What is Footbridge for Families?
Footbridge for Families is a 501c3 offering government agencies and health insurers a turn-key, low cost solution to providing emergency support, coupling human discernment with an efficient, purpose-built infrastructure to ensure strong outcomes.
Footbridge for Families also provides the means for community members to support families in their most vulnerable moments. Our goals are to 1) protect children by relieving the stress that caregivers face in financial crises; 2) give families an opportunity to ask for the help they need and avoid more costly interventions; and 3) give donors a clear, trustworthy means of helping their community members’ real needs in real time.
The organization fills a crucial gap in our society’s prevention landscape by acknowledging that a short-term financial crisis can lead to exponentially worse circumstances and offers a solution to the financial challenges that families face. This model diverges from today’s dominant paradigm in which tax-dollars and donations meant for families in need are filtered through several levels of intermediaries and directed toward services that professionals have deemed worthwhile, rather than directly to needs and solutions offered by families themselves.
Why contract with Footbridge to deliver rapid financial assistance in your community?
Health and human service administrators recognize the critical role of stabilizing basic needs for individuals and families so that they can avoid more expensive outcomes.
Establishing the staffing, IT and payment infrastructure to ensure dollars are spent only when they should and in a highly-secure, rapid manner poses an obstacle to implementing this critical prevention strategy.
Footbridge helps stakeholders customize and operate payment processes that seamlessly layer atop existing relationships and work-flows ensuring the most secure and rapid approach is taken in each community.
How does Footbridge work?
- New funding partners identify the subpopulation whom they would like to support. Appropriate referral partners are then identified by either the funder or with Footbridge assistance.
- Footbridge’s onboarding process ensures all parties have a shared understanding of what local resources should be utilized first, if appropriate, and what is and is not permissible for Footbridge to pay, including amounts, frequency and if our risk scoring matrix should be used to reject those cases where it is unlikely assistance will provide stability beyond a month or two.
- Footbridge designates staff and supervisors to support new market, and local referral partners trained on process.
- Referrals begin! Footbridge confirms fit with funder’s criteria and triages cases based on timeframe needed to avoid crisis escalation. Referral partner notified if case accepted or if additional information is required within 24 business hours or sooner as necessary.
- Client receives text with mobile-friendly form to submit details about need.
- Footbridge uses additional information provided by client and vendor to confirm fit with funder’s criteria and assigned staff member submits payment request for Footbridge supervisor review and approval.
- Payments remitted to vendor as quickly as necessary. Foundation dollars and/or individual donations may be used to augment funder’s allotment.
- Outcome letter with payment details and tailored referral recommendations sent to client and referral partner. Footbridge accounting team tracks and reviews payments made.
- Evaluation surveys that can be tailored to funder specifications sent at case completion and at one-, three- and six-month intervals.
Why should I give as a private donor?
Footbridge helps both individuals and society-at-large in six key ways:
1. It meets financial obligations that families face during a short-term financial crisis at the time they need the help, as opposed to when it’s too late.
2. It reduces the burden on the overall social welfare system by preventing people from needing to rely on more costly safety net programs.
3. It collects and provides accurate data on the real needs that families face, which enables social welfare providers to develop better solutions for these problems.
4. It gives frontline professionals a tool to help families, which strengthens the relationships that they have with families.
5. It gives community members an opportunity to support their neighbors by directly meeting their most pressing needs, which ultimately helps build stronger communities.
6. It addresses the important need among community members to feel a sense of agency in today’s society by truly helping others. Unfortunately, the magnitude of need that families face has given rise to a difficult-to-navigate market of nonprofits. Families, who are meant to always benefit from these services, sometimes do and sometimes don’t. Most importantly, the actual needs they face—the ones that could be met that would enable them the most dignity —are not prioritized in today’s nonprofit sector. Footbridge cuts through the noise of founder-driven missions by giving primacy to families’ stated needs.
How does Footbridge address data privacy and security concerns (e.g., HIPAA)?
Footbridge’s solution is built using industry leading solutions like Salesforce, which is a HITRUST and SOC 2-compliant application, and HIPAA-compliant data collection methods for interacting with referral partners and clients.
If you have any questions or concerns about our data handling practices or how we comply with HIPAA, please do not hesitate to reach out to our team at info@afootbridge.org. We value the opportunity to serve those in need while prioritizing the privacy and security of the data entrusted to us.