The COVID-19 financial crisis has greatly affected some Greenbelt Homes, Inc. (GHI) members. To address the challenge, GHI has allowed members to defer up to four months of cooperative fees under a special COVID-19 emergency fee deferral policy. As of the end of August 2020, the deferred fees totaled $16,440. GHI members Cynthia Newcomer and Jason Luly have offered to help shoulder this financial burden for the affected members and believe other GHI members would like to do the same. Newcomer and Luly have been working with the GHI Board of Directors over several months to create a crowd-sourced fund to which GHI members and others can contribute to offset the fees deferred by those GHI members financially affected by COVID-19. They hope to raise enough money to completely pay off the deferred fees. As Newcomer said, “We’re a cooperative. Let’s cooperate – because as a cooperative, we are all in this together.”
The chosen fundraising platform is at chuffed.org/project/ghi-relief-fund. Newcomer and Luly believe that using chuffed.org will allow a campaign that is transparent, communicative and integrated with other social media. Although using the chuffed platform itself is free, payment processing is not free. Two percent of the donation goes to a payment processor. Donors may add an optional percentage to their donation to defray the payment processing costs.
The funds raised on the chuffed.org site will be directly transferred to GHI to forgive the deferred fees and reduce the amount that the affected members will have to pay back to GHI beginning in January 2021 when the fee deferral period ends. The funds will be distributed equally by GHI to the deferred balances of the participating members until the balances are zero or until all transferred funds have been depleted, whichever occurs first. Any funds raised in excess of the deferred fees will be deposited into the GHI general fund.
Newcomer and Luly kicked off the fundraising drive on September 23 and hope that GHI members and others join them in donating online and spread the word to friends and neighbors. No donation is too big or too small.