He also recently authored one of the most inspiring and articulate cases I’ve ever seen for investing in the human potential of our large and growing underclass.   His powerful essay appeared in the Star Tribune on Sunday Nov. 18, and was headlined ”Think of the poor as part of the solution: They’re a source of economic growth. That’s why we can afford to help them.”

Selvaggio is the soul of charity but he’s not a naive do-gooder who sees poor folks as purely victims.  And he argues that they ultimately are responsible for grabbing on and pulling up on the hands that are  offered from public and non-profit workforce training providers.  And he also concludes that governments need to invest more in broad-based self-sufficiency and productivity efforts instead of just focusing on direct aid and entitlements.    Citing the success of the Harlem Children’s Zone and other non-profits such as Twin Cities Rise! andSummit Academy OIC, Selvaggio notes:

“Entitlements seem to be anathema to the right, left and center.  But job-training programs are politically acceptable to left, right and center.   The private nonprofit sector has proven that they work, but philanthropy can’t do it alone.  Now it’s time for government to put muscle behind them…Change the paradigm and think of the poor as locked in a cocoon, ready to develop into a productive creator of wealth.”

Our policy-makers in Minnesota need to find what’s working best in in preparing and moving chronically unemployed or under-employed folks in to the decent jobs that are being created in our new economy and right in their communities,  whether it’s health-care, transportation, financial industries, or construction.   Growth & Justice is beginning a project that will illuminate those models.   And our legislators and other elected officials must be ready and willing to invest in them.   Because this really is an investment that pays off for everybody.

Dane Smith

Source: Growth & Justice

Photo: Kyndell Harkness, Star Tribune

It’s a pleasant relief to take a break from some of the issues of the past election– the rich paying more taxes, the freedom of choice in a marriage partner or an unwanted pregnancy, voter registration … but one issue was conspicuously absent in the political debates, and now I’d like to hear more about it.

The poor. We heard lots about the rich and the middle class, but scarcely a mention of the poor. I think I understand why. People see the poor as a problem, and if we don’t have enough money to help the middle class, how in the world will we have money to enhance the lives of the poor? We think of the poor as needing entitlements, and who needs more entitlements when we can’t fund the existing ones?

I propose that conservatives and the liberals start talking about the poor, not as a problem for limited resources, but as a solution. Think back to the pre-World War II days when most women were homemakers. Then the war forced them out of their homes and into the factories while the men went off to fight. This, unwittingly, produced a great deal of wealth, not just for the individual women joining the workforce, but for the nation as a community. Can you imagine how much weaker we’d be as a country if women didn’t have careers in the workforce? Work produces wealth!

The poor are the last big block of people who are either unemployed or underemployed. We should start thinking of them as a resource, a potential asset, not a liability looking for entitlements.

Lest you think I’m a “naive turkey,” I’d like to mention that I’ve spent 45 years of my career working with the poor — first as a parish priest, then growing Project for Pride in Living (PPL) for 25 years, and now with MicroGrants. I have my memories of horror stories where the poor seemed less of value, but more of laziness. Once a “poor person” was told that PPL had all kinds of resources for her — bus passes, help with climbing the housing ladder and job training, but she had to throw herself into it. It was a not a “handout” program, but a “hand up.” Was she ready? The lady said something like, “Yeah, I’ll do it, but I wanna be upfront with ya. I ain’t going outside in no winter time.” While I found this somewhat comical, I also found it pathetic but rare. The vast number of poor we worked with were willing, talented and ready to work.

In a New York Times Magazine article in August, President Obama was quoted (from “Dreams of My Father”) as saying that he observed in Roseland, Ill., “lost congregations of teenage boys, teenage girls feeding potato chips to crying toddlers, discarded wrappings tumbling down the block.” Then, from a speech in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, D.C., the magazine quoted Obama: “When I’m president, the first part of my plan to combat urban poverty will be to replicate the Harlem Children’s Zone in 20 cities across the country.” As president, the article went on to say, “Obama has followed a very different path … more like the antipoverty path of a traditional Great Society Democratic approach: his administration has spent billions of dollars on direct aid to poor people …”

That strategy may have been good for stimulating the economy, but it did not measurably help the poor. The direct aid may have just enabled them to buy more “potato chips for the crying toddlers.” Food stamps and safety nets have their merits, but they won’t get jobs, pay the rent or tuition, or promote healthy diets. The poor need to get off the couch, turn off the TV, plan and adopt the ancient habits that get them to a self-sufficient lifestyle.

