In Vittorio De Sica’s bleak, postwar Italian movie “The Bicycle Thief,” a man is humbled by a personal catastrophe involving a tiny amount of money: unemployed, he is given a chance at a job, but he is required to have a bike to travel to work sites. Antonio Ricci does have a battered old bike, but he is in the process of pawning it for food. Undaunted, his wife pawns the family linens instead. All is good until the bike is stolen, leaving Ricci to haunt the markets of Rome while trying to find it. The bicycle is worth about seven thousand lira—just a few dollars—but the loss is devastating; finally, out of options, Ricci makes an ill-fated decision to steal another man’s bike in recompense for his own loss. The resulting public humiliation is one of cinema’s most awesome, and moving, moments.

But what if the bicycle thief had had other options—like posting his tale on a Web site and soliciting donations for a new bike from strangers?

For almost two years, a Chicago not-for-profit corporation called Benevolent has highlighted the financial challenges of people referred to the site by community groups and nonprofits across the country. Users post a short description of their needs, as well as a Kickstarter-style video appeal to potential donors. Next to each posting is a dollar amount, usually in the several-hundred-dollar range. Donors can give all of the requested amount or a portion of it. Benevolent then sends the money, in the form of a grant, to the referring community group, which funds the client’s needs.

Shavon Dossett, for instance, required a hundred and one dollars to take a North Carolina licensing exam after her nursing assistant’s license expired. Without it, she couldn’t work in the jobs for which she was trained and couldn’t properly take care of her three children. “I did a short interview on an iPad,” Dossett told me. “They interviewed me about who I am and what goals I was trying to accomplish. We put together the video and they posted it online. Within two weeks my needs were met.” Once donors had sent in enough money, Benevolent gave a grant for that amount to Grace-Mar Services Inc., the nonprofit that had been working with Dossett. Grace-Mar then gave her the money. “I was able to take the state exam; I passed it,” she said. “I’m working two jobs, I’ve got an interview with a local hospital—so everything is coming together.”

Benevolent’s rules are simple. It posts only the stories of clients referred to Benevolent by trusted community groups. The people who post online requests have to be at least eighteen years old and low-income, and they can’t seek money to pay off debts. Instead, they have to request one item that will allow them to pursue an opportunity: for instance, a security deposit for an apartment so that a family can get out of homelessness, or money to buy tools for a job, or cash for a laptop computer.

The model has its roots in recent academic research, collectively highlighted at the Experimental Approaches to the Study of Charitable Giving conference held in July of 2007, at Princeton University. The research shows that when people can personally identify with others in need, they respond far more generously than when they’re presented with large-scale problems or abstract situations. Our brains like to be told a story—and it turns out that’s as true for our interactions with charities as it is for our engagement with great novels.

Cash assistance for the poor has been controversial, with some critics arguing that it doesn’t give people the tools they need to improve their situations in sustainable ways. But a set of recent studies of cash assistance for poor communities has found that it can be highly effective: research in Uganda indicated that small infusions of cash, donated as part of a World Bank-funded program, boosted recipients’ earnings by forty per cent, and increased the value of their business assets by more than fifty per cent, on average; it also dramatically increased their consumption of staples such as food. Other research, looking at similar cash-infusion programs in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, suggests that small cash donations can change a person’s economic prospects more than any other single act, with the exception of specific health interventions.

Such findings probably would not have come as a surprise to the economist Milton Friedman. In the nineteen-sixties, Friedman advocated for a “basic income guarantee.” Instead of giving poor people funds for specific purposes, he argued, the government should simply guarantee a baseline income level to all Americans, and watch as consumption and wealth expand. No less a conservative than Richard Nixon voiced his support for the plan. Ultimately, however, the plan fizzled: providing subsistence levels of welfare, with all sorts of strings attached, was one thing, but giving the poor unconditional grants to elevate them above the poverty line was seen as going too far.

Benevolent isn’t the only site trying to use direct cash grants to help the poor. In 2008, GiveDirectly began allowing people to give cash grants to poor people in Kenya through cell phones. Kiva lets people lend small sums to people in need around the world, with donors choosing whom they will fund. Megan Kashner, Benevolent’s founder and a longtime social worker, had been working with nonprofits in Chicago since the early nineteen-nineties, and kept hearing about clients’ very specific needs that could not be met financially by those organizations. But what if clients could appeal directly to large numbers of potential donors? “I thought, ‘We have the technology now,’” Kashner recalled. She had the idea to encourage people who were already looking to buy feel-good moments by matching them with clients in need. She believed that some clients’ stories could even go viral on social-media sites. “People give higher amounts if they know who they’re giving to and what it is they are giving for,” she said. “People want to meet someone, know why the person needs help and why the help will make a difference.”

And so, in 2011, Kashner and a team of volunteers set up Benevolent as a not-for-profit corporation and began developing the Web site. They concentrated on four communities: Chicago; Charlotte, North Carolina; Detroit; and Silicon Valley. Over time, community groups in other states began to send clients Benevolent’s way. The site remains small: by late 2013, about a hundred and fifty clients had raised funds.

Last Christmas, Ronni Luther, a retired hairdresser from Royal Oak, Michigan, learned about Benevolent while watching television and decided to check out the site. She signed up for its e-mail blasts and started giving money. Sometimes her giving decisions are entirely random: “I just go ‘eeny, meeny, miney, mo,’ and that’s the one I choose,” she told me. Other times, she looks for elements of people’s stories that remind her of her own life. “I was a single mother for years, so that goes to my heart,” she said. “If I see a single mother in a homeless shelter, those are things I can relate to.” In the past year, Luther estimated, she has given small donations—usually around twenty-five dollars—more than thirty times.