There's a version of this story where a charity tells you it's growing. More staff, more offices, more programs, bigger footprint. Growth is the proof that things are working.

Friends of Jack went the other way, and you deserve to know why.

The Titanic and the schooner

A large national nonprofit is like the Titanic. It saw the iceberg well in the distance, and it was so big it didn't have the opportunity to turn away from it.

Friends of Jack is a small, agile schooner. When we see new challenges, we can pivot and move and transition quickly.

That decision to stay small, it's a decision that we keep making intentionally. For us, staying small is what lets us say "yes" to a family sitting in a hospital room next week instead of putting them in next year's budget.

What "small" actually means

Jill Fearons founded this organization and didn't take a salary for the first five years. She spent five years building a foundation that grew into a real institution in this region, unpaid the entire time, because every dollar that could have gone to her salary was needed somewhere else.

The flip side of low overhead is honest to name. It means that growing Friends of Jack required sweat equity. Pete and Jill, plus a board that shows up, plus volunteers who treat this like their own, are the entire backbone of the foundation. They have to make more out of the hours they have. Low overhead isn't free. Somebody absorbs it, and around here that somebody is a very small group of people who looked at the trade and decided it was worth making.

What the programs look like from the inside

Here's the part that separates local giving from writing a check to a national organization.

With Friends of Jack, you get to watch your money work in your community. A parent in this community takes their child to St. Luke's, that child gets a Hero Bear, and the equipment in the room was paid for with funds raised at an event that same parent attended six months earlier. There's a direct line between the room where the money was raised and the room where it gets spent, and you can stand in both of them in the same calendar year.

Contrast that with giving to a national charity: the money leaves and something presumably happens somewhere. Friends of Jack offers donors the transparency and intimacy that larger organizations can't match.

Right now that looks like more than 100 hours a week of Child Life Services funded at St. Luke's Hospital. It looks like Hero Bear kits in the hands of children on the days they need them most. It looks like a $280,000 commitment to expand the Child Life Specialist program at Southcoast Health, the largest single gift in this foundation's history.

We punch above our weight, and we know why

Beyond just our two full-time employees, it is the board, the volunteers who show up on weekends, the community partners who host their own fundraisers on our behalf, and the donors who keep coming back year after year who allow us to punch above our weight. We're the small structure that holds it together and gets the money where it needs to go. The weight is carried by a lot of hands.

Almost all of our support comes from local donors and local businesses. We rarely receive a gift over $10,000. This foundation is built out of ordinary contributions from people who live here, which is exactly why we're intentional with every dollar we receive.

At Friends of Jack, if you come to us with a specific thing you care about, and it's within what we do, we can usually get on board with it. We don't ask our donors to always get behind our agenda. Oftentimes, we get behind theirs.

And if what you care about falls outside our purview, we'll tell you so and point you toward the organization that can actually help. That happens more than you'd expect, and we consider it part of the job.

If you want to see the receipts, our transparency page lists where our grants have gone and what they bought: friendsofjack.org/impact/transparency

If you want to be part of the next round, the Annual Celebration is September 19 at the Arch at the Meadow in Rochester: tickets and sponsorships