Your tax dollars!
We have a sequester. The federal government is shortly going to lay off large swaths of its workforce, including the military, yet the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) is still sending out announcements for applications for micro-enterprise grants to non-profits so they can further distribute your tax dollars to refugee ‘entrepreneurs’ who truth-be-told want to get paid to care for their own kids and a few others (of their own kind) in their own homes. What! they can’t use existing American child care facilities?
Here is the announcement I received last week from ORR (applications are due in May):
Funding Opportunity
Title: Refugee Home-Based Childcare Microenterprise Development Project
Description
The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) within the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) is pleased to announce the availability of funds for Refugee Home-Based Child Care Microenterprise Development Projects. These projects are aimed at assisting primarily refugee women in becoming economically self sufficient by providing home-based child care services. Thus, recipients of grant awards through this announcement will teach refugee women about local, state, and federal child care laws, regulations and licensing requirements and about cultural norms [wouldn’t their kids learn cultural norms more quickly in American-run day care centers?—ed] concerning child care and child care development. Also, they will assist refugee women in English language acquisition, advance educational attainment (GED) and improve economic opportunities through application of acquired job skills in a market where there is a shortage of childcare providers. Through this grant, mentors [non-profit groups–ed] will help primarily refugee women establish agreements or contracts with State or county child care offices so they may qualify for State/county childcare reimbursement as childcare service providers.
Not to be exclusionary, men can get this money too!
Although the focus will be on refugee women, all services provided to refugee women under this project are available to refugee men who are able to benefit from these services.
I told you about this “culturally appropriate” daycare in January, here, when the Office of Refugee Resettlement reported on their ‘success’ with the program, and I said this:
We trained hundreds, paid out millions of dollars and got 79 refugees off public assistance all the while assuring the kids were cared for by appropriate culturally competent caregivers.
It’s not just day care centers we are encouraging. Micro-enterprise loans flow out of the US treasury and then through a bunch of non-profit groups and fund all sorts of businesses that then compete with existing businesses in an already stressed economy. Go to the Annual Report to Congress for 2009 (beginning on p. 43) to just get an idea of who is getting these grants from the Office of Refugee Resettlement. And, could someone direct me to a site where we can learn how many of these “loans” to start a businesses are repaid!
For new readers: See my previous posts on where we can save millions of dollars by cutting out grants to non-profits involved in setting up refugees as a special class of people, here (refugee unhealthy marriage grants), here (ethnic community based groups that create division), and here (federally funded savings accounts for special people—refugees—but not for you low-income Americans!).