Join Us in Helping Those Who Need It Most. We're Matching Up to $10,000 for Cash Assistance via @GiveDirectly

We're happy to join more than 30 other Substackers in boosting three Rwandan villages' efforts to escape poverty

If you’re reading this newsletter, it’s a near-certainty that you have been lucky in life.

That’s not to say that you haven’t worked very hard and made good decisions and sacrificed for your success. Here at Newcomer we’d certainly like to think we’ve done all those things.

But speaking for ourselves at least, we’ve all pulled winning tickets in the great lottery of life simply by being born into comfortable circumstances in the most prosperous society in history.

With that in mind, we’re very happy to support @GiveDirectly, which spreads a few more winning tickets around. Specifically, it offers $1,100 cash payments to the poorest of the poor, with a well-thought-out and proven methodology that involves supporting entire communities.

For this campaign, the aid will target 800 families in three Rwandan villages.

We will match donations up to $10,000 that come through the Newcomer GiveDirectly page: GiveDirectly.org/newcomer.

The money is life-changing for many recipients, and @GiveDirectly avoids common pitfalls of antipoverty programs by offering everyone in each village the same payment and using modern fintech to assure the money goes where it’s intended.

Alphonsine, pictured above with her two sons, had only irregular farming work after separating from her husband and struggled to care for her children. With $1,100 she was able to buy a small plot of land for farming, as well as three pigs, household items, and a bicycle for her eldest, 23-year-old Melchiade, who now has transport to support himself.

You can read a lot more about who @GiveDirectly helps and how it all works on the donation page: GiveDirectly.org/newcomer. There’s also the full roster of the Substackers who are pitching in. At a moment when the U.S. government is stepping back from helping those most in need, it’s more important than ever that we step up.

Again we hope you will join us in giving here and helping us deliver our $10,000 match: GiveDirectly.org/newcomer.

Our deepest thanks to you, our subscribers, for making this possible. Happy Holidays!