Modest Needs: Providing Small Grants to Stop the Downward Spiral Into Poverty and Homelessness

As of late, I've been pondering empowerment and prevention of the downward spiral of poverty.  I suppose somewhere I heard the proverb- "Give a person a fish and they eat for a day.  Teach a person to fish and they eat the rest of their lives."  And for some reason, as I'vetrundled down this path of trying to dispell my cynical, easy-way-out notions of I can't possibly help and instead, try to convince myself to have the faith that small pebbles thrown into a pond can produce ripples of significant change, I've come to focus on the hope of treating people with compassion is best done when we look at providing individualized long-term solutions for the ills of the world. 

In my aimless wanderings, I happened across the Modest Needs Foundation, whose mission it is to provide small grants with the aim of preventing families from entering the demeaning and degrading downward socioeconomic spiral of poverty.  With the tag line: "Small Change. A World of Difference" and a 50 state reach, I knew that these folks may be able to shed some light on my current quest to convince myself and hopefully others that small actions do count --- and they count big.

To me, chasing my doubtful demons away is best done by focusing on one person/cause at a time and looking at a way I can be part of the solution.  Sometimes it is giving  money. Sometimes it is giving time. Sometimes it is writing a supportive blog post.  Other times, it is being bold (as I am pretty much an introvert) and asking questions in hopes of proving that my skepticism is unfounded and learning to view things from a less pessimistic perspective.

Thankfully, Dr. Keith Taylor of Modest Needs Foundation, answered my email and graciously agreed to give me some information about his foundation and then be bold enough to wax philosophical on philanthropy as activity for every person.

What is Modest Needs Foundation and how did it get started?

Modest Needs Foundation is an award-winning charity that provides grants to hard-working, low-income families who require assistance with a short-term, emergency expense. In this way, with a well-timed grant, Modest Needs stops the cycle of poverty before it starts for these individuals and families. Modest Needs’ grants are funded entirely by small individual contributions, ranging, on average, from $5 to $100 per month.

When I was a graduate student, on my limited income, I remember having to rely on the kindness of others for unexpected bills and emergencies. When I became a professor, I decided to repay the kindness of those who helped me by helping others. I set up a small website and pledged 10% of my income, about $350 per month, to anyone who needed short-term assistance. I had no idea that this small system I had created would become so popular! Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who wanted to help people in this way and I received many letters from people who, like myself, wanted to give to stop the cycle of poverty for these families and individuals.

How many grants have you dispersed? What was the average amount dispersed? Describe the average family that gets assistance from your organization.

Since 2002, we have helped 3,281 individuals and families. We just recently awarded our millionth dollar grant! The average grant awarded is about $350, and we have made grants as large as $1,700 and as small as $76. Most of the families that receive our assistance have a single, hard-working parent as the head of the household.

Many simply see the world as made up of people who have enough and people who do not. Actually, there is a process that takes people into poverty. Can you describe this process and how Modest Needs helps prevent people from falling into poverty?

 

The cycle of poverty often begins with a hard-working but low-income self-sufficient family that lives from paycheck to paycheck. This family then has some unforeseen short-term crisis (a trip to the hospital, a death in the family, temporary loss of work, etc.) that results in their falling behind in their bills one month and struggling forever to catch up with that one house or car payment. At this point, any minor financial setback can cause the family to lose their home or car, leaving them with absolutely nothing because of one small bill that they consistently could not catch up on.

Without assistance from Modest Needs, these families would never be able to recover from this financial crisis. Modest Needs steps in before these families have lost everything and have to rely on state or federal assistance by helping hard-working families to remain self-sufficient and to be able to continue to work.

Are there any myths about poverty that you would like to address? If so, please feel free to clear them up here.

I think the most important myth about the cycle of poverty is that people often fall into that cycle as a result of personal irresponsibility. Five years at Modest Needs has shown me that this is almost never the case. The persons who come to us are hard-working, low-income folks who are doing their best to do everything right, but who just can’t afford to cover the cost of a short-term emergency.

The question I sometimes hear in regards to persons in this position who ask for our help– ‘Why couldn’t they have just saved up’ – is akin to Marie Antoinette’s famous, apocryphal comment ‘Let them eat cake.’ You can’t save money if you’re a single parent working full time for $13 an hour while you’re raising two children. The real problem is that no resource prior to Modest Needs had existed to help these persons at the *outset* of a short-term crisis, for example, the desperately needed car repair that a person in this position can’t afford without foregoing his or her rent for that month.

