by Dalton Black, executive director
Imagine having to decide between paying your electricity bill or paying to feed your family. Imagine having to decide between getting your child corrective lenses or paying your water bill for the month. Imagine having to decide between paying your rent or paying for a life-saving medical procedure. All these situations seem silly. Of course, you would feed your family, get your child corrective lenses and have your life-saving procedure. But what happens when you can’t pay for those other things?
As a society, we are led to believe that financial instability is the fault of the individual. We are told that a person must have made bad decisions or simply isn’t trying to help themselves. In reality, the majority of working-class families don’t have enough excess money to keep paying their regular bills after an unexpected medical emergency. A heart attack, or simply a broken leg, could be enough to put these families in a difficult situation on deciding which bills get paid first.
Throughout 2021 and 2022, the most requested assistance we received from residents of Harvey County was for rent and/or utility assistance. People would call for a variety of reasons. Some had been laid off. Some had been in car accidents that made employment difficult. Others had jobs at our community’s largest employer but still were having difficulty making ends meet with their current wages.
At the time, we didn’t have funds to help these families so we would work to connect them with other organizations in our community that could help. Sometimes this was helpful, but many times, families had reached out to those organizations and funds were already exhausted at that time. This would leave our residents without many options to help through their difficult time.
This year, Harvey County United Way has opened a fund to help bridge the gap for families struggling to make ends meet. The Helping Hands Fund is intended for short-term assistance and will supplement other available resources in our community. When residents call, they go through a screening process which helps determine need and assistance to be provided. Additionally, we send resources to families who might need help finding a job or who would benefit from a financial education program. The Helping Hands Fund is about more than handing out free money. It’s about lending a helping hand to those in our community who need it most.
The Helping Hands Fund was made possible by a generous grant from the Graef Family Foundation, ONEOK Foundation, and individual donors.
The United Way 