I run The Human Utility (formerly the Detroit Water Project) and we help folks with their water bills. When they reach us, they're used to dealing with other social service agencies that aren't very responsive and don't do something as basic as ever calling them back. We do and we find that people are grateful even for that.
Edit: People are happy to hear from us regardless of whether we actually help with their bills. If we say we can't, at least they know to try elsewhere and can do so fairly quickly.
"I don't think this is a good solution to this problem."
Why? Why isn't giving people money (direct to the utility, as we never hand people we help the funds) to get their water turned back on when they've gone for weeks without running water not a good solution? When you encounter someone in that situation, what would you suggest?
"Many of the customers get shut off and then immediately pay their bill along with the penalties."
That's often true, but what many people (including yourself and, oddly, staff at utilities) don't consider is that these people are often robbing Peter to pay Paul. We've got people skimping on medication and food they need in order to keep their utilities on. So, yes, they may pay as soon as the water is shut off, but there's often a trade-off.
"This is often cyclical with the same people getting shutoff every couple months. Appears to me to be administrative."
This also does happen, but talking to hundreds of families with difficulties paying their water bills, you start seeing patterns. A pattern of multiple shut-offs is usually indicative of some other deeper problem(s). There are people who are between jobs. There are people who've had their hours at work cut. There are people on fixed incomes where even the smallest fluctuation in the water bill (or another bill) can prevent them from paying in full. They pay what they can, but arrearages build up, and next thing you know, service is disconnected.
One of the things we're going to begin working with Detroit and Baltimore to do better is pick up on these signals and act. Prevention is always better than treatment.
Also, if you consider where we work (Detroit and Baltimore), these aren't exactly places teeming with amazing employment opportunities for many of the people we serve (the elderly, single parents already juggling multiple jobs, people with minimal education, etc.). Obviously, a stable job is a big part of consistently paying your bills. You can hold all the budgeting classes you want, but good luck getting people there who barely have the funds to keep their families afloat to sign up. Not having enough to make ends meet is not always the result of poor budgeting.
And yes, illegal service restoration does have the potential to damage equipment, but when your customers have to resort to that, it's indicative that your utility has failed to look after especially vulnerable customers. Detroit is especially odd with respect to indigent customers as they don't have a program to assist low-income customers with a discount or the like. Same goes for the elderly. Baltimore has a discount for the elderly, at least.
Thanks for the comment. Yes, there are programs in place that help people with their bills. They've a number of problems, however. Some ran out of funds and couldn't help any more people. What's interesting about those programs is that a few (including the Detroit Water & Sewerage Department itself) started referring people to us. Others (such as state-run programs) moved too slowly to prevent shut-offs.
Yes, there are people who simply choose not to pay their bills. When we determine that's the case with an applicant, they don't get assistance. Simple.
On top of that, we provide one-time assistance, so there isn't an opportunity to just decide to lean on us and stop paying a bill.
I'm not against people getting medical treatments if they need them, but why call what we're doing "goofy"?
The single mother of three we helped who was contemplating forgoing her heart medication to make sure her children had water (and lost it anyway because she needed her heart medication) wouldn't call this "goofing around."
I'm genuinely interested in why you insist on framing this that way.
Edit: Nothing that we're doing suggests we value some lives over others. Watsi helps a specific demographic, we help another. Everyone wins here.
From talking to hundreds of people over the course of running this project, in many cases, what we have is not a failure to organize one's life. Instead, it's life events such as being laid off or having a medical issue get out of hand and force a person to leave work and forgo a salary that cause people to fall behind and need assistance.
In other cases, people are in situations where they're not earning enough to cover all of their life expenses, but the water department itself has turned them down for assistance. We see their attempts to do the best they can in their payment patterns. $25 here, $50 there as soon as they can.
These are not people that sit around actively looking for handouts. And many people we've helped have volunteered to help us however they can.
Founder of Detroit Water Project here. Despite what you’ve said, this is a serious effort to do good. You mention saving a life versus contributing to a water bill. Why are those so dissimilar? Our assistance application data shows that over 350 children are in houses affected by this crisis.
Not having running water at your house is a real problem. It’s a public health and sanitation issue. People have not been able to flush their toilets, clean, cook, or exist in a state of dignity.
On top of that, without running water in a house in Detroit, a house can be ruled unfit for habitation. That can translate to children being removed from the home because they're in a dwelling unfit for habitation. Preventing families from being broken up isn't goofing around.
It’s a false dichotomy to say that you either save a life by helping a child in a poor country OR give to a water bill in the United States. You can do both in proportion to your ability.
Yes, these people are citizens of a wealthy and powerful nation, but we’ve already seen that it’s allowed them to suffer greatly. The City of Detroit itself—especially before we forced them to react—turned people off with very little regard to someone’s ability to pay.
You should volunteer to help us return phone calls to people that need help. If you do, I’m sure you’ll find that this is as serious a project as any!
But, seriously, what else is different? If I'm looking at it as if it's a Fancy or Svpply clone, I'm not going to go as far as signing up to add anything.
One way I see these kinds of sites is as wishlists and thus, it makes sense to have just one site I use--unless there's something compellingly different.
It looks an awful lot like Svpply and The Fancy. And he's an investor in The Fancy. I guess this time the curation is through friends instead of the site itself.
It's interesting that the name "Request for Comments" invokes "Oh, this is a club that I can play in too," as this is the impression I've gotten as I've read increasingly more of them lately and learn how they come to exist at all.
I highly recommend this and a bunch of other C-related stuff in the Stanford CS library. Their pointer explanations helped me many, many years ago. http://cslibrary.stanford.edu/