Modest Needs

Modest Needs

Thursday, July 12, 2007 9:01 PM (permalink)

I just got back from visiting my parents in northern Maine, in a little town called Calais. If you have ever driven to the Maritime Provinces of Canada, you probably drove through Calais--and didn't stop. Since the paper mill fell on hard times, Calais--and pretty much all of Washington County--have fallen on some hard times. I bumped into an old High School teacher of mine, who told me that the entire population of Washington County is now under 30,000 persons (or, less than the population of the city of Bangor, Maine, which at two hours away was the closest thing we have to a city with an airport, shopping mall or a proper hospital).

Maine is a mess right now. Over the past decade or so, essentially all of the coastline has been bought up by wealthy transplants and investors from out of the state--it is no longer even remotely possible for a Maine native of modest needs to own land on the Maine coast. Southern Maine (where most of the people are) is the land of Kennebunkport, LL Bean and lobsters for everyone. Northern Maine, where I grew up, is now the poorest part of New England--and Washington County one of the worst off counties in the US.

The folks who live there are working poor--living check to check, paying their bills when they can, hoping for some more overtime at the mill and praying that their car holds together for one more (brutal) winter. It is not easy to escape Northern Maine.

I have been extremely fortunate in my life, and going back to my home town, and seeing it as a shell of its former self, dominated by a Wal-Mart and an empty main street, crushes me everytime I think about it. The tough part of life for many of the folks there is that they work--and work hard--but constantly skirt the edges of financial ruin. Many families make just a whisker more than the cutoff for various state and federal aid programs, but are a single illness, accident or car repair away from a complete fiscal crisis that they can never catch up from.

I write all of this mostly as a plea for anyone who reads this who can spare a few bucks to look closely at Modest Needs, a charity I support every week with a small deduction from my check. Modest Needs provides small grants to cover medical bills, fix mufflers and catch up on back rent to folks who are usually just a tiny amount - a few hundred dollars--away from calling it quits and filing for bankruptcy. It is amazing what a little bit of money can do, and these are folks who don't really have other avenues for aid since they make "too much," which is, frankly, ridiculous. Donors can log in, read grant requests, and score them based on need, with higher scores getting funding priority. I regularly log in and rate the Maine requests highly, then turn to North Carolina, where I live now.

I don't give much--I don't give enough. I do give every week. I give a little bit more by writing about them here. Maybe you will too.