My solution (and Obama’s first solution) is to spend the billions of dollars on community centers like the one in Roseland, Ill. In the Twin Cities, that means investing more money in programs run by PPL, Twin Cities Rise, Summit Academy OIC and dozens of other nonprofits that help the poor become job-ready for our business sector. As our economy continues to grow, we need good, productive workers.

We may also need to break into the cycle of poverty through longer-term investments in teaching the poor to delay having babies until they can support them or in early childhood learning, but I’ll leave that case to be argued by other advocates.

Entitlements seem to be anathema to the right, left and center. But job-training programs are politically acceptable to right, left and center. The private nonprofit sector has proven that they work, but philanthropy can’t do it alone. Now it’s time for the government to put its muscle behind them.

As our legislators discuss the fiscal cliff, entitlements and jobs, let’s urge them to consider the poor as people of potential, ready to work, with a little prodding and coaching from those who have made it.

Change the paradigm and think of the poor as locked in a cocoon, ready to develop into a productive creator of wealth.

————

Joe Selvaggio is executive director of MicroGrants and founder of PPL and the One Percent Club.

————

Source: Star Tribune

A statue of actress Mary Tyler Moore stands at the corner on Nicollet Mall. Photo: Ben Garvin, New York Times

Counterpoint

While it is hard to disagree with Barbara Flanagan’s beautification projects (“A few pleas for pleasing updates around town,” April 2), I think I am up to the challenge.

Barbara’s suggested improvements remind me of my hometown, Chicago. When I go back every summer, I take the “L” from a western suburb and first see the beauty of Oak Park.

Then I see the blight in African-American neighborhoods where there are murders almost daily. Finally, I see beauty again as I reach the downtown area. Flowers divide the streets, and the lakefront parks are unparalleled in aesthetics.

I hate to say there are two communities in Chicago, one rich and one poor, but that’s what I see.

Even though we all love Barbara and her good intentions, we need to do some prioritizing. After all, her suggestions may cost a half a billion dollars. In these belt-tightening times — when the money has to come from taxes and the private sector — who can object to prioritizing?

Allow me to make a pitch for a different set of improvements around Minneapolis.

I agree with Barbara that the Kmart at Nicollet and Lake is ugly. But do we really need to tear down a perfectly functional building when other public needs are crying for our tax dollars?

This big-box discount store provides a crucial service in a low-income neighborhood, and there are no nearby lots that could accommodate such a large footprint.

Poor neighborhoods need appropriate shopping areas, but I think they deserve beauty as well. Rather than tear the store down, why not match some private dollars put up by Kmart to create some public-beautification planters with flowers and such?

If public beauty is important, it should be important for everyone. The same goes for sports.

Rather than invest $350 million in public subsidies for a new Vikings stadium, why not split the subsidies with sports programs and fields serving the city’s youth soccer teams, Boys and Girls Clubs or core city parks?

Money spent on the Nicollet Mall could be split with renovations on East Lake Street. The Latino community’s investments on East Lake and the Midtown Global Market have brought us about halfway to where it should be. Why not a little subsidy or private investment there?

The public subsidies that have been spent and will be spent on the Walker Art Center, the Guthrie Theater and the Minnesota Orchestra might be matched with programs like Art Buddies that serve inner-city kids.

The business subsidies set aside for the New Nicollet Hotel and Target Center could be paired or linked with job programs run by Project for Pride in Living (PPL), Summit Academy OIC, or those that run microgrant and microloan programs. (Like my organization, MicroGrants!)

I am not anti-art, anti-sports or anti-rich. I love art. I love sports. And I love riches. I just want more people to have them.

The beauty of America has been its large middle class and lack of a huge impoverished community. If we don’t have a balanced investment, our middle class will keep shrinking as the impoverished class grows. It will look like an hourglass economy. Is that the kind of Minneapolis we want?

Barbara gave her thesis. Now I’m giving an antithesis. I beseech our city’s civic and business leaders to give us a synthesis.

