CHARITY NOW SPENDING $11.4 BILLION ANNUALLY; 1,200 HOUSES BUILT YEARLY
BY INGRID BROWN Associate Editor -- Special Assignment browni@jamaicaobserver.com
FOOD For the Poor (FFP) Jamaica spent $11.4 billion last year to roll out its many social programmes as the poverty needs become increasingly greater in light of Government's austerity measures, according to executives of the local charity organisation.
FFP Chairman Andrew Mahfood said demands on the organisation have been overwhelming at times. However, he said it's great that the charity has been able to offer assistance.
"In the last couple of years, with the austerity measures... life [has been] more difficult for many Jamaicans, and I think with the Government tightening up its belt it hasn't been able to do all that it should... and the demand on us is huge," said the FFP chairman.
Mahfood, who was addressing the weekly Jamaica Observer Monday Exchange at the newspaper's head office in Kingston, said the demand for assistance with education and housing was limitless.
He explained that the organisation builds some 1,200 houses yearly, which is now done in partnership with the Government's Jamaica Emergency Employment Programme (JEEP).
According to Mahfood, the organisation which started out with food donations quickly realised that this alone was not going to solve poverty issues.
"What will solve the poverty issue is when you build a school and you educate somebody and that person becomes a doctor or a reporter or whatever; you have taken somebody out of always being poor and given them the lifestyle and broken the cycle," Mahfood said.
Having evolved into this holistic- type charity, the chairman said the organisation has been trying to raise funds locally as well, instead of only depending on the generosity of its US-based parent company, which gets most of its donations from Americans.
Executive Director of Food For the Poor David Mair said although the organisation is building 1,200 houses each year, the demand is way much higher than it can meet.
"We have a waiting list of over 5,000 [persons] who have made applications to us," Mair said, adding that the demand for housing has been steadily increasing.
At the same time, FFP's Director of Recipient Services, Susan Moore, said the organisation is the first to be called upon for a lot of emergency needs which cannot be readily met by other entities.
"... As soon as there is a fire, Food For the Poor is called on. There are even the social agencies who refer people to Food For the Poor, so the numbers multiply as the years go by," she said.
The needs have not only increased but have become very dire in many instances as Moore said they are seeing cases where families with children live in chicken coops and outside pit latrines.
"...It was someone's pit latrine they were living in where they would go in the evenings to have a coverage (shelter). This is a family that now has their own house and the children are doing well, but those are the things when you go out in the fields that you come across," she told the Exchange.
According to Moore, more people have moved into the grouping which meets the organisation's criteria to classify as a beneficiary as persons who lose their homes to the many fires in recent times, and the death of main bread winners.
And as the needs become greater, Moore said the organisation has had to ensure that it is first helping those whose situations are most dire.
"So you want to look at the person who has no shelter at all as being the first line of persons you want to assist; and then up from there persons whose shelter really is not a shelter because of all the elements they are faced with; and then if children are included or if there is a disability, those are how we have to prioritise over the years," she explained.
Like the other members of the FFP team, Moore said she was hoping the organisation would reap great success from its staging of a 5K run next month, proceeds of which will be used to build more houses for the hundreds of persons still waiting.
The organisation has built a total of 38,000 houses since it began providing shelter for needy Jamaicans.
Food for the Poor has evolved over the years to provide more than just food and housing to the destitute, but is now a major donor of education grants, medication and hospital supplies, agricultural and fisheries supplies. The charity has also built scores of public schools, operates a free health centre at St Joseph's Hospital in Kingston, providing medical care and medication for the 10,000 patients seen each year.
The charity also has a wheelchair donation programme and assists the National Housing Trust in the building of houses under its First Step Housing programme.
"...Our overall organisation has an expense to contribution ratio of five per cent, so basically for every $1 the organisation raises five cents goes towards its expense and 95 per cent goes towards its projects and to the poor," Mahfood said.
http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/More-people-turning-to-FFP-for-help_18751254
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