When I was homeless in downtown San Diego, I initially made a point of going to a bunch of different local charities to figure out which ones had services that worked well for me. And I began keeping notes online FOR ME on a free site called San Diego Homeless Survival Guide which ended up having organic traffic because OTHER people needed this kind of info and it was hard to find.
To my shock, some programs were not only not particularly helpful but actively made my life harder. Getting a free hot meal typically involved standing in line for a long time beforehand surrounded by people smoking and coughing and then the food wasn't all that good, so I also started a site called What Helps The Homeless and prioritized finding OTHER ways to keep myself fed.
If you have to stand in line for an hour or more three times a day to eat three meals, your day is soon gone and there was no time in there to actually try to solve your problems and get your life back. If you are that destitute, finding help that ACTUALLY helps and isn't some huge burden that makes the donor feel important or something is essential to getting your life back, so I continue to blog about topics like that.
If you are in a very distressed area, you will NEED to do what I did and evaluate the potential sources of aid for your area and be choosy about which programs you want to get help from. Not all of them will be a net good for you.
The rest is not intended to be "endorsement" per se, though I'm sure it defacto will serve as such. These are EXAMPLES of stuff that ACTUALLY helps.
Back when I had a middle class life, I donated regularly to Habitat for Humanity. They have an overall good model.
From what I have seen so far, water.org seems to have a good model. They LEND small sums of money for water projects to people in places where a small sum can go far.
I have no idea if they charge interest or not and do not care. If it isn't USURY -- crazy high interest rates -- it's reasonable because they support development of water infrastructure and THIS raises quality of life and productivity and lowers expenses for things like medical care.
It's a good deal. It's good debt: Investment debt that makes the borrower and/or saves the borrower more than it costs.
What I do know: The organization was founded by someone who went to Africa with a medical mission of some sort and concluded that lack of water infrastructure was causing health issues, so he wanted to address that. "Root cause analysis" for the win and my impression is this is really making a difference.
Habitat for Humanity comes from MY home state of Georgia and was founded sort of like Walmart: By a guy who loved his wife and was trying to make his marriage work.
They had been happy when they first got together and he was a millionaire by age 30 and she told him "I hate our lives. This is not the good Christian life we had when we met. I want a divorce." so he gave away all his wealth and they founded Habitat for Humanity together so he could keep his wife.
Habitat for Humanity follows a lot of Christian principles -- or did back when I was more up on their activities -- such as NOT charging interest on loans to poor people. So you and other locals HELP build your home and this reduces the initial cost and THEN you get an interest-free mortgage.
The interest on a mortgage can easily be two or three times the price of the house over the life of the loan and is FRONT LOADED such that if you pay $500/month, the first year you have paid almost NOTHING towards the equity because it's like $20/month or something at first. So this financing model -- where you are borrowing maybe 80 percent what other people borrow and there is no interest -- gets house payments down from say $500/month to $100/month without CHARITY.
I think it's technically not a "charity" in that they don't "give" you anything. It's a not-for-profit organization.
The other reason they want you to help build the house, in addition to investing sweat equity, poor people who grew up in the projects tend to lack the skills middle class kids from the suburbs have to do minor maintenance themselves. So they want you to have some idea of how a house works, how to swing a hammer, use a saw, hang wallpaper, paint etc. so you can do some basic DIY home maintenance yourself.
It's a form of hands-on education.
And it is possible to eventually sell your house with their permission and move elsewhere. I don't recall the details, but some woman with a Habitat house went to college and after she completed her degree -- Masters, I think -- she had a job offer for a good paying job that would let her live a middle class life but it meant moving elsewhere and Habitat let her sell the house.
So unlike SOME "charitable" programs, Habitat doesn't actually REQUIRE you to remain trapped in poverty. They are okay with you getting your act together and moving on.
To my shock, some programs were not only not particularly helpful but actively made my life harder. Getting a free hot meal typically involved standing in line for a long time beforehand surrounded by people smoking and coughing and then the food wasn't all that good, so I also started a site called What Helps The Homeless and prioritized finding OTHER ways to keep myself fed.
If you have to stand in line for an hour or more three times a day to eat three meals, your day is soon gone and there was no time in there to actually try to solve your problems and get your life back. If you are that destitute, finding help that ACTUALLY helps and isn't some huge burden that makes the donor feel important or something is essential to getting your life back, so I continue to blog about topics like that.
If you are in a very distressed area, you will NEED to do what I did and evaluate the potential sources of aid for your area and be choosy about which programs you want to get help from. Not all of them will be a net good for you.
The rest is not intended to be "endorsement" per se, though I'm sure it defacto will serve as such. These are EXAMPLES of stuff that ACTUALLY helps.
Back when I had a middle class life, I donated regularly to Habitat for Humanity. They have an overall good model.
From what I have seen so far, water.org seems to have a good model. They LEND small sums of money for water projects to people in places where a small sum can go far.
I have no idea if they charge interest or not and do not care. If it isn't USURY -- crazy high interest rates -- it's reasonable because they support development of water infrastructure and THIS raises quality of life and productivity and lowers expenses for things like medical care.
It's a good deal. It's good debt: Investment debt that makes the borrower and/or saves the borrower more than it costs.
What I do know: The organization was founded by someone who went to Africa with a medical mission of some sort and concluded that lack of water infrastructure was causing health issues, so he wanted to address that. "Root cause analysis" for the win and my impression is this is really making a difference.
Habitat for Humanity comes from MY home state of Georgia and was founded sort of like Walmart: By a guy who loved his wife and was trying to make his marriage work.
They had been happy when they first got together and he was a millionaire by age 30 and she told him "I hate our lives. This is not the good Christian life we had when we met. I want a divorce." so he gave away all his wealth and they founded Habitat for Humanity together so he could keep his wife.
Habitat for Humanity follows a lot of Christian principles -- or did back when I was more up on their activities -- such as NOT charging interest on loans to poor people. So you and other locals HELP build your home and this reduces the initial cost and THEN you get an interest-free mortgage.
The interest on a mortgage can easily be two or three times the price of the house over the life of the loan and is FRONT LOADED such that if you pay $500/month, the first year you have paid almost NOTHING towards the equity because it's like $20/month or something at first. So this financing model -- where you are borrowing maybe 80 percent what other people borrow and there is no interest -- gets house payments down from say $500/month to $100/month without CHARITY.
I think it's technically not a "charity" in that they don't "give" you anything. It's a not-for-profit organization.
The other reason they want you to help build the house, in addition to investing sweat equity, poor people who grew up in the projects tend to lack the skills middle class kids from the suburbs have to do minor maintenance themselves. So they want you to have some idea of how a house works, how to swing a hammer, use a saw, hang wallpaper, paint etc. so you can do some basic DIY home maintenance yourself.
It's a form of hands-on education.
And it is possible to eventually sell your house with their permission and move elsewhere. I don't recall the details, but some woman with a Habitat house went to college and after she completed her degree -- Masters, I think -- she had a job offer for a good paying job that would let her live a middle class life but it meant moving elsewhere and Habitat let her sell the house.
So unlike SOME "charitable" programs, Habitat doesn't actually REQUIRE you to remain trapped in poverty. They are okay with you getting your act together and moving on.