Day: September 20, 2011

Job training by Catholic Charities in Ft. Worth, living wage for refugees?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Or, part of a growing fiefdom where the job training is window dressing?

Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Ft. Worth is touting their new jobs training for refugees as the economy and the labor market is sliding in the here-to-fore booming Texas.  We’ve written previously about how Texas has been hauling in refugees by the thousands* in recent years (to do jobs Americans won’t do?) and not everything has gone so smoothly.  See one particularly egregious article from Houston in 2009 (Refugee Horrors in Houston).

Now here is a seemingly innocuous little puff-piece story that sent me looking for more information.  The article in KERA begins:

FORT WORTH, TX (KERA) – As unemployment rises in Texas, Catholic Charities of Fort Worth is creating living-wage jobs. KERA’s Bill Zeeble reports that’s one reason the national charity group held its first-ever Poverty Summit in downtown Fort Worth.

This job-killing economy has created all kinds of complications, from hunger to ruined relationships. So Catholic Charities of Fort Worth concluded one solution might be job training. But Heather Reynolds, Fort Worth Catholic Charities CEO, says not just any kind of training, because many of her clients already work. But the jobs pay little.

Reynolds: So our goal at Catholic Charities Fort Worth is to get them into jobs that pay them a living wage. How do we get them a job that pays a living wage? Get them skills they need to get a job, how do we develop a work force that is ready for what industries need and then match those two together.

Your tax dollars at work!

It makes Catholic Charities sound so nice, so benevolent, doesn’t it?  But, I did some checking.  You can’t find their government grant money in their 2010 annual report but you can in their 2009 report here.    Also, check out their 2009 Form 990 here.  Out of an income stream of just over $14 million half of that, $7 million plus, comes from you the TAXPAYER.  You are paying for the job training to train people to compete against you for jobs, while they get paid by the head by the US State Department to import more refugees to Texas!

But that isn’t all I found!  The Diocese of Ft. Worth, gets half of its funding from you and pays out more than $6 million in salaries.  Ms. Reynolds herself (the CEO) makes a nice “living wage” of $133,000 in salary and benefits.

There is more!  The Diocese paid out $9 million dollars that year to building contractor Steele-Freeman who built them a very nice edifice in Ft. Worth to house all their benevolent work!

Sure doesn’t leave much for the poor between $6 million in salaries and $9 million for a fancy building.  Imagine how far $9 million would go for actually helping the people!

Oh, and one more thing!  If you happen to be in Ft. Worth today—run right over to Billy Bob’s for Texas-sized fun at the POVERTY SUMMIT!   I kid you not, this is from their website today (sounds like a Saturday Night Live skit or a Jon Stewart spoof!):

Please Plan to join us at the Catholic Charities USA Annual Gathering & Poverty Summit September 18-21, and come out for a Texas-sized fun time at Billy Bob’s on Tuesday, September 20th.

* Texas now receives the third highest number of refugees in the nation behind California and Florida (see 2008 Annual Report to Congress Appendix).

Concord, NH: Malicious graffiti found on three refugees’ homes

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update September 21:  Reward offered to find the perpetrator of what is being called a “hate crime” here.

This is not the way to express one’s unhappiness with the arrival of more and more refugees to your towns and cities.  We live in America and we go through a political process (as frustrating as that can be!) to make ourselves heard—not through intimidation of those who are helpless.   Actions such as this deplorable one only play into the hard Left’s political agenda to create chaos and unrest.

From the Concord Monitor today:

Manessee Ngendahayo proudly held the small vase of mismatched wild flowers and pointed at the note attached.
“I wanted you to know I am glad to have you in my community,” the note from “Cheryl” read.

Ngendahayo doesn’t know who Cheryl is, but her words and gift are a comfort to him, he said: “This, this is what we have found here in Concord. Not that.”

“That” is the paragraph of racist, xenophobic graffiti Ngendahayo’s family found on the front of their Perley Street house Sunday morning.

Two other families in the neighborhood, all refugees from Africa, found similar graffiti on their homes.
Written in a small scrawl of black marker across the white clapboards of all three houses, the graffiti declares with slurs that the city was better before refugees resettled here.

“Your subhuman culture has already brought many crimes linked to your mud people,” one of the messages reads.

Another says “the church is destroying our towns just to save a few doomed Africans. This is a bad joke on us.”

The third, at Ngendahayo’s house, begins with, “You are not welcome here. You lower the value and safety of our good town. . . You bring death wherever your cursed people go.”

The Concord police are treating the incident as a hate crime, according to a news release from Concord Regional Crimeline.

Read the whole article.   African refugees were the targets of the graffiti.

For new readers, Concord, New Hampshire (not the deep south!) is having lots of refugee/immigrant related problems.  You can learn more about recent history on that issue in our Concord archive here.