Families with critically ill relatives face an enormous dilemma: Stay with and support their hospitalized family member or go to work and earn income required to pay the bills. Most working family members have two weeks of vacation leave and one week of sick leave available to them. When paid time off is used up, they must take unpaid leave to remain with their family member in the hospital; an option not financially viable to many working families.
Spare Key’s program is unique because we:
We do not have income guidelines.
As a result many of the families we serve would be considered working class, middle-income families. Because of this reality, Spare Key is often the only source of financial support for these families in crisis given that most of them are declined assistance from other organizations because of their income.
We do not make a distinction between type of illness or injury.
Social workers and families have come to depend on Spare Key to be simple and easy to access. They also know that our focus is not the type of injury or illness but on the length of the hospital stay.
Ease of Application.
The Spare Key application takes less than 1 hour to complete. Families can just head to helpmebounce.org to fill out their application, which includes a financial statement for each funding goal they are seeking assistance for, as well as a social worker to verify that they are facing a medical crisis. This user-friendly application makes the process easy!
Frequency of Eligibility.
Spare Key has served many families with multiple mortgage grants over the years. In May of 2018, we changed our program to allow families to apply for our Help Me Bounce program -- giving them the ability to raise funds for many of their major financial needs such as mortgage, car payments, utilities and more! Because of this new program, families are eligible to raise money as long as they are facing a medical crisis.
“You don’t think that this could happen to you but it does and there are people there with you the whole entire way and Spare Key makes it possible for you to live your normal life.”
—Evans Family
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