This is how the cycle of poverty actually begins for most people, and I’m glad we can play a part in stopping that cycle BEFORE it starts for the persons who most can benefit from the short term helping hand that we’re able to offer.

Are there any stories that come to mind of where the “small change” provided by Modest Needs made a “world of difference”? If so, would you mind sharing one or two.

I think my favorite story ever is that of a woman from Kentucky who asked for our help to purchase a special pair of glasses for her son. This woman and her husband both worked full time (one as a teacher, the other in construction) had several children, and were making ends meet. But their youngest son had an eye disorder – a corneal defect – that prevented him from seeing shapes. To him, the world was a blur of sound and nonsense.

Ironically, this eye disorder is completely correctible with glasses, but the lenses are very expensive because they must be tailored to the individual corneas that they’ll be correcting. This person couldn’t afford such glasses for her son (the lenses alone cost $550), and so she applied for help from Modest Needs for $50 – the cost of the down payment for the glasses.

She explained that her son was just about to start school and had to have the glasses and promised that, if we’d help her with the down payment, she’d get a night job to pay off the balance due to the optician.

Ultimately, we decided that his person hadn’t requested enough help from us, and so we paid for the lenses in full, leaving her to purchase only the frames. We found out later that, when this child went to the optician to be fitted with these special glasses, he looked up at his mother and said, ‘Mom, is that you?’

This child was five years old, and he’d never seen his mother before.

When you can restore a child’s sight for $550, that, to me, embodies what we talk about at Modest Needs when we say ‘Small Change: A World of Difference’

Please describe the process that you use to evaluate each request for assistance.

At Modest Needs, we take extra steps to safeguard the integrity of our donors’ contributions. Our evaluation process is designed to ensure that the people we assist legitimately require our assistance. Applicants first fill out a brief online application, telling us about their financial situation and the expense that they require assistance with. After we have initially reviewed this request to make sure it falls within our funding guidelines, we ask our applicants to submit documentation, verifying the information they provided in the initial application. You can view a sample documentation packet by visiting http://www.modestneeds.org/images/38199_documentation.pdf

Once we have made sure that the documentation confirms the applicant’s situation, we place them on our website for donor review and funding. In the event that an application is funded, we remit payment directly to the creditor (we never send a check directly to the applicant) on behalf of the applicant.

Does the donor have a place in the evaluation of requests for funding? If so, what?

Our donors are not passive donors. They enjoy the giving process and like to be directly involved the decision-making process when it comes to funding applications. Anyone who gives even two dollars to Modest Needs can go onto our website and ‘score’ applications from 0 to 9, indicating which applications they would like to see funded first. Our system calculates an average score for each application. Each week, when we allocate funding, we start with the highest scored applications and work our way down until we exhaust funding.

To date, what methods have you used to get the word out about the foundation? Is there anything the DP readers can do to help you out in this?

Surprisingly, we really haven’t had to do much to get the word out. People and the press seem to love the work we are doing and our unique approach. However, we are registered with every local 211, which is how most of our applicants find out about us. We have also been featured in many news articles, television talk shows, and radio programs.

We just recently joined the Squidoo community, which is a bit like Myspace for the socially conscious. We would encourage DP readers who are interested in supporting Modest Needs to go onto our headquarters and make a “lens” in support of our organization. A “lens” is simply a small, personalized web page that can be about anything at all -- movies, a pet, a hobby or interest. This page is completely free to create, only takes about ten minutes of your time, and generates revenue for Modest Needs.

What are top 5 items on your organization’s wish list?

Honestly, we have only one major item on our wish-list at this time: more recurring (read monthly or weekly) donors.

Throughout 2007, Modest Needs is operating under a very generous matching grant that doubles the dollar value of every recurring donation made to Modest Needs, each month it’s made. For example, if a person pledges $30 a month to Modest Needs this year (that’s $1 a day), the donation is instantly matched to be worth $60 a month to our applicants. And because we have grants that cover our operating costs, we’re able to pass all of our donors’ funding to the individuals who have applied for help through us.

