The Zakat Fund

In January 2019 IFSSA restructured the Benevolence Fund, we did this for three reasons…

1. To provide community members in need with support.
2. To ensure we were using community resources effectively and prevent misuse.
3. To focus our frontline staff on developing more robust and long-term solutions for clients.

Purpose

Success for IFSSA means a person in distress is able to find the resources necessary to resolve their situation. Ideally, this happens because we use our knowledge and insight to help them. If we can’t open a door then we have the blessing to be able to help people by opening the purse. We do this work confidentially and transparently.

The fund is a resource, not a program. Its purpose is to financially support people in non-chronic challenging, stressful circumstances related to safety, security & health when they do not have other viable options.

Background

The Benevolence Fund was started because concerned community members wanted a means by which they could make a more direct and impactful interventions for people experiencing financial distress. The fund helped people facing evictions, utility bill short falls, and other similar short-term financial crisis. It did not address non-emergency requests such as training, medical needs (because of liability), etc. The fund emphasized significant scrutiny of applicants with a typical application taking 4 hours of staff time. In winter of 2017 the fund faced a significant drain because a technical glitch with the processing of the child-tax benefit for refugees meant a large number of refugee clients faced a delay in their payment.

Challenges with the fund…

1. The assessment was onerous and time consuming. For every dollar disbursed through the fund there would be a cost of 33¢ in staff time. (Staff time was spent checking bank balances, verifying income, recording stories, and helping put together applications that could speak to an evaluating committee).
2. The assessment criteria was prone to abuse, an applicant could empty their bank account and then demand support from an outreach worker.
3. Requests for rent support were the most common & costly, however the funds disbursed for this purpose were not an effective way of preventing evictions. (Alberta does not allow for a person to be evicted until they receive their third eviction notice).
4. The vetting process for applications was variable and dependent on those chosen to evaluate the application.
5. The rigorous process meant that the outreach workers would only consider the process for larger requests, small requests, such as help buying diapers did not warrant the time investment.

Based on these challenges a new criteria was developed with the goals of being cost effective, clearer & broader applicability.

Criteria

We are now testing the following criteria before dispersing funds.