Note: This is the first of two related articles previewing Friday’s Neighbors Helping neighbors Help-A-Thon on WNZF and other Flagler Broadcasting stations. See the related article, “Flager Cares Impact: How Care Coordination Helped a Person in Need Move From Silence to Connection.” To contribute to the Help-A-Thon, go here.
For at least three hours starting at 9 a.m. Friday on four local radio stations, including WNZF, Flagler Broadcasting will hold the Flagler Cares Neighbors Helping Neighbors Help-A-Thon to raise $25,000 and in-kind services businesses and organizations are willing to provide to help people bridge a sudden crisis.
The money raised and the services offered go toward a Barrier Fund. Carefully vetting help requests to ensure that they are legitimate, Flagler Cares provides a one-time mini-grant or service to an individual to remove sudden barriers that make it difficult to get to a job interview or a doctor’s appointment, to bridge an unexpected setback such as an illness, a hospital stay or a family member’s funeral, or that may result in the cutoff of water or electric service.
So the Barrier Fund is not just money. It’s a collaborative network of skills and dollars to resolve personal crises in the community. Those crises are not simply: I need help, my lawn needs cutting, my car needs a repair, I need a gas card. They are the result of unique but unplanned circumstances, not from a person’s neglect or carelessness or laziness, but because life deals abrupt and random blows that can precipitate a family or an individual from barebones subsistence to destitution.
The prevention of that is Flagler Cares’ Barrier Fund, and building up that Barrier Fund is what the Neighbors Helping Neighbors Help-A-Thon is all about.
The actual services that can be donated mean mechanics willing to do diagnostics or repairs or tire replacements for that person whose car repair is the barrier between a job and unemployment, plumbers willing to donate labor to swap out a leaky toilet to end what could be crippling water bills, attorneys willing to provide pro bono consultations such as guardianship, family law or probate matters, hair salons willing to prep someone for an interview, handymen willing to install grab-bars in bathrooms for the elderly or disabled, cleaning services, for that person returning from the hospital, unable to ensure a clean house to recover in.
Or else lawn care, pest control, appliance repairs like refrigerators, moving assistance or junk removal, tax services, barber services, dental exams, gas cards, grocery cards, all toward removing that one potentially life-derailing barrier.
The Barrier Fund is in line with the mission of Flagler Cares, the nonprofit that last summer marked its 10-year anniversary as a social service and care-coordinating organization that now provides behavioral and mental health counseling and substance use treatment, helps clients navigate their way to benefits to which they’re entitled, helps them secure identification, disability assistance, points them to a variety of available care or services elsewhere–and removes one-time barriers.
“What we’re trying to do is provide whole person care,” says Flagler Cares CEO Carrie Baird. “No matter what someone’s challenges bring them to us, we try to understand their whole experience, so that it’s not transactional. We’re not just addressing whatever the need is that’s described to us. We’re trying to get to know them and understand the broader needs they might have. And that takes more investment on our time and their time, but ultimately, we believe we’re putting people in a more stable position after they’ve worked with us than when they came to us. We want to leave everybody better off.”
It’s not about throwing money at a problem, but about filling a gap that then returns a person or a family to sustainability on their own. If anything, it is to prevent hemorrhaging money–either for the family in crisis or for Flagler Cares. Again: that barrier.
“We’re not in the business of helping people with what might be considered a luxury or an extra,” Baird said.
“That’s why it’s not a handout. It’s a hand up,” says Flagler Broadcasting President David Ayres. The people the Help-A-Thon helps “aren’t scammers coming in looking for free handouts. These are real people with real needs that would really appreciate the help.”
Ayres is part of a quiet fraternity of three that calls itself the Vigilante Philanthropists. You might recall their names from the Covid days when they were on WNZF’s Free For All Friday every week, keeping the community prepared and informed about the pandemic: Dr. Stephen Bickel, the medical director at the Health Department, and Bob Snyder, at the time the administrator of the Health Department. Bickel has been a major backer of Flagler Cares and both he and Snyder served on its board.
The trio was brainstorming ideas some time back to help Flagler Cares, an organization that puzzled people even like Ayres, who had difficulty wrapping his head around what it did.
“It took me a while to understand exactly what Flagler Cares is and does,” he says. Once he did, “I realized that the community needs to realize what an awesome first stop it is for people that are in need to come to. This is the door to stumble through for people that have a legitimate need and help for anything with a big variety of things.”
