In a previous post, I mentioned that I’ve recently left my 17-year career as a pastor to do automotive charity full-time. A commenter asked me to share a little about the system we’ve developed for reducing poverty through the gift of reliable automobiles. So here goes.
Three and a half years ago my wife and I founded OnRamp (www.onramptx.org) a 501c3 in the Brazos Valley of Texas to provide reliable transportation to people in need to get them on the road to self-sufficiency and share with them the grace of God. We figured we’d give away a few cars a year. We gave away number 70 last week - hence the career change to do this full-time.
Here are a few key lessons we’ve learned that have made this work possible and that you are welcome to take and use in your own communities.
Lesson 1: This charitable work has only proven sustainable because of a critical decision we made from day one: we don’t take any clients directly. No one can come to me and ask for a car. Instead, all clients come through sponsorship from local charities (e.g. Habitat for Humanity, the Food Bank, etc.), school districts, health-care providers, and houses of faith. Sponsors must have known the applicant for at least six-months and must be willing to walk with the applicant through our interviewing process. This ensures that we are getting applicants who are receiving holistic care from their sponsors. A reliable car will not “save the day” if that’s the only service provided to a family attempting to escape crisis or generational poverty. So the key is to partner the gift of a reliable vehicle with the long-term, multi-faceted care provided by the sponsoring organizations (in other words: let car guys do what car guys do best and let the sponsors do what they do best!)
Lesson 2: The gifted vehicle needs to provide four-years minimum reliable service to change a family’s trajectory. Studies have shown that gifting unreliable vehicles or vehicles that only remain reliable for a short time actually has a net-negative impact on a family in need because it accustoms them to rely on a vehicle and then fails them before they can save enough for a replacement vehicle. In other words, you are actually hurting a family’s long-term prospects if you give them a vehicle that is only likely to last one year, or that will cost them greatly to maintain. So our goal for all the vehicles we give is five years of reliable service. Our average expenditure per vehicle for purchase, preparatory maintenance, and tax and title is approximately $7000.
Lesson 3: Support the client for the first year to help them get a leg up on savings, the key metric of success. OnRamp budgets an additional $3000 per client in order to provide a 12 month warranty on the donated vehicle. In other words, we pay for all maintenance and repair for the first year. During that time, we follow up regularly with the client to teach them how to care for their vehicle and to remind them that the purpose of the 12-month warranty is to free them to save all spare funds in a “rainy day” account. Studies have shown that our target clientele can easily fall off their path towards self-sufficiency if they incur a significant unexpected expense and haven’t built up savings. Most are not able to qualify for affordable loans due to bad credit and few assets. Therefore, their only recourse is predatory lending or default, either of which can destroy their financial future. So we do everything we can to help them build their savings. For our first 40 clients, their average savings account went from $20 when we met them to over $800 at the end of the 12 months, which is a game changer in attaining financial health.
There’s much more that I could share with anyone interested, but those are the top 3 lessons that can help car people like us make a measurable, long-term impact on poverty in our communities. Thus far, OnRamp has grown from my wife and I to a team of two dozen, with a couple of us now on staff. We’ve accelerated to almost one car donated per week and are working towards our first Affiliate expansion in the Dallas area later this summer. We hope to eventually help like-minded people launch OnRamp’s throughout the United States since there are so few charities addressing this substantial need.
I’ll leave you with the results of a national study conducted about a decade ago. This is why we do what we do. "Automobile ownership has a greater impact on a person’s chances of being employed than having a high school diploma and is the greatest indicator of the quality and likelihood of a person’s employment" (Lichtenwalter, Koeske, & Sales, 2006; Fletcher et al., 2010)
