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April 2, 2020

Non-profit charities seek new sources of support during crisis

PHOTO | Contributed The United Way’s Fox: We have seen and heard and felt the need.
By Michael C. Bingham

A new emergency philanthropic initiative yesterday approved some $600,000 in disbursements to non-profits that provide services to the needy most impacted by the coronavirus crisis.

The awards, ranging between $5,000 and $40,000, were part of the first round of awards by the Greater New Haven COVID-19 Community Fund, a partnership of the United Way of Greater New Haven and the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven.

The purpose of the campaign, launched two weeks ago, is to help ensure that people have access to such basics as food, shelter, health services and utilities by providing financial support to those on the front lines. These include community-based health care and basic human needs-providers directly supporting local residents and families. Many of these groups have been beneficiaries of United Way and Foundation largess in the past, but not all.

According to Aly Fox, the United Way’s vice president for community impact, “We have felt and heard and been a part of so many issues that have come up as a result of COVID, and wanted to be responsive to our neighbors and community members.”

To accomplish that, “Our teams [at the UWGNH and the Foundation] have come together to make sure our neighbors are getting the support they need,” Fox said. “We looked at what are the emergency issues [related to] basic needs — those who are experiencing homelessness, the economically disadvantaged, our seniors, folks with disabilities.”

The $600,000 funding round finalized yesterday was the first in an effort intended to continue for as long as the need lingers. “We anticipate that there will be many phases of funding,” Fox said.

The announcement came during a webinar, “Loans, Grants, & Fundraising: What Nonprofits Need to Know Today,” organized and presented by the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce.

Many non-profit service providers are feeling their own financial pinch as the medical crisis dries up once reliable sources of funding — and makes finding new ones more difficult, and even desperate, than ever before.

“Many nonprofits have cancelled fundraising events,” noted Jackie Downing, the Community Foundation’s director of grantmaking and non-profit effectiveness. But not the Foundation, whose board of directors has decided to move forward with their 11th annual fundraising effort, the “Great Give,” which last year raised $1.87 million. “We are looking for ways to use the Great Give to replace those missing events,” Downing said.

This year’s 11th annual event is a 36-hour fundraiser scheduled for May 5-6; registration for the event remains open until April 17.

Among the panelists Thursday morning was Joseph W. Williams Jr., a business advisor for the Connecticut Small Business Development Center. Williams discussed two new financial lifelines available to both small companies and non-profit groups: the federal Paycheck Protection Program, which begins accepting applications this Friday (April 3), and the Economic Injury Disaster-Relief Loan (EIDL), both emergency programs of the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA).

New Haven Chamber President and CEO Garrett Sheehan, who moderated the webinar, asked whether businesses should wait to apply for SBA disaster loans until they can document greater “economic injury.” “March may not have been that bad,” Sheehan said, “but [revenues for] April and May will have fallen off a cliff. Should you wait a little bit longer until you really begin to feel some of those economic impacts” to apply to the SBA?

According to Williams, the SBA will want to see both historical and current financials, as well as projections for the foreseeable future — notwithstanding that the future is scarcely foreseeable. It is only then that it can be calculated “how can we mitigate that through the use of the EIDL or the PPP,” Williams said.

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