( Astrid Riecken / FOR THE WASHINGTON POST ) - Ann Marie Oliva, director of the Office of Special Needs Assistance Programs, was so frustrated by the paperwork for processing grant applications that she helped cut their processing time to a third of what it had been.
The year Ann Marie Oliva contracted malaria in Kenya was the year she promised herself she would dedicate her life to fighting poverty if she made it out alive.
For four months, Oliva, then a junior in college, lived at sea as part a study-abroad program. The ship had rounded the southern tip of Africa and was crossing the Atlantic, when Oliva, severely anemic with a 108-degree fever, was helicoptered off to a hospital in Brazil.
“It sounds kind of hokey, but I think that sort of solidified for me my intent to do something meaningful,” Oliva said.
Oliva, 40 and now director of the Office of Special Needs Assistance Programs at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, is a finalist for this year’s Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals for her work in getting federal funds more quickly to organizations that help the homeless.
Oliva led the switch to electronic processing of grant applications, allowing HUD to deliver more than $1.6 billion in grants to local organizations in a third of the time it used to take — cutting the process from six months to two.
“I had seen poverty in India, Taiwan, Kenya, Brazil, but I wanted to start here because I knew that we have plenty of issues in our own country,” said Oliva, who was recruited to head the office in 2007.
On her first week on the job, Oliva was stunned to see the amount of paperwork the office handled. Just one application for federal grant money required a stack a foot thick, she said. Last year, more than 8,000 funding applications were submitted.
“It was ludicrous,” Oliva said. “If you piled them up, they would take up the whole office.”
Since the transition from paper to an electronic system known as e-snaps in 2008, HUD has cut administrative costs by 90 percent and tracked results and allocated resources more efficiently, she said.
“It was incredibly complex and difficult to do that first year — I cried at my desk a lot,” said Oliva, who admitted a sappy commercial is enough to get her tearing up. “It was not an option for us to fail and not get this money out the door by January 1st [2009].”
Oliva’s office has helped 935,000 people with $1.5 billion in stimulus funding — a figure double her office’s budget that year. Her team of about 30 employees is now working to draft new regulations to streamline the nation’s homeless programs as part of the Homeless Emergency Assistance and Rapid Transition to Housing Act.
Oliva, the third of four children, grew up in Havertown, Pa., in a service-minded household, where the two most important lessons she learned were to “vote and give back to the community.” Her parents immigrated to the United States in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Oliva graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1993 with a bachelor’s degree in politics and philosophy and a minor in economics.
She moved from Pittsburgh to New Mexico to fight poverty as a Volunteers in Service to America member, where she learned after about a month on the job that she was not cut out to be a direct-service provider.
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![( Astrid Riecken / FOR THE WASHINGTON POST ) - Director of HUD’s Special Needs Assistance Programs Ann Marie Oliva stands in front of the HUD building in Southwest, where she works primarily on homeless issues. “It’s easy to lose [sight] when you’re writing regulations and counting numbers,” Oliva said.](/rf/image_606w/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2011/07/28/Others/Images/2011-07-28/oliva007_1311894721.jpg)
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