed, or receive updates via email.

Another new feature we're excited about is our Calendar. There's not much on it yet, but if your organization has an event that you would like our readers to know about, feel free to send us an email with all the pertinent information, and we'll add it to the calendar. Also, if you use Google calendars, you can subscribe to our calendar, and automatically receive updates as we add them.

From now on, our Achievements page will be much more fluid. As we close new loans throughout the year, the numbers on this page will be updated to accurately reflect current statistics about the Trust Fund, including how much we've lent and leveraged, how many units of affordable housing have been created as a result of our loans, how many new jobs were created, how many children have been served, and so on.

We'll be working out the bugs and rolling out some new features over the next few weeks, but we're excited about this new website. In the meantime, if you experience any problems or have any suggestions for how we can improve the site, please don't hesitate to let us know what you think. Thanks for reading!