The Bunt Single Brigade...

The name Daniel Nava may not mean much to you, but if you’re a baseball fan, it means a great deal.

Nava is a young outfielder who has had a wondrous week. First, he was called up to the Boston Red Sox from the minor leagues—thus fulfilling one boyhood dream. Then, the first time he batted, he fulfilled another.

Nava hit a home run with the bases loaded. He was the first person to do so in his first major-league at bat since 1952.

I’ve been thinking about Nava this week as we at United Way of the National Capital Area try to put the finishing touches on fundraising for our fiscal year. It ends on June 30, and we are scrambling in search of Navas—heavy hitters who can give huge bucks.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with such a strategy. Fundraisers go where the money is. They always have. They always will. They always should.

But we must never lose sight of the impact that many small donors can have.

Call them The Bunt Single Brigade. They are not Daniel Navas. But if you stitch enough bunt singles together, you will win the game just as surely as if you hit a ball over the fence.

Too often, smaller donors feel unnoticed and unappreciated. At United Way, they shouldn’t.

We value every gift because we know that when you put them all together, you have a large gift. That’s the way our annual campaign has operated for nearly 40 years. Put even the smallest gifts back to back to back, and you have impact.

No one at United Way will turn aside a five- or six-figure gift. We want them and we need them. But there wouldn’t be a United Way without donors at the other end of the spectrum. They are the bedrocks. They are the stitching. They are the point.

Thank you to everyone who has contributed during the fiscal year that’s about to end. You have helped us keep families fed and housed. You have helped us work to improve the health of children. You have helped us break the recession through job training, food-for-the-needy and eldercare programs.

Without you, we wouldn’t have much. But we have you.

And that’s excellent news.

"When people see what we do, they’re always amazed..."

If you doubt that the recession can smack an area as prosperous as Fairfax County, stand outside the Embry Rucker Community Shelter in Reston on a Wednesday afternoon.

Families are unloading station wagons that are crammed to the ceiling with possessions. Men are unfurling bedrolls. Mothers with toddlers are signing up for the waiting list.

There is literally no room at the inn, and there seldom is. The Rucker shelter, run by Reston Interfaith, a 40-year-old community service agency, has been full of displaced and homeless people since the recession started. There were 115 families on the waiting list in December.

“And within two miles of here, there are probably 50 people living in the woods,” says Kerrie Wilson, Reston Interfaith’s executive director. “Sometimes, in Fairfax, the poverty piece doesn’t resonate.”

Yet Reston Interfaith is very familiar with it. The agency specializes in housing aid in many forms—emergency shelter, advocacy, affordable housing initiatives and transitional housing programs. It has a fulltime staff of 95 and an annual budget of $5.6 million. United Way of the National Capital Area is a longtime supporter.

Demand for Reston Interfaith’s services has never been low, according to Wilson. But the big difference over the last 10 or 15 years is the population the agency serves.
“We were serving the traditional welfare population back then,” says Wilson.

Now, “Fairfax has 40 to 45 percent ethnic minority population. Hundreds of languages are spoken in our schools.” Immigrants, documented as well as undocumented, are a major part of Reston Interfaith’s picture.

Under Wilson’s leadership, Reston Interfaith has become much more than a transitional housing agency. Clients can search for jobs on a bank of computers in the Rucker Shelter’s lobby. Financial literacy classes are offered so residents can avoid over-the-top mortgages and shady credit card deals. Comprehensive health care services are offered, too.

The idea is to move people through Reston Interfaith, not allow them to be perpetual feeders at the trough. “No family in the world can sit around here all day and make any lasting progress,” Wilson said.

The housing foreclosure crisis has placed unusual demands on Reston Interfaith in the last two years, but the agency has met them. “Since October of 2009, we have kept 650 people from being homeless,” Wilson said.

Reston Interfaith was founded by six local religious institutions. Twenty religious institutions are now represented on its board. The agency works with any Fairfax County resident.

United Way support during the current fiscal year will be about $35,000, Wilson estimates. She would love to have more, and she would use any additional United Way donations to hire community-based case managers and beef up job training programs, she said.

“When people see what we do, they’re always amazed,” Wilson said.