About Help Now! Advocacy

In January 2004, our founder and executive director Larry Kahn conceived the idea of forming an organization that, on an individual case-by-case basis, would speak up and advocate for those in our society least equipped to do so for themselves and without the funds to pay someone else to do it for them. . . Read the Help Now! story.

Our Management Team
Click on the name of each person to access his biography:

Laurence M. Kahn, Executive Director
Steven H. Jorgensen, Director of Operations

Our Board of Directors
Click on the name of each person to access his or her biography:

Laurence M. Kahn, President
Seth R. Weintraub, Vice President
Michael R. Barnes, Secretary
Diane Zieser, Treasurer
Dave Gilmour
Lorie Morgan

Our Funding
Help Now! is organized under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Service as a public benefit, publicly supported non-profit corporation. We are organized under the laws of the State of Oregon as a non-profit corporation.

Because we are organized in this manner, all of our funding is received from donations, fundraising events, and grants. The grants may be from corporate foundations, private foundations, or the government. We do not charge our clients any fee for our services.

As of October 2004, we have begun to receive support in the form of private donations from both individuals and corporations. We also have one fundraising event currently ongoing, plan to initiate another shortly, and are planning at least two others for the spring of 2005. All fundraising events involve support from the local community. Finally, we are in the process of writing our initial grant proposals to several private and corporate foundations and hope to procure a grant for work with a local governmental entity in the very near future.

Our Clients
We will eventually be linked to current reports from the database we are in the process of establishing so that anyone visiting our website will be able to review up-to-date statistics on the demographics of the client population we have served. It is likely that the number of facets of client demographics presented here will expand once our database is operational.

Click to see the October 2004 Report.

Our Performance
This page will eventually be linked current reports from the database we are in the process of establishing so that anyone visiting our website will be able to review up-to-date statistics on the types of client matters we have handled and our performance results. It is likely that the number of facets of our performance will expand once our database is operational.

Click to see the October 2004 Performance Information.

Our Expansion Plans
Help Now! is currently located in Jackson County Oregon, and we currently serve primarily the population of Jackson County although we have received referrals, and in one case a client, from an adjacent county. At present, we are finalizing a comprehensive business plan which will provide detail on our expansion plans.

As of October 2004, we have not begun any of our outreach programs to particular segments of our focus population. We are simply performing services for clients who fall within our focus population as they present themselves to us. When we do initiate such programs, it will be in a staggered manner meaning that we will initiate outreach to one segment of our focus population at a time. This will be one manner in which we expand, and it will be done at a local level.

Once the expansion described in the preceding paragraph has occurred and has occurred successfully through objective measures of success, we will begin our geographic expansion. This expansion will replicate the model we will have, by then, successfully incubated at the local level. It will first involve an expansion to other targeted communities within the state of Oregon. From there, we will expanded to other targeted locations elsewhere within the United States.

Each location to which we expand will have its own local management and board of directors but will be within the umbrella of the larger organization. Quality control, reporting, and other communications mechanisms will be a part of the expansion, and there will be board connections to the umbrella organization as well.