——–

Joe Selvaggio is executive director of MicroGrants and the founder of PPL and the One Percent Club.

Source: StarTribune.com

Minneapolis/St Paul, MN – The Telly Awards has named MicroGrants as a winner in the 33rd Annual Telly Awards for their piece titled MicroGrants Work. With nearly 11,000 entries from all 50 states and numerous countries, this is truly an honor.
The Telly Awards was founded in 1979 and is the premier award honoring outstanding local, regional, and cable TV commercials and programs, the finest video and film productions, and online commercials, video and films. Winners represent the best work of the most respected advertising agencies, production companies, television stations, cable operators, and corporate video departments in the world.

For its 33rd season, The Telly Awards once again joined forces with YouTube to give the public the power to view and rate videos submitted as part of the People’s Telly Awards. In addition to recognition from the Telly Council, the judging panel that selects the Telly Awards winners, the Internet community helps decide the People’s Telly Awards winners.

A prestigious judging panel of over 500 accomplished industry professionals, each a past winner of a Silver Telly and a member of The Silver Telly Council, judged the competition, upholding the historical standard of excellence that Telly represents. “The Telly Awards has a mission to honor the very best in film and video,” said Linda Day, Executive Director of the Telly Awards. MicroGrants & Studio 120’s accomplishment illustrates their creativity, skill, and dedication to their craft and serves as a testament to great film and video production.”

Contact:
Tricia Haynes
612-327-3400
tricia@microgrants.net

JUSTIN’S PLACE GRADUATE PROUD RECIPIENT OF FIRST LOCAL MICROGRANT AWARD

January 25, 2012

(Naples, FL) The successful Minnesota-based MicroGrants program designed to help those who have overcome life’s obstacles in pursuit of their dreams has extended its reach to Collier County. Collier County individuals struggling to make ends meet are awarded $1,000 to help them become self-sufficient. Based on past recipients’ results, the average income of a MicroGrant recipient increases annually by over $12,000.
Tim Sullivan, a former St. Matthew’s House resident and Justin’s Place graduate, is the first local MicroGrant award recipient.
Tim was homeless, battling a drug and alcohol problem and extreme insecurities. Through the Justin’s Place faith-based program, he was able to overcome his addictions and rediscover his validity. A window washer for the past 15 years, Tim will use his Microgrant award to start his own window-washing business. As part of the application process, he was able to demonstrate to the grant committee that his award will be used toward this goal. Where he used to climb ladders to wash windows, Tim will soon be able to climb the ladder of success. For more information about the Microgrants program, please contact Chuck Garrity at 239-261-6360 or go to MicroGrants.net. For more information about St. Matthew’s House, please contact Julie Clay at 239-298-5026.

About Microgrants Progam
MicroGrants, a 501 (c) (3) organization based in Minneapolis, MN, was founded in 2006 by Joe Selvaggio, founder of Project for Pride in Living, a nonprofit organization promoting self-sufficiency through housing, training and resources as well as the founder of the One Percent Club, an organization promoting philanthropy among the wealthy. Mr. Selvaggio is known as the “Dean of Minnesota Giving”. Chuck Garrity, a Microgrants board member and founder/CEO of Intelligent Financial Strategies, has expanded the program to Southwest Florida beginning this year. Their goal is to award 12 Microgrants to deserving Coller County recipients in 2012. St. Matthew’s House and Habitat for Humanity are the partner organizations for this locally-based chapter of Microgrants.

About St. Matthew’s House
The mission of St. Matthew’s House is to change lives in a spiritual environment that is both compassionate and disciplined, as well as providing housing for the homeless and food for the needy. A 501(c)(3) non-profit entity, SMH, along with Immokalee Friendship House, has been serving the homeless, hungry and hopeless in Collier County since 1987. SMH is the only emergency housing and recovery program in the county, offering 170 beds for men, women, and families. Serving meals at Justin’s Place, SMH is also the only feeding ministry in Naples, as well as operating three thrift stores, two food pantries, a full service catering company, a substance abuse recovery program, Wolfe Apartments transitional affordable housing, and a direct assistance program to individuals and families in need.

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Read the article in Twin Cities Business Magazine

MinnPost photo by Bill Kelley

Shantae Holmes: “I’m feeling positive. I’m still committed to this goal of mine.”

