Filling Gaps and Building Communities of Support

A Benevolent Blog Guest Blog

By Professor Scott W. Allard, School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, Research Associate of the Population Research Center at NORC and the University of Chicago, Research Affiliate of the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, Research Affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Member of the Board of Directors of Benevolent.

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As poverty and unemployment rates remain at historically high levels, the growing needs of working poor families and job-seekers shine a harsh light on the gaps in today’s safety net. These gaps should be challenging us to think of new ways of connecting those who can help with those in need. Benevolent.net offers a promising new way to direct giving to the unmet needs of low-income families -- needs that too often fall through the gaps in the safety net and consequently make it difficult to find or keep a job.

Government programs like food stamps or Medicaid often come to mind when we think of assistance for the poor. Yet these public programs cover only some of the material, transportation, or health needs of low-income families striving to make it. For example, lack of access to a reliable car or to public transit is a significant barrier to many of the working poor – but there is precious little transportation assistance available. Many poor job-seekers may need vision care or dental work in order to secure a steady, good-paying job, but these basic health needs often are not covered by public assistance programs.

There is other help, but it also can be spotty and insufficient. In some cases, social service programs and organizations provide critical assistance to the poor through employment services, adult education, child care, emergency assistance, and counseling services. Delivered often through community-based nonprofits, these social services are central to helping many low-income families achieve stability. The problem is that social service programs are coping with substantial cuts in public and philanthropic support. And what support there is doesn’t always reach those with the greatest need. In my 2009 book, Out of Reach, I found that residents of high-poverty neighborhoods have about half as much access to social service providers as do people who live in more affluent neighborhoods.

It can be bitterly hard for families living on the edge of stability to find help in times of need. Most turn to family, friends, or trusted members of their social networks for help with needs that safety-net programs do not or cannot address.

Ordinary people who want to help often don’t know how to. We know there are people around us who are having a hard time, but many of our neighbors silently struggle to find work, feed their families, or keep their homes. We find ourselves asking - what can we do?

How can the nonprofit sector do a better job of filling critical gaps in the safety net? And, on the other hand, how can we give private philanthropists, who don’t have unlimited means, opportunities to make a real social impact?

I believe Benevolent can be the answer to these questions. By providing an online portal that connects donors to community-based organizations, caseworkers, and ultimately to families who need help in a time of crisis, Benevolent helps to weave a connective web of people to fill in critical gaps in the safety net. Benevolent ensures that we reach those most in need at the moment of their need, and ensures that the donors’ support has real, visible impact. By providing a place for people to interact and share with each other, Benevolent helps us become a community of support. In short, Benevolent is a platform for helping us to realize how we would like to receive help and give help.

- Scott W. Allard, Benevolent Board of Directors

Doing the Right Thing 15+ Years Ago is Working Against Denise Today

Denise did what she needed to and followed the rules. Now she’s lost her job and she and her children are living at a shelter.

Denise was a teenage mom. When her child was born, she continued her education, receiving some Temporary Aid for Need Families support while she went to high school. She made it through her junior year before she found herself having to make the tough decision to drop out of school. She had struggled to find safe, nurturing child care for her son while she was in school, but when her senior year came around, she was out of child care options and chose to put her son first and stay with him.

In the following years, Denise went to school to become certified as a Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA). She was able to do this because CNA training is one of the select training paths one can take in Illinois and still qualify for TANF, subsidized child care, food stamps, and other services.

Once she had her CNA, Denise found a job working with seniors and people with disabilities. She worked full time, uninterrupted, for fifteen years as her family grew, her skills increased, and she matured into adulthood. Denise had never been homeless never had to seek out TANF any further, until this recession.

In March, the facility where Denise worked shut down. When she pursued a new job in her field, she found that the field had changed, shrunk, and that there were not jobs readily available. She’s been seeking work since March and only last month had to give up her apartment and move herself and her children to a shelter. She has gone back to school for her GED, hoping to go on to train as a medical assistant. Last school session, though, she had to drop out because she didn’t have the bus fare to get to her classes regularly.

When Denise sought help, TANF, food stamps, and other supports this year, she found that she was ineligible for most public supports because in her teens she had exhausted the 60-month lifetime limit for support. This meant that doing the right thing for her son when she was 17 years old precludes her from receiving much help now, in the depths of the recession. While I’m not sure whether the crafters of welfare reform in the 1990s meant for this to be the case, it is the reality for Denise.

