IDENTIFY

Financial assistance as little as $250 for a car repair so that people can get to work or assistance with one month’s rent after a medical emergency can keep otherwise stable families housed and reduce the strain on an already taxed homeless services system.

CONNECT

We have partnered with Walton Family Foundation, with additional support from Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, to create a financial assistance program to help stabilize families in Northwest Arkansas on the brink of crisis, especially in terms of their housing needs.

Based on the success of the program during the COVID-19 crisis, additional funding has come from individual donors, local employers, city governments, and the faith community, with innovative cost reductions strategies also stemming from local property managers and financial counselors.

DRIVE

Catalyst Fund NWA focuses on helping people one-by-one-by-one in an extremely efficient, highly controlled, and completely transparent manner. It is designed to be the “option of last resort”, since all applicants receive the standard needs assessment, client plan, and follow up services of Hark. Only after all the resources identified through this process have been exhausted (e.g. government funding sources, utility company assistance programs, providers with sliding scale or pro-bono rates negotiated by Hark) would Catalyst Fund NWA become available.

Qualifying households can receive up to $250 for general assistance and $1,000 for rental/mortgage/utility assistance. Financial controls with multiple levels of approval are in place to ensure that dollars go to the intended population and to guard against abuse. And funds are always distributed to service providers, not to the clients themselves.

One hundred percent of contributions to Catalyst Fund NWA go to client support; Hark's overhead is covered by Excellerate. Detailed reporting is available on the Catalyst Fund NWA section of Hark’s online data portal, which is available to the public at www.harknwa.com. The total amount of Catalyst dollars committed and other information, including the aggregated demographic information about Catalyst recipients and their top areas of need, is updated every few hours.

To make your own donation, please visit www.CatalystFundNWA.com.