By Cynthia Boyd | Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2011
A decade ago Shantae Holmes walked out of the Minnesota Correctional Facility at Shakopee, telling her jailers: “You won’t see me again. I’m not coming back.”

She did return years later, but wearing a visitor’s pass. By then a community college graduate with a human services degree and a clean record and wisdom surpassing her years, she visited the prison as a role model and to help others get straight.

Holmes, a North Minneapolis woman who overcame drugs for a better life, is being honored today by the League of Catholic Women, a group with a name born in a different era and a deep-rooted history of service to women and children. This is the centennial year of the group housed in that little building with the big green door at 207 S. Ninth St. in Minneapolis.

Shantae (pronounced shawn-tay) Holmes and two other mothers will receive a $500 check and a Women Becoming award for beating the odds and achieving success.

Working for a social service agency, she once led support groups and shepherded women through court appearances, but her real dream was to open a business that would make her some money and help others as well. Today she’s a businesswoman, and that brings new challenges.

Holmes has indeed beaten the odds, and her story has been told in the local media. But when you talk with her, beneath the upbeat tone and behind the pride of accomplishment you hear a hint of uncertainty brought on by a poor economy and a tornado.

Almost 14 months ago Holmes, 40, realized that goal, opening All Washed Up, a laundry service in a redeveloped commercial area on the North Side near Penn and Lowry Avenues N. Neighbors and the business community applauded.

Sen. Al Franken even came by to shake her hand.

Her business is 3,128 square feet of family-friendly sunny space with 22 washers and 22 dryers, a couple of flat-screen TVs, a kids’ play area and snack-food vending machines, as well as laundry pick up and delivery service. What makes it a stand-out is Holmes upfront, greeting customers with smiles and offers to help.

Communal effort
Getting the business up and running was a major communal effort, involving profits and non-profits, including St. Paul-based Wellington Management, the Metropolitan Consortium of Community Developers and the Northside Economic Opportunity Network (NEON).

“Shantae is a very, very unique individual,” says Grover Jones, executive director of NEON, an organization that works with minorities who want to start businesses, particularly in North Minneapolis.

Holmes, he says, came from a religious upbringing and a good family, but she’d fallen off the rails for a while. She came to NEON for business-start-up help.

“It was not an easy project to pull together,” Jones says, but she persevered.

Start-up costs ran about $375,000 for outfitting her building, purchasing equipment, including about $40,000 from her own pocket, she says, and not counting the expense of all those costly extras like plastic slipcovers for clothes, business cards, hangers, a wet vacuum, an industrial fan.

“It left me $14 of working capital pretty much,” she tells me, admitting she’s still not paying herself a salary, though she pays three other employees.

MinnPost photo by Bill Kelley

Getting the business up and running was a major communal effort, involving profits and non-profits.

Holmes is also engaged to be married, and her fiancé and his business pay living expenses for Holmes and her kids. (She is mother of two boys ages 7 and 9 diagnosed with autism, and a 3-year-old daughter.)

Their wedding is in the distant future. “Right now we can’t even afford to buy a broom to jump over. We maybe could afford the rice,” she laughs.

Factor in a major economic recession and a tornado sweeping past her door in May, and see her challenges. Her building wasn’t damaged but power outages cost her. No electricity, no business.

Still, when the lights came on she passed out free laundry coupons to tornado victims, a generous gesture to the neighborhood she grew up in and a good marketing move paid for in part by a consortium of area churches.

“She knew the struggles of those North Minneapolis families,” says Cassandra Cheatem, family services manager at Northside Child Development Center where Holmes used to bring her children for child care. She’s known Holmes for eight years and nominated her for the League award. “She was a hard worker. She always had the drive to continue, no matter the obstacles.”

Holmes is a cancer survivor, and Cheatem sometimes drove Holmes, now closing in on four years cancer-free, to chemotherapy treatments. “She didn’t give up. She always said she had too much at stake. She said, ‘I have children to raise. This cancer will not beat me.”’

Helping customers
Customers trickled in one mid-morning Monday to the self-serve laundry on a street corner that used to attract the prostitution trade.

The door opens and Holmes turns on her smile. “Welcome to All Washed Up. Can I help?” Holmes asks patron Cari Acker.

