What’s the right way to use $250,000?
Saturday Sally and I took a behind the scenes tour of ProjectHome Indy, one of the neighborhood non-profits that Trinity Episcopal Church
supports.
PHI rents from Trinity, for about a dollar a month, a home
around the corner from the church that the organization has nicely restored and
now maintains as a place that offers shelter and life-skills training to
homeless pregnant teens and teenage moms.
Read that again.
Homes for pregnant teens have been around for generations. This one fills a need for girls (yes, “girls,”
we’re talking about children) who have no
place to live. Many of them are 15
or even younger; they are pregnant or raising a newborn; and they have no
home. Perhaps they’ve been kicked or
driven out of a parent’s home. Perhaps
the one parent they have is homeless themselves. Perhaps home is where a stepfather or
relative or unrelated adult male impregnated them.
PHI’s lovely house has five bedrooms upstairs, so at any one
time they are working with as many as five girls (and maybe their babies). Sometimes they’re not full. Some clients don’t like the structure and
bolt at the first bad opportunity to sleep on a friend’s couch. Some stay as long as 18 months, but the
average is closer to six months.
“Success” for PHI is
when a client completes whatever is necessary to move out into a sustainable
home life. Sometimes that means that the
original home has become viable again.
More often, it means completing high school or a GED, getting a job,
perhaps sharing an apartment with another “graduate,” ideally having acquired
the knowledge and the habits to build a life outside the cycle of poverty and
abuse that led them here in the first
place.
Based on the numbers above, it would take an absolutely
ideal set of circumstances for PHI to serve and graduate ten young women a
year. But probably, five is closer to
the reality.
We didn’t talk about budget, but afterwards I looked PHI up
on Guidestar. The most recent numbers
there show them as a $250,000/year operation.
Most of that is the cost of having 24/7 paid adult supervision in the
home. They also have an impressive
part-time executive director who, like most part-time non-profit execs, is
really just receiving part-time pay for full-time work. In the year I looked at, less than a third
of their revenue came from reimbursements from the state’s Department of Child
Services. Private donations made up the
rest.
I have to admit to doing a mental calculus on return on
investment. $250,000 seems like a lot
of cost to society to run an operation that serves five people a year. $250,000 is four times the annual budget of
each of the two feeding ministries – a food pantry and a kitchen – where I volunteer. And those both serve hundreds of people a
month.
On the other hand, our clients are hungry again within a
week, or a day.
At PHI, that $250,000 helps five teenage girls who ideally
learned the skills and disciplines to break the cycle. Odds are, without intervention, they would
have had another baby while they were still children themselves; maybe
more. Odds are, those babies would grow
up in the same cycle of dysfunction and, in 15 to 18 years, have a couple of
babies themselves. And they would repeat the cycle.
Ideally, this year’s quarter million dollars turns around
the lives of five young people. It
avoids the need for ten such investments in 2030 and the couple of years
thereafter, and twenty in 2045, and forty in 2060. That’s 70 future “broken” lives, in just the next fifty
years, that hopefully won’t need interventions at the cost of $50,000
each. That’s three and a half million dollars.
PHI’s inspirational CEO Lakshmi Hasanadka would love to build an endowment,
and who can blame her? We teach our
non-profit leaders to use renewable revenues on operations, and one-time gifts
like bequests for capital projects or to build endowments. But would another $250,000 be better used if
it was used as an endowment? It could
create $12,500 a year in spendable income.
How much of a difference would that make on this issue, in the lives of
five people a year?
Such a gift to PHI, as an endowment, would spin out $12,500
a year … $125,000 a decade … $625,000 over fifty years.
Coincidentally, $250,000 is also just about what it took PHI
to rehab a sturdy but dilapidated house that our church made available to them
four years ago.
I don’t want to oversimplify the situation, or make another
organization’s decisions for them based on two hours of observation. I just want to point out that sometimes, the
best way to use $250,000 can be to spend it.
