Editor’s note: This is part three in a weekly series about families impacted by United Way.

MONROE — Joni and Don Craft thought they would have to live out of their car. That threat came this time last year when the grandparents struggled through a streak of financial problems, with no help from the slumping economy.

Countrywide Financial had foreclosed on their home in Michigan earlier in the year, and Don Craft had quit his job at Penske, sure that the automotive industry would soon collapse.

They faced eviction just a few months after moving to Monroe.

“I was just ready to call it quits, period, permanently,” Joni Craft said. “If I thought about it all the time, I’d go crazy.”

United Way was there to break the fall.

The Crafts moved to the area in June 2008, just after Don Craft’s mother died. The couple stayed with his father in Peachland until the first part of August that year, when they moved to Monroe.

“We thought we’d be all right with the little bit of money we had saved,” Joni Craft said. People told them they would find jobs within a week, but the Crafts soon found that jobs were scarce.

Joni Craft finally got a job at an assisted living facility — her 50th job application — but didn’t start until January.

At the end of last November, the couple had no idea how December’s rent and utilities would be paid.

With no insurance and a handful of medications for Don Craft’s back problems, bills continued to pile up.

That’s when Joni Craft went to Crisis Assistance Ministry. The United Way agency didn’t just help with rent, but gave her an outlet to vent her frustration. If not for Crisis Assistance, Joni Craft said, she and her husband might have spent the month living in their car.

The couple’s two daughters, 21 and 26, live in Michigan. Not wanting their daughters to worry or think their parents were irresponsible with money, the couple said they wouldn’t have told them if that happened.

“We would’ve just said, ‘We’re down here with Dad and we’re fine,’” Joni Craft said. “We would not have told them. We would have made it through one way or another.”

Even the car is unreliable; the day of their interview with The Enquirer-Journal, it broke down before they left the driveway. It was the second time in a week.

It was Crisis Assistance that kept the couple in their home.

“They’re all good people there,” Don Craft said, adding that he didn’t know how many United Way agencies there are until he and his wife needed help.

Don Craft spent 15 years as a truck driver. He came to Monroe intending to work, but “there was no work anywhere.” His back problems occasionally require a cane, and medications come to about $150 per month. He is not yet approved for disability benefits, and because he quit his job, he can’t get unemployment checks, either.

The state has helped with some of his medical bills and he is still trying to get Medicaid. He attends vocational rehabilitation in hopes of earning an income again.

Joni Craft received her certified nursing assistant license but makes just above minimum wage.

To his wife, Don Craft said he feels bad about using “your money.”

“Our money,” she corrected him.

The Crafts met when they were 14 years old. Nearly 30 years into marriage, their $500 monthly house payment quadrupled and the couple moved to Monroe to find themselves sleeping on the floor. Their neighbors donated furniture for their home and a riding mower for their yard.

Don Craft said he couldn’t ask for better neighbors and is forever grateful for United Way. The couple plans to donate regularly as soon as they are able.

Agencies are “overburdened,” Joni Craft said, yet “people just won’t give. They’re just afraid, I guess ... of being squandered.” The $1.2 million compensation package of former United Way of Central Carolinas executive director Gloria Pace King broke donors’ trust, she said, but that is behind the community now and people are in need.

“If you’ve got 50 cents to give right now, it’s worth it,” she said. “As a community, if we could all hang in there together, it would be so cool just to help your neighbor. ... A dollar is not going to kill you.”

Where the Crafts previously showered their daughters with Christmas gifts, they could afford to send only cards last year. Joni Craft gets her clothes from Goodwill and makeup from a dollar store. “You learn really quick how to save a dime,” she said.

The couple has also turned to Operation Reach Out for help with a utility bill and Loaves and Fishes for food. Joni Craft said she was “embarrassed” to pick up the food, but “once I get a chance to repay these people, I am so going to do it because they made you feel like you were somebody.”

As for other United Way agencies, she said they are all important. Joni Craft recently heard the story of a man who learned English through the Literacy Council. Without the agency, “How would this guy be able to go up there and order a hamburger? It seems so trivial,” but speaking English or buying groceries are things people often take for granted.

“If you think that you aren’t susceptible to possibly being in this situation, you better think again because you’re one illness and one layoff away from being in this same situation,” she said. “ ... We’re just one story.”

A donated TV sits against the couple’s living room wall, next to a wooden sign that says “Believe.”

“Sometimes you just don’t believe you’ll make it through,” Joni Craft said, “ ... but you will.” To all the donors who have helped her and her husband, “Thank you, and you’ll get tenfold back one day.”