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."
Send your Dollar Today...
Their objectives are to help U.S. Military children and spouses with college grants as well as provide financial assistance to those families in need of help with housing, utilities, food and clothing. Often, when a loss occurs in these families what was a two person income becomes one. The financial hardships placed on these families are very difficult to deal with. Their lives are devastated and forever changed.
