Can buying gift cards at church help prevent homelessness?

By Tanya Connor | The Catholic Free Press

By shopping for your Christmas meal or gifts, you can help prevent homelessness.

Here’s how: Buy store gift cards at church, any time during the year. Give them as presents or buy what you need with them. You lose nothing, but the retailers whose cards you purchase donate a percentage of the proceeds to a non-profit – to help people remain in their homes.

This program – Hope for Housing – has volunteers sell the retailers’ cards at 20 participating local churches, including six Catholic ones, according to Katie Coughlin, executive director of Central Massachusetts Housing Alliance.

Hope for Housing is a fundraising program of CMHA, the Worcester-based non-profit which developed it with the Interfaith Coalition to Prevent Family Homelessness, she explained.

Matt Ryan, a member of St. George Parish in Worcester who is now deceased, brought the idea to Central Massachusetts around 2009 after learning of a similar program elsewhere, according to some of those involved.

Ann Dalianis, who coordinates the program at her parish, Our Lady of the Rosary in Worcester, said he introduced it there, and she and Judy Savageau, now deceased, started it more than a decade ago.

Ms. Coughlin said CMHA negotiates with participating retailers to donate up to 10 percent of the profit from the cards. The money goes for CMHA’s eviction prevention program, which helps people stay safely housed, she said.

“It’s a great program,” said Ms. Dalianis. “I’ve learned about the people that have benefited from it,” including someone she knew. She said that woman couldn’t afford a security deposit and first and last month’s rent for a smaller place after funeral expenses from her husband’s death, and CMHA helped her.

Ms. Dalianis said CMHA has shared stories of paying an electric bill for a single mother whose work hours were reduced and rent when a family’s primary breadwinner had an accident.

“It seems like a small thing, but it’s exactly what somebody needs at that point,” she said.
Ms. Coughlin can give talks about CMHA’s work and homelessness at interested churches, whether or not they sell the gift cards.

CMHA buys the cards from the stores, and the churches sell them for $10, $25, $50 and $100, Ms. Coughlin said. She said the churches give CMHA all the money they receive from the sales, together raising an average of $50,000 annually. This is not CMHA’s largest fundraiser; the annual Walk for the Homeless is. But, she said, “We’re super lucky these volunteers (who sell the cards) work year-round to fundraise for us.”

Sometimes Yvonne Nguyen feels like giving up that volunteer service at her parish, Christ the King in Worcester. She finds it a lot of work for the results it produces.
Then she thinks of St. Teresa of Kolkata. And her customers. And homelessness. And she keeps going.

She got involved about five years ago, when she saw a Sunday bulletin announcement requesting help with the program, she said.

“It’s something I can do for the church,” she thought, and volunteered to sell the cards each week after whatever Mass she attended.

When the fellow-parishioner coordinating Hope for Housing at Christ the King no longer wanted to do it, Ms. Nguyen volunteered to do that too.

“I took over because I didn’t want to lose the benefit” for people at risk of homelessness, she said.

So, now she has to pick up the cards from CMHA headquarters at 6 Institute Road, find substitute volunteers when needed, make sure the amount of money received matches the cards sold, and return it to CMHA. She also attends CMHA meetings for parish program coordinators.

Sometimes it doesn’t seem worthwhile to spend her valuable time this way, she said; she could just write CMHA a check.

But, she said, if she doesn’t coordinate the program it may be dropped.

“I don’t want to cut off the spirit” for customers who like participating, she explained.

She recalled St. Teresa of Kolkata saying that if you can’t feed the whole world, feed one person.

And the money adds up because several churches participate, Ms. Nguyen said.

That helps, because she’s seen a drop in the number of customers at Christ the King since the coronavirus pandemic, she said. She thinks that now more people buy things directly from retailers, with credit cards that give back benefits.

About 10-20 people per weekend, most of them regular customers, buy the gift cards at Christ the King, using cash or checks, bringing in a few hundred dollars up to $1,000 or more, she said.

One woman said she’s buying the cards for stocking stuffers, said Ms. Nguyen, who also finds them convenient to use for gifts, instead of going out shopping.

Our Lady of the Rosary has “a dedicated group of people” who buy the cards, and a “small, dedicated group of volunteers” who sell them after Masses the first and third Sunday of each month, Ms. Dalianis said. They sell about $1,400-$1,500 worth per weekend, and more around the holidays, when some people give them as giving tree and family gifts.