In the short time since a Hamilton-born Israeli woman co-founded Ten Gav, a crowdfunding charity initiative to help underprivileged Israelis with modest needs, hundreds have signed on to give people a hand up.
Naomi Brounstein, who practised law in Toronto before moving to Ra’anana with her family in 1993, spoke to The CJN about what inspired her to create Ten Gav in 2014 with her co-founder partner, Baltimore-native Vivi Mann.
“We’d both been involved in different types of community work over the years and in volunteer work, and we had been trying to hammer out a concept to meet some of the challenges that we saw,” Brounstein said.
“We wanted to develop a platform where you could learn something about a family [in need], read a story about them. We knew that people want to give, but they are hesitant. Is the money really going to where they say it’s going?… People don’t like it when their funds go toward administrative costs. They want to know that they’re giving to something or someone and it’s going straight there,” she said, adding that Ten Gav fundraises separately to cover administrative costs.
She explained that Ten Gav relies on Israel’s social workers to apply on behalf of families in need that have active files with the welfare services.
“We have social workers that we work with across the country. They have clients and they go on home visits and they are exposed to things that we don’t see,” Brounstein said.
“Maybe an older man is a client and he has diabetes and multiple other problems and [a social worker visits] their home and sees an older woman, his wife, washing clothes over the sink. And they’re asked, ‘Why are you washing clothes over the sink?’ And it turns out the washing machine broke down three months before,” said Brounstein, who recently obtained a master’s degree in social work from Tel Aviv University.
“These are welfare families. Where are they going to get the money for… a washing machine? They’re not.”
She said the social worker sends Ten Gav an application, detailing the need and the cost, and if the request meets Ten Gav’s standards, a profile about a family’s need is posted to its website and a crowdfunding campaign begins. About 80 campaigns have been funded to date.
“We made it a policy that no single item that we post exceeds $1,500 or 5,000 shekels. When you give $100 and the entire item is $1,000, you represent a meaningful portion of that item in the end,” she said, adding that donations can be made in Canadian and U.S. dollars, British pounds and Israeli shekels.
“There is quite a variety of cases at any given time. We want to have things that speak to different people. You might want to help Reuben with piano lessons, and someone else might want to help an elderly woman get a new bed, and someone else might want to help a teenager get a computer.”
She said one of the more creative requests came from a social worker in Ashdod. She had two families in her jurisdiction who each gave birth to a blind baby within two months of each other.
“There is a centre in Petah Tikvah for parents of newborn babies who are severely visually impaired… It’s a program that offers 12 sessions.”
The issue was that to get from Ashdod to Petah Tikvah would require the families to take three buses.
“We had this creative social worker who put in a request for a driver to bring these two sets of parents twice a week for six weeks so they could participate in these workshops.”
In addition to funding individual campaigns on the website, a way to engage young people in the habit of giving is Ten Gav’s Bar or Bat Mitzvah Tzedakah Project.
The idea is for bar and bat mitzvah kids to encourage family and friends to contribute to Ten Gav in honour of the milestone.
“That child has the opportunity to tell their friends and family that they would like gifts to be given in honour of Ten Gav, and at the end of the simchah, it’s a great educational experience.”