Children’s Hospital Project
Our Children’s Hospital Project was visited recently by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The Journalist, Rich Lord, has written an excellent article and here is an excerpt...
GLASGOW, Scotland — The day of the school Christmas show, Dina Kadhum’s 10-year-old daughter came home from school vomiting. It wasn’t a case of nerves, but rather a rare cancer that would soon dominate every aspect of the lives of the family of five.
“I spent all my time with my daughter,” said Ms. Kadhum on Monday. She could focus on nothing else and shelved her work as a translator, which was the family’s main income.
At Glasgow’s Royal Hospital for Children, she was referred to Lorraine Wallace, a money advisor who worked the complex United Kingdom benefit system and found the family 1,300 British pounds per month in aid.
Ms. Wallace is part of an unusual, privately funded money advice service that does much more than find money for parents of sick kids. She and her colleagues, employees of a nonprofit called Money Matters, also craft budgets, negotiate with creditors and landlords, work out arrangements with employers, and sometimes even line up lawyers for bankruptcy filings if a family’s finances falter due to a child’s illness.
“We fight for people all the time,” she said. She applies a typically Scottish martial attitude to each family’s challenges: “It’s my fight.”
The full article can be read here...