The help you gave

Here's how we've spent your money so far

Here’s a random photo I took on a walk yesterday. Because . . . a chair in a tree. Seems about right around here now.

Hello friends! Just a quick report on the funds so many of you so generously gave to help out folks whose lives were so terribly upended by hurricane I Still Hate Dignifying It With A Name.

About 45 of you gave about $3,375.00.

$500 of that was a gift from someone who wanted to help me with my extremo medical bills. (Thank you SO MUCH, JV!)

That leaves $2,875.

(Note: I did my first call for donations on October 11. If, in response to that call, you paid for a subscription to this, my Substack newsletter/blog, I considered that money as intended for me to use to help others.)

So far Cat and I have given $500.00 Visa gift cards to four different people, and $100 to a local business.

That leaves us with $775.00 to give. We both know plenty of people who could very much use that money, and we’ll be donating it soon.

We’ve been very careful to use your money to give to people who, for whatever reason, didn’t qualify for FEMA relief—or, if they did, what they got was so small compared to their needs that . . . more was better.

I don’t want to say too much about who we gave the money to, because, save for one of the four people, we did so anonymously. But I can say that all four recipients of your benevolence were single women. One is an older woman who had to travel out of this area to get the medical care she needed—which FEMA didn’t cover, and which wiped out her finances. (I’m going to see about her reapplying for some FEMA: FEMA is pretty awesome, but it can take a few rejected applications before things go well with them.)

The other three women all have one thing in common: they have children, and they lost every last thing they owned in the flooding.

Oh! I wanted to say: You might recall how, in a previous post, I said that Home Depot would match any money that you/I gave to help Home Depot employees impacted by the hurricane. I didn’t know it then, but there is more to it than that. Bottom line: Home Depot has two ways to get money to its employees in this situation. Employees can apply for relief given directly from what I think is called The Home Depot Foundation, or they can apply for relief money through what’s called The Homer Fund, which is something tons of Home Depot employees give to automatically with each paycheck, and is something employees who need assistance can always apply for.

Turns out that the Home Depot Foundation (or whatever it’s called) turned down nobody from our store who needed assistance. Nobody had to apply to the Homer Fund, in other words. Because I guess the Home Fund just takes longer to get. And that was the funding that was going to match amounts given to it.

So we’ll see with all that. But, basically, Home Depot took good enough care of its employees’ needs, and in such short order, that I was comfortable looking outside of Home Depot to others who didn’t have that kind of net beneath them.

And, of course, if we’d have had $10,000 to give each of the four people to whom we gave the Visa gift cards, we’d have gladly given it. It wouldn’t have been wasted.

But $500 is still money, and you better believe the people who received it did so with great joy and gratitude.

Which I’m now passing on to you who gave. Thank you, thank you, thank you for caring as you do.

If you’d like to donate money to people whose lives have been fairly devastated by (okay, fine) Helene, please do.

You can Venmo me: @Norman-Shore-1 or john@johnshore.com, or PayPal me via john@johnshore.com . And of course I’d appreciate—and will use that money to help others—you upgrading your subscription to this newsletter/blog from free to paid.

Thank you! Off to work for me now! Love to you and yours. Your friend, John