In our last post on Benevolence Funds, we talked about how the impact of your collaborations are going to matter a significant amount in the upcoming days and weeks with the Covid-19 pandemic. This week, we wanted to highlight where donations are impacting local communities.
We understand that many families are under financial duress, perhaps even your employees’ families. It just makes it all that more relevant to consider the collective impact your entire organization could have if you pooled resources together for targeted impact. A little can go a long way when strategically collected and distributed.
Here are some suggestions on where the impact of your donation could be best utilized in your local communities right now.
Food Banks
Food banks across the country have been experiencing shortages in donations. As an entire nation at one time became unsure about food availability and rushed to grocery stores, people who rely on food from food banks have faced a shortage of supplies and most likely will continue to do so in the weeks and months to come. This is an issue that sits in the a difficult intersection of many different compounding problems: food deserts, rising costs of food, and lack of volunteers due to shelter in place.1 Your donation can make a difference for your local food bank and your local community for those in need of supplies to feed themselves and their families in the days and weeks ahead.
How to make it happen: Say you have an organization of 100 people. If everybody gives $5 every other week to your local food bank, that is $1,000 a month. While $10 a month will most likely not be a difficult give for those in your organization, $1,000 a month is a high impact gift for a local nonprofit right now. If you facilitate this giving initiative through a payroll deduction (which we’d love to make happen for you), this initiative can be fully automated once you have everyone on board.
Mental Health Services
The Covid-19 pandemic will most likely usher in an era of increased needs for mental health services. The ramifications of this global experience are yet to be fully actualized, but the guarantee of increased concerns on health and the economic stability alone are major concerns for the mental health of the general public.2 Shelter in place orders in and of themselves can cause stress and anxiety for individuals, especially those who live alone. Consider directing your donation to a local nonprofit in your area that provides mental health services - especially to low income or uninsured individuals, who will have felt the effects of Covid-19 in their community most acutely in the recent days.
A suggestion on how to make this happen: similar to the example given for food banks, you can run an initiative through your organization using payroll dedication to make it quick and simple with high impact. Keep in mind as well this may be a service the people in your organization need right now as well, which would be a great use for a benevolence fund. (For a review on what that is, see our blog post from last week). Subsidizing the cost of seeing a therapist to process Covid-19 through a benevolence fund could be an excellent way to care for the people within your own organization.
Domestic Violence Shelters
Domestic Violence is a far more prevalent issue than many people know, with one out of three women experiencing interpersonal violence in the course of their lifetime.3 The concerns for heightened amounts of domestic violence are increasing right now as well, as at-risk individuals are being asked to shelter in place with their current or potential abusers.4 Nonprofit agencies in your area who work with domestic violence are quite possibly seeing an increase in calls and the need for resources to help individuals leave life threatening situations. Your donation to a nonprofit agency working with domestic violence could quite literally save lives in your local community.
Thoughts on implementation: for this cause, inviting your customers or clients to be a part of it could be a great watch to generate impact quickly. Rolling out a match giving campaign, where your clients are invited to contribute to match the amount pledged by the organization, would be a quick way to generate and mobilize more funds quickly.
If you’d like to discuss how to streamline your donation and possibly integrate it more seamlessly into your organization’s processes through payroll deductions, then we’d love to hear from you and share a little bit more about what we do. Our mission is to make the mobilization of funds as quick and efficient as possible to connect donations to where they need to go to create the most impact.
However, regardless of how you do your donation, we hope you consider making one, if you are able. Communities are in need, and we are only facing the beginning. By making a donation to help with access to food, mental health, or domestic violence services, you’ll be putting your money towards three areas of immediate need in your local community.
Thank you for stepping up to meet the needs of the most vulnerable in your community with your donation.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/business/economy/coronavirus-food-banks.html
2: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/managing-stress-anxiety.html
3: https://www.thehotline.org/resources/statistics/
4: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/world/coronavirus-domestic-violence.html
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