No, she’s fine, Acker says, acknowledging it’s her first time there, that she’s pushing a pile of white plastic bags with dirty laundry in a running stroller because the tornado that ripped through town last May destroyed her car and damaged her house, including her washer and dryer.

Do you need help? Holmes asks, because there are resources out there and she could steer her in the right direction.

No, she had insurance, Acker says, smiling.

As for her business future? The next six months will tell, Holmes says. Now it’s up to the community to show support, even though customers wait a little longer before making that trip to the laundry and try to fill the wash tubs a little too full. It’s the economy, she says.

The business is “not where it needs to be,” she says, but “I’m still energized. I’m feeling positive. I’m still committed to this goal of mine. Anything worth having is worth working for.”

Related content
The League of Catholic Women’s awards, says President Rita Fox, both recognize the heroic strides of remarkable young women as well as highlight the League’s 100 years of service.

Fox says the awards are a “recruitment and publicity effort” to bolster membership and keep valuable programs going.

League members are first responders of a sort, recognizing the unmet needs of women like Holmes, as well as children and immigrants, and then stepping in to help.

A century ago they operated residences for single working women, later sheltering fatherless children and their mothers, and operating group homes for girls and boys. More recently through their First Impression program they supply job-interview coaching and professional clothing to those in need, stock cloth gift bags with toiletries and more for women leaving incarceration. Their Read to Me program matches members and kids from the Northside Achievement Zone.

At luncheon today at Midland Hills Country Club in Roseville, Holmes and two other women will receive awards.

The others are:

Rosalind Anderson of Brooklyn Park, parent to three, who overcame economic, educational and single-parenting barriers to become a registered nurse working in the neo-natal care unit at Hennepin County Medical Center,

Natasha Holt, also of North Minneapolis, and mother of two, including a child with cerebral palsy, who graduated from Minneapolis Community and Technical College in June and is working toward a four-year degree to become a hospital child-life specialist.

Helping the women reach their goals were different groups, including the League with such efforts as its By Your Side mentoring program, as well as Northside Child Development Center, St. Catherine University’s Access and Success program, and the Jeremiah Program, Fox says.

Source: MinnPost

That way they’d have money to buy stuff and pay taxes.

Yeah, right. All that proves is that there are idiot economists who don’t know what real value is all about.

Adam Smith, a Scottish social philosopher and the pioneer of modern economics, who died 220 years ago, insisted that individuals in a productive society need to have a product, something to sell at the end of work.

If you make shirts and I make shoes, we can exchange our goods and we both benefit. Now that is something that makes sense.

Wealth comes not just from the natural materials in shirts and shoes, but from the work that makes them. So the shirtmaker will have money to buy other products from other workers who produce everything from cars to houses and computers.

If too many material goods are produced — no doubt some in America have too many shirts — workers can become part of producing important nonmaterial products like education, entertainment and accounting services.

What we need is a system where people can work to produce material and nonmaterial goods competitively. Then prices would stay down and people could purchase what they most need and want.

That’s the kind of grass-roots capitalism that Adam Smith would applaud, and it’s a lot saner than what we heard recently from the New York Times’ Nobel Prize-winning economist Krugman.

We can’t do a lot to change Washington or big corporate policies. But we can do some things to make ends meet in these tough economic times.

• We can exchange goods and services with friends and neighbors in a kind of barter system — cleaning, cooking, home maintenance, babysitting. Many microbusinesses are already doing this.

• We can go to the Internet for valuable free information. At my last visit to my eye doctor I asked him how much vitamin D was too much. He said, “Let’s find out” and went to the Internet to find out that it was 25,000 milligrams. I realized that I now have the same access to information as my surgeon.

• We can use public spaces (parks, schools and libraries) to get all kinds of benefits. Even private spaces like shopping malls can give us free heat, light and water as we enjoy the beautifully designed buildings and products.

• We can use these and many more free blessings here in America and have a pretty decent life, even if we earn a minimum wage. We can “beat the system.”

For individuals without a high-paying job, the lesson here is to get to work and benefit yourself and your neighbor. Stop looking for the government to take care of you, unless you really can’t take care of yourself.

