Giving Fund an ideal place for common ground

Perhaps our least favorite part of this holiday season is when someone inevitably grumbles, “Those Giving Fund cases are made up.” We wish it were so. While we live in The Age of Cynicism, such doubters have lurked since the origins of the holiday campaign 36 years ago. The challenges of poverty in Connecticut ran deep then, and utterances of “fake news” won’t make them vanish today. The Giving Fund invites readers to donate in an effort to elevate the lives of strangers in distress. Cases from local nonprofits identify the needs of clients who are unaware they have been nominated, and every dollar that is donated goes directly to the people in need.

On these editorial pages, we often summon data to detail how the wealth gap is wider here than anywhere else in the nation. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s recent declaration of Fairfield County as “the most unequal metropolitan area in the country” was not really news at all, as that was also true in 1980.

It is not easy to put a face on poverty. Yes, the Giving Fund cases we detail use first names or euphemisms to protect dignity, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t real.

Consider just one of this year’s cases:

“Courtney is a single mother of three, and her youngest child , who is 1, has been diagnosed with cerebral palsy. As a result, the child requires a specialist to ensure his health care needs are met. A waitress, Courtney struggles financially to makes ends meet. Her son’s specialist is about 35 miles away from their residence, making it difficult to attend his appointments regularly as needed. A gift of $200 would assist Courtney in paying for a driving test and registering her vehicle so that she can be on the road to selfsufficiency.”

Given Courtney’s circumstances, it’s not a big ask.

But it can change the lives of this family of four in ways most gifts on wish lists never could.

Those aforementioned grumbles are reliably vanquished at each year’s end by donations from readers, often through clever initiatives in offices and classrooms — such as everyone in a company skipping a coffee run for a day to meet a case’s request, or passing a hat around or someone asking for donations to be made in their name instead of a gift.

The initiative started in the Stamford Advocate and Greenwich Time in 1983 and has expanded throughout the Hearst Connecticut Media Group to include The Connecticut Post, The NewsTimes and The Hour. The cases are collected by Family Centers and PersontoPerson for the Stamford Advocate and Greenwich Time; LifeBridge of Bridgeport for The Connecticut Post; the United Way of Western Connecticut for The NewsTimes; and the Family & Children’s Agency of Norwalk for The Hour.

Strangers helping strangers is the remedy to skepticism. That’s our favorite part of the holiday season. It can be yours as well.