Sunday, November 22, 2009
Writer captures fund's human side
From the newsroom
Carole Tarrant, editor
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Every holiday season since 1983, The Roanoke Times has asked its readers to consider donating to a community emergency assistance program called the Good Neighbors Fund.
Last year, you responded by contributing more than $191,300 to the fund, which provides a quick infusion to people who unexpectedly come up short trying to make ends meet. Unable to make a rent check or pay for a prescription or utility bill, they face a dangerous financial precipice -- a time in their lives when such short-term aid can prevent them from spiraling into homelessness.
For 18 of the programs's 26 years of existence, a key driver behind The Roanoke Times' Good Neighbors Fund has been Betsy Biesenbach, a longtime Roanoke Times correspondent. It's her byline you see each season on anywhere from 16 to 18 stories about people served by the fund and its coordinator, the nondenominational Roanoke Area Ministries.
Betsy's relationship with the newspaper has stretched over two-plus decades. She has written for our former Neighbors sections, given tours of our building and continues to write occasional commentaries for our opinion pages. Outside that, she runs a real estate title examining business, has freelanced for national and local magazines, and written and produced several television documentaries, advertising copy and a handful of children's plays.
With the 2009 Good Neighbors Fund campaign starting today, it seemed appropriate to ask Betsy to share her firsthand experiences learning about and reporting on our community's needy residents.
Q: What is Roanoke Area Ministries' role in the Good Neighbors Fund?
A: In 1982, then-Roanoke Times Publisher Walter Rugaber decided to set up a fundraising campaign to benefit a local charity. Concerned that people were donating money to causes without really knowing how it was spent, he chose Roanoke Area Ministries. It had been set up as a screening agency for its member churches and businesses and already had the resources to determine who was truly needy.
The Emergency Financial Assistance Program, which is supported by the Good Neighbors Fund, is not geared to help the chronically poor, but people from every income class who have run into hard times and need one-time help to avoid becoming homeless. Every penny raised was to go toward helping the poor -- not the agency's administrative costs. Rugaber decided that publishing profiles of those who had been helped would encourage people to donate.
Q: How did you get involved in the Good Neighbors Fund?
A: In 1986, I was still freelancing for the newspaper when I became unemployed. Despite the fact that I didn't work there, I showed up every day with my briefcase and even commandeered a desk in the Neighbors office.
No one seemed to mind, and it was very handy when they were passing out story assignments. Until then, the Good Neighbors stories had been done by two or three editorial assistants who would come back to the office complaining that interview subjects often didn't show up, and they didn't have time to do the stories and their regular duties, too. They did this one day in 1991 when I happened to be in the room. Several pairs of eyes turned on me, and suddenly, the job was mine.
Q: What were your goals when you began this project?
A: Initially, my main goal was purely selfish. I felt that I didn't fully appreciate how good my life was and that exposure to "poor people" would make me feel more grateful.
What I discovered instead was that the poor people I met really weren't that different from me, and, in fact, many of them had been just like me before a job loss or an illness. It made me realize how easily I could become one of them myself, and it was both humbling and scary. My life has not been the same since.
As for feeling grateful, I learned to value my good health and my education -- the two things many of my interview subjects didn't have, and the lack of which had profoundly influenced their condition in life.
Q: How have your goals changed?
A: For whatever reason, the Good Neighbors stories seem to touch readers very deeply. Some of the interview subjects are generous enough to give their real names and to allow their pictures to be taken, so that readers can see that these are real, live people living among us today.
My goal now is to help readers identify with these people and understand that even though they may be different from us, in some ways, we are far more alike.
I hope that people will come to feel that it's our duty to help take care of the less fortunate among us.
Q: Have you seen the kind of needs change in our community?
A: People's needs seem to change every year, with utility and prescription costs vying for the top spots. But in the past few years -- and especially this year -- I've been seeing middle-class people who are used to having employment with full benefits lose everything due to a serious medical condition. They don't know the system. They don't know where to turn, and they're scared, ashamed and bewildered. They are grateful to come to RAM, after the social service departments turn them down.
Q: How do you choose which people to profile?
A: Jo-Anne Woody, RAM's administrative assistant, selects those whom she thinks would be the best interview subjects from the previous years' applicants. When I first started the job, people often wrote to me or to others at the newspaper, thinking that we were the ones who actually handed out the money, but we must have gotten the word out, because that doesn't seem to happen anymore. I interview some of them in RAM's dining room. The others I see in their own homes.
Q: Can you recall a profile subject that sticks with you years later?
A: Every year there are several interviews that I just can't forget. Sometimes the stories I hear are so tragic that I leave the interview feeling physically ill.
There was the woman who fought off a would-be rapist at the age of 5; the immigrant whose rotten teeth would have been fixed in his home country, but which he could not afford to repair here; the young developmentally disabled couple who would never, never be able to work, no matter how much they wanted to. And this year, the woman who told me she had had a cancerous tumor removed a few days before.
She casually asked me if I wanted to see the incision, but after she showed it to me and lowered her shirt, I saw that despite her seeming stoicism, she was very, very frightened. I understood that no matter her station in life, the loss of a breast is hard for any woman.
Q: What have you seen different this year with the recession?
A: Again, the middle-class people whose lives are being ruined due to high medical bills. On the other hand, there also seems to be more charity care available as well as compassionate physicians who are willing to waive their fees.