Ayres had heard real-life stories of people who’d gotten that sort of help (over 5,000 clients in the organization’s lifespan, as of last June). “This isn’t long-term type support,” Ayre, a Reagan-bred conservative with an aversion for welfare-type supports, says. “It’s just a few dollars to get their kids some clothes that they haven’t had any new clothes for a while, or to fix a tire, to to help keep the electric bill on for one month to get them back on track. All these short term needs that people really have. We can do something to help with that.” There was more brainstorming with Baird and her staff, and the Help-A-Thon was the result.
Ayres says the pre-publicity to the Help-A-Thon raised about $10,000. “Once we reach the $25,000 goal, I’m all for let’s raise the goal. Let’s help more people than we even thought we could,” He’s willing to extend the Help-A-Thon past the three-hour mark.
The three hours will begin with the regular hour of Free For All Friday hosted by Ayres and Brian McMillan, the Observer editor, with Baird and several other Flagler Cares staffers in the studio. The Help-A-Thon will be simulcast on Beach 92.7, Kix Country 98.7 and Cool 100.9. Donors and participants who want to play up their donations and services, or give their businesses an organizations a plug on the air, will be featured throughout the three hours and will be heard on all four stations. On WNZF, hosts for the two hours after Free For All will include Kirk Keller, Danielle Anderson, and the ever-ebullient Bob Snyder.
The hosts will also illustrate the kind of work Flagler Cares does every day. “We have to tell stories about people that we have already helped, and what their experiences are,” Baird said. “One of the things that we’re really good at is working with many organizations to serve the same household at the same time in a way that really changes the condition that they’re experiencing.” One kind of help may lead to another, or to the discovery that, by investigating the need, reveals more fundamental needs that Flagler Cares itself may not necessarily have the capacity to address, but that it can direct the family to address through its network of resources.
“Sometimes we’re their first call, and that’s really the position we’d like to be in the community,” Baird said. “If you aren’t sure where to go, you can start with us, and we can at least provide you with an up-to-date, educated view of where you might go for help, or if that help exists, because it’s hard to navigate that if you don’t do this work every day.”
It’s expensive to devote three commercial-free hours to a philanthropic social service event. So AdventHealth Palm Coast (a longtime pillar of support for Flagler Cares and one of its original founders), Cline Construction and Smart Technologies “have basically covered all the cost for us to do all the promotion and marketing and to raise the money,” Ayres said.
The Help-A-Thon serves an implicit purpose, too: to broaden awareness about Flagler Cares itself, since Ayres isn’t the only one who may have had a hard time understanding what the organization is about. Summing up Flagler Cares’ mission in a sound bite is impossible, as Baird herself recognizes: social services in an era of fraying and defunded services is a maze of contradictions and ever-changing rules and, these days, abrupt and absurd funding cuts (huge federal grants in place for years have suddenly been eliminated, causing a ripple effect downstream to states and local governments, ultimately affecting the nonprofits that do the work).
Flagler Cares’ staff and care coordinators are the decryption agents who keep all this straight for their clients, assuming they themselves continue to be funded: the organization’s care coordinators, for example, are creations unique to Flagler Cares. There are no federal or state grants that ensure their existence, and absent sustained private support, those care coordinators could themselves disappear.
So the Help-A-Thon also started as “kind of a challenge from Dr Bickel and Bob Snyder to see if we could rally the broader community around what we’re trying to accomplish at Flagler Cares,” Baird said. “Everybody is aware of the Food-A-Thon that the radio station sponsors, and they thought something similar like that would be a good strategy to kind of communicate with the community about what we do, to inform more people and to start the dialogue about having the local community support each other and not heavily rely on funding from outside the community.”
The challenges, in other words, are not just the clients’.
“The first thing is to create an awareness of how grateful I feel we are to have Flagler Cares in our community and for people to understand what they do, whether they’re in need of what Flagler Cares has to offer, or if there’s local businesses, local people, volunteers that are willing to help provide for those needs.”
The dude says
How can there possibly be “families in crisis”???
The orange shit stain continually reassures us that things like the economy are better now than they have ever been before ever in the history of economies…
Atwp says
The country cast their votes for Trump, now he is throwing them in the Dump.