For our governments at all levels, the lesson is: Let’s stop building “bridges to nowhere” and instead fix the bridges and potholes we already have. That will stimulate commerce and aid workers in creating the goods and services we need far more than unproductive “make-work.”

But extending unemployment benefits without expecting any work from the beneficiaries (other than looking for jobs that aren’t there) has got to stop. Most unemployed workers would be happier if they earned their unemployment check by performing some useful service.

Today we are told that businesses are not spending their cash because they can’t count on a strong demand for their product. Maybe they are right. Maybe we have too much “stuff” and should just produce what people really need at a grass-roots level, by letting the marketplace decide.

Above all, let’s stop (metaphorically) paying people to dig ditches and fill them up again. Let’s get back to a grass-roots supply-and-demand system that gives all of us meaningful products and meaningful work.

* * *

Joe Selvaggio, Minneapolis, is founder of PPL, the One Percent Club and MicroGrants.

View original post on StarTribune.com

Did you get a chance to read my article on the Project for Pride in Living? My piece talked about an organization that has been compassionately making provisions of necessity for low-income individuals in the community. I was blessed to have had the opportunity to sit down with the Executive Director, Steve Cramer, and just recently, that blessing became a gift when I met the retired founder of the Project for Pride in Living, Joe Selvaggio.

I didn’t know what to expect as I sat and waited in the backyard gazebo, the birds’ serenade keeping me company. Selvaggio entered. His swagger was calm and gracious, and when our hands and eyes locked, I felt an instant connection – internal notification that this was an assignment I would enjoy immensely. Although now inactive with the PPL, Selvaggio still dabbles in the business of helping low-income people, and why wouldn’t he? In his forty-year career, he has pursued multiple avenues of servitude, including Catholic priest, founder of Project for Pride in Living, and founder of the One Percent Club, a philanthropic organization for people of means.

These days, Selvaggio is heading the MicroGrants program. “The program is designed to help low-income people become self-sufficient and to make a stride towards sufficiency with a thousand dollar bump of cash,” says Selvaggio. Selvaggio has taken a different tack than the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Muhammad Yunus. Yunus created a program to give people one hundred dollar loans to help get their businesses started. Selvaggio feels another loan would only create another burden and a bill to pay back, so he gives out microgrants. Selvaggio stressed, “If properly coached to use it well and to invest in their future and be accountable, it could be a positive bump in their direction.”

In order to help grant qualifiers succeed in a positive direction, several agencies have been chosen to oversee the progress of the applicants so that they don’t knowingly or unknowingly misuse the funds. According to Selvaggio, the money is not to be used for partying or other miscellaneous activities that are contrary to the intended use of the funds, and this is where the partnering community organizations come in. Jeremiah Program, Twin Cities RISE!, Summit Academy OIC, African Development Center, Project for Pride in Living, PRISM, Daily Work, Midtown Global Market, Wilder Foundation, and WomenVenture are the agencies that potential applicants can tap into for assistance. Selvaggio made his point clearer by quoting an old Chinese proverb, “Gimme a fish, and I eat for a day, but teach me to fish, and I eat for a lifetime.” He said it even better this way, “Gimme a fish, and I eat for a day, but gimme a microgrant, and I’ll open a bait shop.” Simply profound!!!

After our sit-down, Selvaggio gave me a tour of his home. I was exposed to art and its hidden meaning, pieces of antiquity, pictures of him in the motherland, and his “hit list,” a list of philanthropists who aid him in raising a half a million a year in order to provide the grants.

MicroGrants works like this: Selvaggio utilizes the “hit list,” partners with the agencies, and the agencies send the applicants. If you have faith in self, a plan of action, and your income doesn’t exceed $36,000 dollars, then you qualify. Why not take advantage of this opportunity to better self and community? Why not take a chance on your hidden dreams? Why not acquire the grant so you are able to purchase a quality computer to assist with your studies? Why not finish up your trade and embrace that grant to help with your tools? Why not use the money to start that landscaping business? Why not get those business cards made so that you are professional in your business endeavors? Why not utilize the lighter fluid that will get the coals to sizzling and your life burning?

It might be liver for dinner now, but to those who really want to do it, I see prosperity, success, self-gratification, and oh yeah, a little filet mignon!!!

