CORE Taps Blackhawk Network For Grant Disbursements By Prepaid Card

Children of Restaurant Employees (CORE), which offers help to families in the restaurant service industry, has teamed with Blackhawk Network to harness prepaid cards for grant disbursements. The tie-up lets CORE contend with the heightened demand for relief without making compromises to its service levels, according to a press release emailed to PYMNTS.

Volunteers spread the word of CORE’s service offering through social media to inform friends and community members about group’s service offerings at the pandemic’s peak. For that reason, the agency’s grant footprint grew to each U.S. state, with over 540 families having been served by grants of almost $1.5 million in aggregate, according to the press release, which noted that almost half of those disbursements were made through prepaid cards.

“We went from five applications in a week to upwards of ten per day and had to pivot our program very quickly,” CORE Executive Director Sheila Bennett said in the announcement. “Thanks to Blackhawk’s unique prepaid card fulfillment capabilities, we ramped up for this unprecedented demand in record time, avoiding unnecessary disbursement delays typically seen with more traditional options like store bought gift cards.”

Blackhawk has delivered over $250 million since March 2020 through “hundreds of thousands” of prepaid and gift cards on behalf of government agencies and nonprofits for individuals affected by the pandemic throughout the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom.

“Our cards are a flexible and remarkably easy solution for nonprofits and government agencies because they are much faster to issue and deliver than paper checks, while providing recipients with convenience solutions to make purchases in store or online,” Blackhawk Network Senior Vice President, Incentives, Corporate Development and Strategy Jeff Haughton said in the announcement, noting that the cards “also provide people who are unbanked or underbanked access to a resource they can use whenever and wherever they need to.”

Blackhawk Network Vice President of Global Product Strategy Helena Mao told PYMNTS in a recent conversation that gift cards have already stepped into the digital on-ramp role as the pandemic has worn on and people who perhaps didn’t have access to a credit or debit card need an expedient and simple way to jump into digital commerce.