Website set up to help North Texas non-profits get help during COVID-19 pandemic
DALLAS - The Agape Clinic in East Dallas provides medical care to anyone regardless of ability to pay, and now the coronavirus crisis is costing the non-profit more to give that care.
“Our costs are going up. Having to obviously purchase PPEs is hard to come by and it’s much more expensive, and then of course having to pay for medication for our patients that’s also increasing our costs increasing our staff is increasing our costs,” said Stephanie Bohan, with the Agape Clinic.
Agape is just one of an untold number of non-profits hurting because of the virus.
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“It's the ones that are impacted by trying to help deal with food and security. It’s the health care supply and related service organizations. It’s many human services organizations, as you can imagine,” said Dave Scullin, CEO of Communities Foundation of Texas.
Communities Foundation of Texas, United Way, and other major funders have come together.
“We realize that we are in unprecedented times and so we needed to do something to get money into the hands of non-profits, like Pronto,” Scullin said.
They are creating a portal, northtexascares.org, where non-profits can make one application for assistance and many financial donors can see their request.
“When we started this about eight day ago, we had 15 funding organizations. Today, we have 30 funding organizations that are coming into this effort, but we're getting overwhelmed because I’m just pulling the data this morning,” Scullin said. “As of this morning, we have 430 grant applications and 875 in the system being prepared, and just on the 430 applications the aggregate requests are about $14 million.”
“Having this access point has been a great God-send to us that we're able to go and touch a lot of donors really quickly and get the funding that we need,” Bohan added. “It is so nice to know that there is help for those who are helping.”
Non-profits are urged to apply at northtexascares.org.