In November, Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity launched its “Other Ways to Give” campaign, which advocates “four non-cash gift ideas” for the holidays. The mailing features four brightly wrapped gift boxes labeled Personal Property, Real Estate, Stocks and Life Insurance.

The strategy lies in sharp contrast to the recently launched Minnesota Give to the Max Day, which aimed to raise more than the $14 million in cash that charities took in last year. And while some organizations have sought asset donations for years, others — including Habitat — are turning to the strategy out of necessity.

Best known for using lay volunteers to build homes for poor families, Habitat explains that its fundraising is usually targeted to traditional cash donors. But now it’s showcasing fresh donation options to a wider audience because cash is “spread pretty thin.”

“We, like a lot of other organizations, have really seen a dip in our fundraising. So we are actively promoting other ways that people can help,” said Twin Cities Habitat spokeswoman Anne Weber-Smith. “We had to do it to maintain our level of production.”

In place of cash, Habitat is happy to accept your stock, vacation home, unwanted land or even commercial property as a tax-deductible gift for the holidays. It also suggests that donors list it as a beneficiary on a life insurance policy or simply “make us the owner.”

“I’m for all these things,” said Joe Selvaggio, 73, long known as the don of Minnesota philanthropy. He founded Project for Pride in Living, the One Percent Club for millionaires, and most recently MicroGrants, which gives seven $1,000 grants or in-kind gifts to the poor each week. “Whether it is land or stocks or charitable remainder trusts, or insurance or in-kind contributions. Just use them all.”

Over the years, Selvaggio’s groups have received millions of dollars in tax-deductible donations in the form of land, stocks, cars, homes and cash. The assets are all used to house, clothe or employ hard-working families, he said. One time Project for Pride in Living received a $100,000 house as a gift, which it then sold to a low-income family for just $50,000.

“Occasionally you get these lemon assets that people want to get rid of,” he said. “But by and large, I think it’s a great idea.”

But asset donations are still novel thinking for Minnesota’s general public, which often regards Thanksgiving, Christmas and Hanukkah as the time to write checks or drop off food, toiletries, mittens and warm coats to Habitat, the Salvation Army, Jewish Family Service, Red Cross, Project for Pride in Living, Minnesota food shelves and the like.

Weber-Smith admits that Twin Cities Habitat must work to educate the masses that it’s open to receiving donors’ assets. More than 90 percent of its charitable gifts now come in the form of checks. And most of its fundraising still is geared toward volunteers and corporations, not to estate planners who traditionally work with wealthy clients well-versed in complicated tax deductible gifts.

“What Habit for Humanity is exploring is expanding that [fundraising matrix] from estate planners of the wealthy to the smaller donor. They are trying to reach more people with that message. I think it’s a great idea,” said Christine Durand, spokeswoman for the 2,000-member Minnesota Council of Nonprofits.

If successful, the broader appeal could help Twin Cities Habitat raise $36 million over four years for its new “A World of Hope” campaign. The initiative aims to build and repair 730 homes across the metro area. So far General Mills, Thrivent Financial for Lutherans, Wells Fargo and others have raised $16 million for the effort.

Said Jean Gorell, president of the Minnesota chapter for the Society of Fundraising Professionals: “Given the economy today, [assets] could be a more favorable gift because someone is not writing that check today.”

Gorell said many of her clients have grown children who don’t want to inherit their parents’ house or farmland. A tax-deductible gift to a beloved charity can be a remedy, said Gorell. More marketing campaigns like Habitat’s will continue to pop up, she said.

Come Easter, for example, the Salvation Army will launch a national advertising campaign about noncash gifts for the first time. While “the Army” reaches out to 1,000 tax attorneys, accountants and estate planners each year with educational seminars, its new ad campaign will be designed to grab the attention of the general public.

“It’s going “border-to-border,” said Dave Overstake, the organization’s planned giving director for Minnesota and North Dakota. The new ads will educate “the broader-based masses” that there are ways to provide for the Salvation Army not only with cash but also in their wills, gifts of appreciated stock and other estate planning instruments, Overstake said.

“We have been doing this for 100 years. So, the [wealthy regular] donors of the Army do know all about this, but the masses do not,” Overstake said.

Dee DePass • 612-673-7725