Modest Needs

Modest Needs works to stop the cycle of poverty before it starts for the low-income workers whom conventional philanthropy has forgotten. We do this by empowering compassionate members of the general public to safely and securely help hard-working, low-income households to afford the kinds of short-term emergency expenses. Since 2002, by working together in this very 'modest' way, Modest Needs' donors have stopped thousands of low-income individuals and families from entering the vicious cycle of poverty and a lifetime of dependence on the public welfare system for their survival. Together, we can make sure that no hard-working person is ever forced to choose between taking a child to the doctor and putting food on the table.

Through our work at Modest Needs, we hope to demonstrate that most people really *are* kind and that

Goal One: Modest Needs' website is somewhat out of date and needs to be redesigned to provide a better user experience for all who visit it - donors and applicants alike. Currently in process.

Goal Two: We'd like to reach more people in the 18-30 demographic, both as donors and applicants. We'd therefore like to hire a social media manager to create engaging content geared towards this age group.

Goal Three: Modest Needs has designed an app we believe donors of all ages will LOVE. Its been approved by Apple and Google for placement on their app stores. We simply need to raise the funds to build it.

Thanks to a generous, ongoing leadership grant, Modest Needs has been able to engage the services of a non-profit leadership consultant who works directly with Modest Needs' board members, its President, and its Vice-President throughout the year (and in concentrated workshops lasting one week for each person / group of people per year) to bolster leadership, problem-solving, human resource management and other similar skills. In this way, Modest Needs and a group of its major donors work to ensure that Modest Needs proceeds from a place of sound leadership, financial management, and trust.

From our inception, Modest Needs was built with efficiency in mind. For example, we'd never planned to have a formal office; we only finally conceded and rented our first office - way back in 2004 - once we became large enough that not having an office would make us look "sketchy." The point is this: even though, like nearly all organizations of our size, Modest Needs does have an office, unlike many organizations of our size, we don't technically *need* that space in order to do our work efficiently and effectively. We can carry out every element of our mission - everything from fundraising to accepting applications and related documentation to vetting and publishing those applications for donor review to issuing grants from anywhere in the world that has a secure Internet connection. Therefore, while many organizations were left scrambling to find ways to carry out their missions remotely when COVID-19 mandated lock downs hit, in reality, at Modest Needs, all we had to do was click a single setting in our back end. That one setting - which switched our work mode from "office" to "remote" - instantly made the system-wide changes necessary for every member of our small team to take their work laptops with them, go to the places where they'd remain throughout the lock down, and then continue their work as normal. So the truth is that Modest Needs did not have to quickly adapt to the unprecedented situation created by the COVID-19 lock-downs. Thanks to our leadership's foresight, our system has included that kind of flexibility / adaptability from the moment it was created, and our team is so well trained that they are able to pivot from office to remote work easily and on a moment's notice. In response to an overwhelming increase in applications, however, Modest Needs did implement a new system that allowed for automated vetting of certain parts of our applications. This worked so well that we'll be keeping that streamlined system in place going forward.