Urbana

Last Friday, Erin and I made the trip to Urbana. No, not the trendy DC restaurant. The county seat of Champaign. If you click on that first link, you'll see that Urbana's center features a rotary. Any town that has a rotary is alright by me.

Urbana is a little strange in that it's only 47 miles from Columbus, but it feels like, culturally, it's in a whole 'nother time zone. Urbana is technically north of our fair capital city, but it felt a whole lot of Southern. Southern accents and hospitality were the order of the day.

We were there to attend Project Connect, an outreach event where Urbana residents can find different programs and benefits that are available to them. An event that like is tailor made for the Benefit Bank so it wasn't much of a surprise to find two other Benefit Bank sites attending the event (although they don't have the, ahem, benefit of the Mobile Express).

The event was a rousing success. We spoke to about a dozen people, and all of them appeared to be eligible for something. Food assistance, voter registration, taxes. The whole nine yards. And with two Benefit Bank sites in the building, it was incredibly easy to make sure these people got taken care of.

Except...well, except the people of Urbana were very hesitant to apply for benefits. It was the old "someone else needs it more than me" card. We hate that card. I sympathize with people who want to see others get help before themselves, but there are no limitations to food assistance.

It had been a good long time since we ran into someone eligible for benefits who didn't want to apply for them. We had at least three in Urbana. At the very least, those people know where to go if they do decide to apply for assistance. We very much hope they do exactly that.