Keep Wisconsin Warm Fund needs more donors to help others pay heating bills
Lottie Truman's tailoring business in her home on Madison's north side helps her make ends meet, but even with that supplement to her Social Security income, filling her furnace tank with oil could break the budget.
"There's no way I have an extra $420 lying around," Truman, 76, said on a cold December morning in her home shop. She was talking about the most recent bill for one of what is usually two tanks of heating oil each winter. Without a heating supplement through the Keep Wisconsin Warm Fund, "I'd never make it," she said. Truman, who just signed up for food stamps, recalled how a customer to her alterations shop once tried to slip her a little money for the heat.
That sense of neighbors helping neighbors is what the Keep Wisconsin Warm Fund is all about, said Tim Bruer, a member of its board of directors and the executive director of Energy Services Inc. The fund, a program initiative of Energy Services, supplements heating payment help offered through the Wisconsin Heating Assistance Program and aids clients with incomes higher than the state program rules permit.
Bruer wants to increase financial support from the general public for Keep Wisconsin Warm this year, in part because for every $1 raised privately for the fund, the state contributes $2. The extra money will be sorely needed, Bruer said. He predicts that with the economy worsening just as winter weather settles in this year, and as newly laid-off workers go through their savings and unemployment benefits, Keep Wisconsin Warm will be called on to assist more people.
About 30 percent of those applying for aid this season are doing so for the first time, he said. "It's layoffs; it's people who lost good-paying jobs and now are paid minimum wage. It's those who are uninsured with medical crises. It's people who, because of pride, did not come forth in the past," Bruer said. "In the worsening economy, they have no place else to turn."
About 8,000 Dane County households receive heating assistance, Bruer said, up from 3,500 just a couple of years ago.
Anita Lander is one of those who has found herself in an unexpected squeeze this year.
At her east side rental home, Lander said the furnace was "running on fumes" a few weeks back. As the temperature dropped, she or her husband, Jim, would go out to check the gauge on their outdoor fuel tank that showed an ever falling supply. Fuel companies wanted cash on delivery on what they calculated to be a $400 to $500 delivery.
Between her unemployment checks and Jim's dropping hours and income from a local moving company, they didn't have the money. "I was praying every morning," Lander said. "If it were just us, we wouldn't worry so much about keeping the house warm," she said. But since August, the Landers' 18-month-old granddaughter has been living with them, at their struggling daughter's request. Because they don't have legal custody, there are few resources to assist them in their care of the child, Lander said.
The family's income of $7,000 over the preceding three months put them beyond the limit of the state program, but Keep Wisconsin Warm was able to help, she said.
The fund was founded in 1996 as a pilot program in Dane County to raise private funds to supplement government funding for heating assistance. It now operates statewide and is administered by Energy Services, which also administers the federally funded state energy assistance program under contracts with 14 counties.
The state program assists households with incomes of up to 150 percent of the federal poverty level: $18,600 for a single-person household and $31,800 for a family of four. Keep Wisconsin Warm extends income eligibility to 200 percent of the federal poverty level: $20,800 for a single-person household and $42,400 for a family of four.
Federal funding for the state's low-income heating assistance program is up sharply this year to $147 million, nearly double the amount available last year, according to a news release issued in October by Gov. Jim Doyle's office. The state estimated then that 165,000 households would need heating assistance this year, compared to the 155,114 that received assistance last year.
Keep Wisconsin Warm raised $3.3 million in its 2006-07 fiscal year, the most recent for which records are available, thanks in large part to a $5 million gift from We Energies, a major utility. The money was spread over two fiscal years. The Keep Wisconsin Warm Fund has typically raised $1.5 million to $2 million annually, said Bruer, who is also a Madison City Council member, but he has set a goal of $3 million for the current fiscal year.
Kyle Mindermann is one of this season's donors. She saw a Keep Wisconsin Warm Fund solicitation that was enclosed with her utility bill about five years ago when, as a young single mother with two sons, paying it was no easy feat.
With her limited income at the time, she qualified for the program, and received about $800 toward heating bills that first winter.
"It freed up money for groceries," Mindermann, now 31, recalled. She was able to swallow her pride and ask for help, she said. "I worked really hard to keep a roof over my boys' heads. If it came to the point where I needed help, I was willing to take it."
Mindermann was eligible for assistance a second year but since that time has worked her way up at WPS Health Insurance to a supervisor's position and greater financial stability.
She is now paying it forward by supporting the fund that helped keep her family warm. She organized a lunchtime sale of chili homemade by co-workers this fall in the WPS lunchroom that raised $600 for the fund. And in November, she and a co-worker who would have been feted in her department's monthly birthday treat day asked that instead of preparing goodies, colleagues donate the price of the fixings to the fund. That raised $400.
"I think it's a wonderful establishment that doesn't get the recognition it deserves," Mindermann said of the fund.
Its impact is felt every day by some.
"I don't sit around and freeze," Truman said in her home alternations shop. "If I'm cold, I turn up the heat."
Michelle Stocker/Capital Times
Lottie Truman, who has a home-based tailoring business on Madison's north side, says she wouldn't be able to pay winter heating bills without help from the Keep Wisconsin Warm Fund.
