We have the red cross, united way and local churches that would help them around here. We have temporary worker companies that would most likely employ this man.
I realize in big cities, these folks are a dime a dozen, but around where I live, people take notice.
I'll happily acknowledge that in small communities where everyone knows everyone, natural feelings of empathy and concern
may be adequate to support families in need, depending on the cultural composition of the community.
But to give you an example of how this mentality can go wrong, I just spent a weekend on a beautiful island. Ten years ago, it was a wonderful community of about 250 to 350 full-time residents and over a hundred children in school. Being isolated and moderately self-sufficient, it is not possible for most residents to find full-time employment outside the home. Ten years ago there were a large number of "welfare moms" - people whose basic financial needs were taken care of so they could contribute to the community by volunteering, offering mutual support in the form of free child care for other moms, involvement in parents groups etc. The main perk was that they
raised their own kids.
Then the government issued new welfare regulations forcing them to relocate to cities and towns with a greater possibility of finding full-time work. This was to appease conservative taxpayers who can't abide the idea of single mothers staying home to raise their own kids, even as they whinge and moan about career-focused married mothers
not raising their own kids.
Now, because no single mothers could afford the cost of housing without the support of welfare, there are only a couple dozen kids in the school. The whole island is becoming a retirement and holiday community. All the residents I talked to agreed that it is a community in crisis: soon there will be no community because low-income families (and due to the isolated nature of the island there are no other kinds of families who could live there) have been purged from the island due to tighter public assistance regulations.
Anyway, to make a long story short, conservative pressure to force people off welfare by relocating them to urban centers with more jobs is not beneficial to maintaining the kind of small rural community where people can step up to care for one another when times are tough.
Besides, I'm willing to bet you don't know how many people in your community receive government assistance in addition to whatever help your charities provide. Local churches might offer temporary shelter for homeless families but government assistance has the power to keep families in their homes in the first place.