The initial value of this matching grant is $300,000.00. We had a similar grant last year, and it took us nearly 12 months to claim the entire amount. This year, our matching donor has suggested to us that if we are able to claim the entire $300,000.00 earlier in the year (say, by July or August), they’ll ‘up’ the amount of the maximum possible match.

So really, what we most want to do is make the most of this remarkable opportunity, and in order to do that, we simply need more people willing to make a small donation on a monthly basis. If people really want to help Modest Needs in a big way this year, that’s how to do it. Interested persons can make a secure pledge of any size in two minutes or less.

While looking through some of the requests, I saw that someone from your office in New York was actually going to take the grant recipient to the grocery store and purchase the food for him/her. This seems like a great way to uphold the commitment to your donors to make sure grants get spent as intended. It also seems like a great way to get donors and advocates involved too. Is there a plan to expand opportunities like this to your community of partners and friends?

Whenever we have the staff and resources to assist with expenses such as food and clothing from people in the New York City area, expenses we normally could not consider because we would have to provide the applicant with cash or its equivalent in order to purchase them, we love to assist with these kinds of necessities.

 

Tomorrow, my assistant is taking this grant recipient to a local grocery store to purchase $200 worth of groceries for her. We would love to involve our friends and partners in this type of grant-giving, provided we can work out issues like liability and logistics (harder than one might imagine). One thing that we do have in place that provides this sort of direct involvement is an “adoption” system, where any partner of Modest Needs can adopt a specific application and personally fund it in full. We put the applicant and donor in contact with each other to work out payment arrangements.

Lastly,  waxing philosophical for a moment... one of my core beliefs is that philanthropy should be a balanced effort to provide a hand out and a hand up. Meeting a need relieves suffering. Empowerment is an effort to prevent future suffering. Would you mind sharing one of your core beliefs about the purpose of philanthropy?

When most people hear the word ‘philanthropy,’ the issue of ‘money’ immediately springs to mind. It’s no wonder – when you watch the news, you hear, for example, about Warren Buffet’s decision to award the bulk of his billions to the Bill Gates Foundation. By contrast, you don’t hear much about the guy who fed a parking meter for a stranger whose time was about to expire. 

I think it’s our culture’s focus on big money giving that causes a lot of folks who genuinely want to be philanthropists to shrug their shoulders and say, ‘But I make $10 an hour. What can *I* do? But what most people don’t know is that even the word ‘philanthropy’ has nothing to do with money.

‘Philanthropy,’ from the Greek, simply means ‘Compassion for People.’ And realizing this made all of the difference for me. ‘Philanthropy’ is not just about empowering the individuals in need of compassion. It’s about empowering each of us to *demonstrate* meaningful compassion, as we can, with whatever we can afford to share. And to me, that kind of empowerment, which tangibly affects both the donor and the recipient, is the only kind of power worth having.

I love your tagline: Small Change: A World of Difference! Please expand your thoughts on this.

This tagline really goes to the issues about philanthropy I raised above. The entire point is that you really don’t have to be wealthy to make a ‘world of difference’ to someone in need of your kindness, of your compassion. 

Consider this: Modest Needs recently made its millionth dollar grant. But that million dollars didn’t come to us by conventional means. We received it (mostly) $5 and $10 and $50 and $100 at a time from people just like you, just like me, just like all of us – people who know what it is to struggle at the cusp of poverty, and who did just what they could to help another person avoid that difficult situation.

Modest Needs is not just about helping persons avoid the cycle of poverty. It’s about changing the way we think about giving and our power – the power we *all* possess – to change lives simply by acting compassionately. We may have only ‘small change’ to offer, and we may only be making ‘small grants.’ But those small acts of compassion create make a world of difference in the lives of all concerned.

I certainly don't mean this to sound trite... but thanks Dr. Taylor for your time and your thoughtful answers.  That is just what I needed... ask and you shall receive....Now, I'm off to ponder a little and continue my 'attitude adjustments."

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Comments

[lornadoone]

As a supporter of Kiva.org, I've often wondered how someone might be able to do something similar in the U.S. While Modest Means makes grants instead of loans, it seems like a good comparison. Thanks for the info.

[Hope Okeny Kaluma]

As a social worker I know that these programs can work we have been suporting women affected in Northern Uganda by loaning money ranging from $20 to $100.
And it has changed the lives of very many families.

[dee]

Digital Charity is another website where people can get donations, but Modest Needs is better regulated. From http://laodn.org/