Mineola family nonprofit tries crowdfunding

Family & Children’s Association has, for the first time, launched a fundraising campaign on a “crowdfunding” website, a potential source of new financing for the nonprofit agency in a time of government cutbacks and increased competition for limited corporate charitable dollars.

“With government funding drying up and our wonderful corporate and individual sponsors doing everything they can to help us, we felt we needed to widen our perspective in fundraising,” Joyce Mullen, the agency’s director of marketing and communications, said in a statement.

Family & Children’s, a nonprofit human services agency based in Mineola, serves about 25,000 at-risk children, struggling families and vulnerable seniors.

“Because our services are community based, we saw the opportunity to reach out directly to the people in the communities we serve to ask them to give $20 or $30 to help their neighbors,” Mullen said in the statement.

Toward that end, Family & Children’s Association launched a campaign last week on GoFundMe.com, a popular crowdfunding source used for a wide variety of personal causes. The association has uploaded three videos featuring testimonials from people who received help from the agency.

Anyone interested in making a tax-deductible donation on the crowdfunding site can visit http://www.familyandchildrens.org/gofundme.