LIVINGSTON - Elaine Kimbler knows how to make $80 count for something.

She tells the story of a young man named Chris. He had lined up what he called his dream job, working for the National Park Service in Tennessee. But he was $80 short on bus fare to get there from Livingston. So Kimbler helped him buy the ticket.

Now, a year later, he's still working. He calls now and then, to say thanks and stay in touch.

"It was such a little amount of money and it got him to his dream job," said Kimbler, 58, executive director of a tiny, one-woman nonprofit group she calls Friends of the Community Inc.

The group exists to fill in the cracks, to help out in emergencies, to keep people off the streets, out of the weather and nourished. Last year, she collected and distributed $7,365, helping 56 people with problems, buying food and diapers and bus tickets, paying for car repairs and motel rooms and even some shoes and socks.

"People just fall between the cracks," she said.

So she helps. She's been doing it for eight years.

"She's kind of a silent warrior," said Bruce Lay, a member of her board of directors and another active philanthropist here. "She's the one not in the limelight. But she helps the really tough cases."

Self-employed as a bookkeeper and proofreader, Kimbler knows the despair of homelessness.

In 1994, she found herself in that very situation. A newly single mother of three, including a newborn with Down syndrome, her landlord sold the house she was living in and she couldn't afford the security deposit and other expenses required to move. Then she lost her job, and day care for a handicapped infant was impossible to find.

So she and her kids spent six weeks in a motel room, cooking meals in an electric frying pan. She went on welfare. Eventually, she found a job as an apartment manager, which put a better roof over their heads. And she found other work she could do at home.

Gradually, things improved,

But it proved to be a life-altering experience.

"If that could happen to me, and I'm an intelligent woman, it could happen to anyone," she said.

She sees the influx of wealth in the area, and she sees it pass by so many people.

"I've seen a progression of people getting poorer," she said.

Rent and gas and food prices just keep rising. Wages lag.

So she helps. When a single mother calls on a Sunday morning and has no food or diapers and payday is a week away, Kimbler provides a gift card for a supermarket. When a woman risks losing her job at a fast-food restaurant because she can't afford gas, Kimbler gives her a gas card. When a young father has stomach cancer and can work only part time, she arranges for food and diapers. When a diabetic man must choose between rent and the special shoes he needs, she helps with the rent.

"I do a lot of networking with the other nonprofits in town, because none of us has enough money," she said.

There's a soup kitchen here, a food bank, a mental health clinic. All of them are strapped. None of them can do it all. So they pitch in.

Kimbler doesn't get much help from the new money that's arrived here. If anything, she said, it makes things worse by driving up housing prices.

"Ostentatious wealth offends me on behalf of the people I serve, who can't even afford diapers," she said.

One local foundation helps, other charitable donors turn her away. They want to see a business plan, an organization chart. The nonprofit world has a certain sophistication and Kimbler keeps things simple. She doesn't give away money, but she buys things that people need. When the cupboard is bare and she can give nothing else, she gives advice.

"We are our brother's keeper," she said. "It doesn't seem that complicated to me."

Her funding arrives mostly in dribbles and drabs.

"I have one lady who gives me $100 a month," she said. "I have another one who gives me $10 a month. Finding the people who care and are willing to donate is very, very rare."

She doesn't have illusions about fixing the world.

"I'm a finger in the dike," she said. "I don't make a lasting difference in these people's lives, but I can help them over a hump."

A few quarts of oil can keep an old car running and take a young mother to work for another week or two. A tank of gas can take an abused woman get back to her family, where more substantial help exists.

The problems are out there. They're not highly visible, but they're very real.

"There's a false sense that everybody's fine here, when they're not," she said.

Scott McMillion can be reached at scottm@dailychronicle.com.

© 2012 The Bozeman Daily Chronicle. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.