Thirty meals At A Food Bank: Something A Paid Subscription of $30 Can Do

Plus how working with The Robin Hood Foundation changed me

Dear Reader, 

I donate all subscription revenues to Robin Hood, a leading charitable organization fighting poverty in NYC. For this month, I will match your $30 contribution, so it will do twice as much good. 

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To see injustice is unpleasant. Last week I read an article in a local newspaper of a small Northeastern city about a two person family: a mother caring for her adult son who has severe mental issues. The two of them had been living for ten years in a row house in a decent neighborhood, their rent paid for by a not-for-profit.

It turned out, however, that the not-for-profit had missed many rent payments on the row house, and the landlord had successfully pursued eviction proceedings. Since she was not paying the rent, the mother was unaware of the precariousness of her housing situation until she and her son were evicted.

The mother was able to get a reprieve from going to a homeless shelter by connecting with an advocate, a lawyer who worked for a not-for-profit law firm specializing in representing at risk tenants.

The lawyer managed to get the city to agree to pay for a hotel room for the mother and her son at a Marriott Courtyard. But only until the end of November. After that, their next stop would be a shelter in a rough neighborhood, one next to the entrance to a highway.

The article reported that the mother feared for both her son’s safety and her own, based on the shelter’s location as well as past trauma she and her son had experienced in shelters.

I read the article about this family on the evening of the last night of their stay at the Courtyard.

I sent an email to the reporter who wrote the article. She put me in touch with the mother’s lawyer who put me in touch with the manager at the Marriott Courtyard who was aware of the situation.

I filled out a credit card form to pay for room nights until the lawyer could find reasonable and supportive housing for the mother and son. It was done in a matter of a few hours.

So the next morning, instead of going to the shelter, the mother and her son were able to extend their stay at the Marriott Courtyard, a safe place in a good neighborhood that they had become comfortable in.

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Seven years ago, I probably wouldn’t have read the article, and even if I had, I’d have shrugged it away. Poverty’s always with us. What can I do?

But my work with Robin Hood has trained me to look for opportunities like this. Not to look away but to seek them out.

I thought about what working with Robin Hood had taught me specifically that made me leap at the opportunity to help the mother and her son.

There are two fundamental tests Robin Hood uses in assessing initiatives to fight poverty:

• Can you define the impact of what you’re doing and does the effort and money required have an impact that is proportionately significant?

• Does your involvement satisfy the “but for” test, i.e., are you changing the outcome or would the outcome be the same, regardless of your involvement?

In this case both tests were met. Not only for me, but also for the reporter motivated to write the story and for the lawyer who worked so diligently on this case. And both responded quickly to me––a stranger––to make sure the Courtyard stay could be extended before checkout in the morning.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway I’ve had from Robin Hood is that poverty may be an impossibly difficult problem to ever hope to “solve,” but that doesn’t make any effort to combat poverty any less worthwhile.

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As for the main purpose of this post, I asked my friends at Robin Hood what impact a matched contribution to Sparks From Culture could have on people living in poverty. This is what they came back with:

• $60 provides 30+ meals at a food bank.

• $60 covers 20 subway rides enabling a mom in shelter to take the subway to find housing and employment.

And in case you want to consider a larger contribution:

• $100 pays for 1,000 diapers for a baby in shelter.

• $300 will provide health care to an uninsured New Yorker.

To date, sixty-one subscribers have elected the paid option, amounting to over $4,300 in annual contributions to Robin Hood. 

To find out more about Robin Hood, go here.