To Donate
Call 423-757-6208 to make a tax-deductible donation or go to timesfreepress.com/news/neediestcases/2015/. Any area nonprofit or 501(c)(3) can apply for the Neediest Cases Fund for their clients by calling the United Way’s 211 number. Clients are assessed on a case-by-case basis to ensure the funds are distributed in the most efficient manner.
For most people, December is a time for parties, mirth-making and joy. For Devona King, the month is all too often a reminder of what she’s lost.
The 12th month of the year is when her grandmother, mother, father and aunt died, not all at once but all in different years – like individual stabs to the heart – over a relatively short span of time.
“I miss my parents so much,” King, 44, says.
Earlier this month, on the fifth anniversary of the day she buried her mother, she signed the lease for a Section 8 home in the Rainbow Creek apartments on Standifer Gap Road in East Brainerd.
She was assisted in the deposit for the apartment with help from the Times Free Press Neediest Cases Fund. She is among hundreds of senior citizens, single-parent households, people with disabilities and veterans who benefit from the campaign funded by Times Free Press readers and administered by the United Way of Greater Chattanooga.
Getting a permanent home, like so many other things in King’s life over the past decade, has been a struggle.
The single mother worked for BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee in 2004 when she was diagnosed with bulging discs in her back. After exhausting her paid time off, she used the Family and Medical Leave Act to continue to recover. In time, after her short-term disability ended, she lost her job. So she applied and received long-term disability.
Yet, she said, she had no medical, vision or life insurance, which she had previously paid for through her employer.
Then, in May 2007, the duplex in which King and her then-grade school son lived burned. No one was hurt, but she lost everything.
Furniture can be replaced, she said, but photographs of her past and her son’s childhood can’t.
A month after the fire, King’s long-term disability benefits stopped.
The fire and its aftermath, she said, are “what got me out of contact with society.” Her life, she said, “went downhill.”
Because King did not continue to receive long-term disability and because of disputes over what a doctor had said and written, she took the doctor to court. But the judge ruled against her in the civil case.
Since then, she said, “I’ve been fighting for this to see how and what could get done. I feel like the system has truly failed me.”
While King says she “got blessed” to receive a voucher from the Chattanooga Housing Authority’s Housing Choice (Section 8) Program and “a roof over my head” through the deposit assistance from the Neediest Cases Fund, she’s far from secure.
Although she receives Social Security Disability Insurance, she has no furniture, “no groceries” and sleeps on the floor.
“I don’t have anything,” says King, a Bradley County native who has lived in Chattanooga for more than 20 years.
She raised her son, who lives apart from her and has a temporary job, “through God’s grace and mercy to the best of my ability,” she said, but on this Christmas Day, she says, “I can’t do the things I want to for him.
“I’ve been through a whole lot,” King says, through tears she has tried to contain. “It’s hard, extremely hard.”
During the 2014 holiday season, Times Free Press readers contributed more than $47,098 that helped some 300 people. Although the annual drive starts on Thanksgiving Day and ends after Christmas, the money is distributed throughout the year.
The fundraiser is in its 101st year.
On this day, as we celebrate Christmas, it’s still not too late to give in the spirit of the one who gave his only son, whose birth is marked today and who reminded us that “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”