Your generosity supports SMHA in its mission to create healthy, strong, and prosperous rural communities in Southern Louisiana and beyond.


 

Our goal is to make giving easy and provide several pathways for donations.

Individual Giving

These charitable donations include gifts from your income or assets to Southern Mutual Help Association. Individual planned gifts can be made during your lifetime or after your death arranged when planning your estate. Planned gifts can reduce your capital gains or estate taxes. Charitable bequests can be made to SMHA from your estate through a will or living trust. These can include life insurance policies, cash donations, assets, stocks and bonds. Our charitable donors also can identify Southern Mutual Help Association as the beneficiary of a life insurance policy or retirement plan.

Corporate Giving

Corporate philanthropy is a key component of a healthy and viable community. If your business or the company you work for supports a corporate giving program, please consider Southern Mutual Help Association. The organization’s corporate giving options include annual giving programs that provide charitable grants to SMHA as part of an annual operating budget, corporate foundations which create independent, tax-exempt foundations for charitable giving, corporate funds which are donor-advised and managed by a community foundation, employee matching programs and non-cash giving through volunteerism.

Endowment Fund

The Sister Anne Catherine Bizalion Endowment Fund – Charitable donors can contribute funds to this endowment created by SMHA after the death of co-founder Sister Anne Catherine Bizalion in 1997. This fund gives SMHA the opportunity to ensure that innovative solutions and institutions continue to tackle Louisiana’s persistent challenges. The interest earned on this endowment fund gives SMHA financial resources to train new generations of leadership and remain flexible to create systems that work far into the future, all in the spirit of our beloved Sister Anne.

Make a gift today

Check

Please make checks payable to Southern Mutual Help Association, Inc. and mail to:  Southern Mutual Help Association, Inc., 3602 Old Jeanerette Road, New Iberia, LA  70563

Planned giving

A planned gift to Southern Mutual Help Association, Inc., allows your legacy to continue to make an impact. Here are some options to discuss with your financial advisor:

  • Bequest – Leave gifts of cash, stock, mutual funds or property through your will or living trust.
  • Retirement plan
  • Life insurance policy
  • Charitable rollover
  • A grant from my Donor Advised Fund at Community Foundation of Acadiana (or elsewhere)

Contribute to SMHA

Online

Contribute to Teche Ridge tornado damage

Online

Contribute to Rural Recovery Response to respond to communities impacted by COVID-19 and Hurricanes Laura and Delta.

Your financial support will make a difference.

Support Rural Recovery

Southern Mutual Help Association, Inc. is a 501(C)3 Not-For-Profit

Your gift may qualify as a charitable deduction for federal income tax purposes.

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Louisiana is a state of great richness mixed with great poverty. SMHA  knows  how Louisiana historically ranks at the top of lists that chronicle the  undesirable and at the bottom of lists that tout the qualities sought after in our communities.

We, like you, want to reverse that trend.

In the mid-1950’s, a little rural Dominican nun came from the French Alps to begin work to end poverty in Louisiana. Sitting beside students in the elementary schools and living with South Louisiana families, Sister Anne Bizalion learned English but held on to her enchanting accent. After graduating as the first Catholic nun with a Masters of Social Work from Tulane University, Sister Anne learned just about every nook and cranny in rural Louisiana. As the first professional social worker at the TB Annex of the Lafayette Charity Hospital, Sister Anne visited the sick and destitute across a dozen parishes.

When President Lyndon Johnson declared a “War on Poverty,” Sister Anne was ready.

She started and was director of the first Headstart Program in Vermilion Parish where poverty touched half the population. Having worked previously with the Red Cross after Hurricane Hilda, Sister Anne knew the difference between the need for emergency help to get back on your feet and the need to change systems and create lasting opportunities for change.

In 1969, Sister Anne co-founded the Southern Mutual Help Association (SMHA). Though Sister Anne died in 1997, it is within SMHA that one finds her abiding spirit of working to bring out the best in Louisiana and its people. Co-founders Lorna Bourg and Sister Anne were joined in 1980 by Sister Helen Vinton, a Saint Mary-of-the-Woods Sister of Providence. The four plus decades of their work focused on exposing systems that didn’t work and creating new ones that would.

SMHA trained thousands in new skills and started the first health clinic for farm workers serving 10,000 patients in the first year. The Teche Action Clinic exists today as does the PEPI adult education program. SMHA built hundreds of homes for families as well as rental units for the elderly. SMHA developed the self-help philosophy of believing that we should do nothing for folks that they can do for themselves.

SMHA started a movement to sustain and support agriculture, co-founding the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group involving thousands of family farm folk over thirteen states. SMHA helped create the Rural Home Loan Partnership between the non-profit sector, banking institutions, and Rural Housing Service. This multi-million dollar initiative, financing homeownership for thousands of low-wealth families, spread to over 300 sites in America. At the turn of the new century, SMHA created Louisiana’s first rural community development bank.

Louisiana and folks who care about this jewel of our nation have a serious stake in the longevity of SMHA. You can build on that precious investment made by many over SMHA’s history and together we will continue to rebuild rural Louisiana.

The Sister Anne Catherine Bizalion Endowment gives SMHA the opportunity to ensure that SMHA’s innovative solutions and institutions continue to tackle Louisiana’s persistent challenges.