A neighbourhood emergency fund · Hampton Roads
One time grants to neighbours who are a single expense away from losing something they will not get back. A car. A job. A place to live.
Day one
The form is nine questions and it takes about four minutes. We do not ask for a reference, a caseworker, a letter from an employer, or a reason you deserve it. We ask what the expense is, what happens if it is not paid, and where to send the money.
Most people fill it in after ten at night, which tells you most of what you need to know about how the week has gone.
Day two
One of us reads it the next morning and calls. The call is not an interview. It is usually about whether the number on the form is the real number, because people almost always ask for less than they need.
Day three
We verify the bill exists. That is the whole check. We do not run credit, we do not means test, and we do not ask for bank statements, because every one of those adds a week and none of them changes whether the heating oil is needed.
Day four
Anything under a thousand dollars needs two of us to agree, and that is the entire approval process. There is no monthly board meeting to wait for, because the boiler does not wait for the monthly board meeting.
Day five
The money goes to the landlord, the garage, the utility, the clinic. Not to the person who asked. That is not about trust. It is because a paid bill closes the file and cash in a bank account does not, and because it keeps the whole thing simple at tax time.
If the amount was wrong we top it up rather than reopen the case.
Where it went, this year
Day six
No repayment. No conditions. No follow up survey asking how it changed your life. The file closes and the money is gone, which is the point of it.
Six days.
Not six weeks.
Give to the fund
These are not suggested tiers. Each one is the actual cost of something we paid for this year, taken off the grant log.
Ninety one cents of every dollar leaves as a grant. The other nine pay for the bank, the insurance and the software. Nobody here draws a salary from donations.
Who this is for
We are not a case management service and we will not pretend to fix anybody's life. We pay one bill, once, for people in Hampton Roads who are working and still a single unexpected cost away from losing something they cannot get back.
If what you need is ongoing support, we will say so on the call and point you somewhere that does it properly, which is usually faster than us saying yes to the wrong thing.
There is no minimum income, no maximum, and no requirement to have tried somewhere else first.
From Craft & Site
The Bridge Fund is not real and this is not a live site. Nobody has been helped, no grant was written, and none of the figures on this page describe anything that happened.
This is the third version. The first was navy and amber with stock photographs of clasped hands, and it looked like every charity site ever made. The second published the fund's grant ledger, every payment and how long it took, which was a good idea and a cold page: it turned somebody's worst week into a line in a bank statement. This one is built around the only fact that matters, which is that six days is not six weeks, and it makes you scroll through all six of them.
The photographs are generated and they are of places, never people. That is deliberate. A charity that does not exist must not show you a stranger's face and let you assume the money reached them. Kitchens, doors and bus shelters carry the same weight and invent nobody.
The stacking is plain CSS, one property, no JavaScript on this page at all. If you have asked your computer for less motion the days simply become six ordinary sections, which is the same story without the pile up.
Carson Holder, Craft & Site