Today, we post Denise’s simple request. She’s finding it almost impossible to persevere in her job search, get to class and the library, and manage her progress forward without being able to access even public transportation. Denise is asking for three months of a hand in the form of three monthly bus passes for the Chicago Transit Authority. It’s not a large request, only $280, but Denise has a plan and a path, and simply needs help getting to and from it.

As always, you can support Benevolent member needs at www.benevolent.net. We are pleased to report that Anne's need, posted less than two weeks ago, has been met in full. We hope to continue to prove the Benevolent model with the fulfillment of this need in the weeks before the launch of Benevolent't real site.

- megan kashner

Founder & CEO

Are We Entitled to Know?

A New York Times editorial this week called out different states’ approaches to determining worthiness for state-administered aid. Florida’s Governor, Rick Scott, signed a law in May requiring those who receive TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) to submit a urine sample and pass a urine test. While that determination is currently being held up through the federal courts, the sentiment behind it is apparent.

What the New York Times’ editorial calls “punishing poverty,” I would call “punishing need,” and it calls up for me a number of insights and concerns I’ve heard from members of our nation’s nonprofit and philanthropic sectors this week at the excellent Independent Sector conference here in Chicago. While the Benevolent model is clearly a highly- validated one - with local nonprofit Validators providing clear statements about the ways in which their clients are striving and on the path to meet their goals – the question of personal revelation remains.

Several people have asked me how much each Benevolent member who wishes to post a need will have to reveal about his or her self. How much personal history will we require in order to post the need, and how much will be necessary to make the potential donor feel secure in filling that person’s need? My response remains the same – Benevolent members have the latitude to reveal as much or as little about themselves and their circumstances as they see fit.

I am given pause, however, by the presumption, both in Rick Scott’s legislation and in the well-meaning queries I’ve received, that in order to be entitled or even eligible to get help from another person, from the State or from a nonprofit, we must be prepared to bare our souls, reveal all our past indiscretions, and own up to our faults.

It made me think about situations in which someone has wanted or needed something I had the power to provide, like a job. When I interview candidates for positions, I don’t ask them if they’ve ever done drugs. I don’t ask them whether they’re taking medication, and I certainly don’t ask them if they’ve been a victim of domestic violence. I ask them, instead, about their personal goals, about the skills and exposure they hope to gain over the coming years, and about their approach to work, responsibility, and collaboration. Basically, I ask job candidates forward-facing questions – questions about where they’re going and how they hope to get there.

If we’re lucky, a job candidate and I will find a common direction and complementary set of needs – the candidate a need for growth and challenge, and my organization a need for the skills and energies the candidate can bring. It is my hope that rather than looking for a deep revelation of past missteps from those who seek our help, we will focus on the path forward our Benevolent members have set for themselves, and look for a new kind of complementarity.

The complementarity I’m referring to here is the way in which giving meets a need for the donor – a very personal and intimate need. If we can find individuals whose need for financial help and willingness to share their stories and their goals meets the needs of those who seek to understand and gain from that introduction into the life and onto the path of another, then we will have met a set of complementary needs.

Similarly, trust is a complementary phenomenon. In the case of Benevolent members, both the donors and the members with needs will want to find a comfortable place of mutual trust – the donors trusting that the individuals are doing their utmost to move forward on their life paths and the people exposing their needs trusting that the details and intimacies they choose to reveal will be held met with respect.

How much does each person – the person who gives and the person who receives – need to expose about himself or herself in this equation? The answer will reveal itself over time and testing of the Benevolent model and platform, but it is my deep hope that we, as a Benevolent community, can refrain from the tendency to ask of those with a need more than that person feels comfortable sharing.

Whatever Benevolent’s members who post their needs have faced or however they might have stumbled in the past is not the focus of our drive to help them today. Today, we focus on individuals’ goals, circumstances, systems of support, and paths forward.

Every adult makes choices every day. Often, we make the wrong ones. When we find ourselves – consciously or unconsciously – starting to expect more revelation from a person in need than we would be comfortable revealing about ourselves, I hope we’ll each pause and re-locate that part of us that respects and sees the common humanity between us.

- Megan Kashner, Founder & CEO