Helping needy for 100 years
BOULDER» Terry Benjamin, the retired longtime director of the Emergency Family Assistance Association of Boulder County — one of the nation’s oldest service agencies — used to wake up over and over from the same nightmare.
A woman would walk into EFAA’s offices, covered head to toe in bandages, with only her eyes showing. She’d be crying in pain.
“It’s like, families go through tough times and get roughed up and then they kind of put a Band-Aid on, and another and another,” Benjamin said. “And the way things are working, with housing costs and increased expenses and other areas, (people) can come to EFAA or your family or your church and you get more Band-Aids. And all you can see at the end of the day is someone completely covered with them.
“Something else is needed here when you get to that point. At some point in time, you’ve got to say, ‘Wait a minute, we’ve got to think about what’s going on here, from a program and a policy and political perspective. Where are our priorities? And how do we support efforts so people don’t end up with BandAids all over them?’”
Through economic depressions and surges, 18 different presidential administrations and constant swings in Boulder County politics, EFAA has, for 100 years, been a stabilizing force for individuals and families facing various forms of uncertainty and crisis.
In 1918, when EFAA was formed — at the time, under the name Associated Charities of Boulder — the crises of the day were food insecurity and the Spanish flu epidemic.
Today, the biggest challenge low-income residents face is the high cost of living; the average participant in EFAA programs in 2018 is spending 72 percent of their income on rent. The government considers people “housing-unstable” and at risk of homelessness if their rent burden is 50 percent.
“There’s an enduring set of needs,” said Benjamin, who led EFAA from 1980 to 2013. “They never really go away. They just modulate up and down based on a lot of external factors.
“Things change, and the way our country works, EFAA, the nonprofit sector, are going to have to continually have to respond.”
“No words”
In 2014, a woman named Indira Kumari showed up at the nonprofit’s north Boulder offices.
Kumari and her husband — both immigrants from Nepal — and their two young twins were in a highly unstable situation. In the years immediately prior, the Kumaris had bounced around from a rental unit in Boulder to a single bedroom to part of a living room.
She and her husband reunited in 2012 after a lengthy period apart, and she gave birth to the twins in Washington state.
“It was pretty hard when we came back to Boulder,” she said.
EFAA connected the family to emergency housing in December 2014. From there, the organization sent them to transitional housing. The period of respite — from high rents, from having to worry about eviction — allowed Kumari and her husband to save money, develop careers and, eventually, to buy a condo.
“I am on my own right now, but the biggest contribution goes to EFAA,” she said. “If I could not have found that long-term housing assistance, I could not have saved money.”
Kumari said she has “no words” to express her gratitude.
“EFAA played a vital role in my success, in my happiness. If there was no EFAA, if they were not able to give me housing, I would have had no idea where to go. Where would I go with two little kids?”
EFAA’s housing stock has grown significantly over the years, and now stands at 57 units in the county. That number includes five new units unveiled just last week in Boulder.
But the organization covers a slew of critical needs, beyond rooftops.
In 2017, the organization doled out 718,000 pounds of food, plus clothing, children’s programming and case management. EFAA conducted more than 16,000 face-to-face interviews with families last year alone.
That level of service is, in part, the result of relentless volunteer efforts from people around the county. EFAA employs 30 people today, but has more than 700 volunteers.
Despite constant fears of federal cuts to programs EFAA clients use, the organization is in a health place now, said its current director, Julie Van Domelen.
“At 100 years, it looks good,” she said. “We’re very strong financially. We have a great array of programs. We’re finishing five new units of transitional housing in north Boulder. We’re able to deepen programming.”
Since the election of Presidential Donald Trump, she added, the community’s collective interest in volunteerism seems to have increased.
But the organization is keeping very close watch on the various ways that the current political climate could make EFAA’s mission more difficult.
If food stamps are cut by 50 percent, for example, EFAA would have to get an extra 200,000 pounds per year in donations. If federal safety-net programs were cut just 10 percent across the board — that is, to programs such as Medicaid; food stamps; Women, Infants and Children, and housing vouchers — EFAA would have to increase its cash resources, which stand now at about $3.5 million annually, by more than 50 percent.
And that’s to say nothing of the day-to-day fires EFAA puts out.