Tag: federal grants

You've been funding 'healthy marriage' grants to non-profit resettlement contractors

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Your tax dollars:
I’ve been meaning for awhile to give our new readers some information that we have written about over the years, and, for longtime readers, this is an update.

Lutheran Social Services of South Dakota, the primary refugee contractor in the state, received $1.2 million of your tax dollars to promote Healthy Fatherhood.

We talk all the time about how non-profit refugee resettlement agencies are paid by the head, by the US State Department, to resettle refugees to your towns and cities.
However, that is only a drop in the bucket when it comes to the millions they get from you for every sort of grant under the sun!
One such program you have funded over the years is the Refugee Healthy Marriage Program.
We told you here in 2013 what we found in the 2009 Office of Refugee Resettlement Annual report to Congress.
I see there are still grants listed on page A-24 of the 2010 Annual Report and a description of how millions of your dollars are educating refugees on how to have healthy marriages beginning on page 21 of the report.
Incidentally, these annual reports are a treasure trove of information for those of you who are digging deeper around the country.
However…..

A huge expansion of the Healthy Marriage program occurred in 2010!

The new program is now called ‘Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood!’  You pay for it!

What is IRCO doing with your money? Wouldn’t you like to know! http://www.irco.org/who-we-are/mission-vision-and-values/

 
This is how the Dept. of Health and Human Services describes the program:

The Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood initiative is part of ACF’s strategy to improve the lives of children. ACF funded a local network of 121 organizations in 47 states to provide comprehensive healthy relationship and marriage education services, responsible parenting, and job and career advancement activities to advance economic stability and improve the overall well-being of children and their parents.

The Claims Resolution Act of 2010 (CRA) provided $75 million for Healthy Marriage grants and $75 million for Responsible Fatherhood grants. The grantees are conducting a range of activities including marriage education and enrichment programs specifically designed for existing couples, including married couples, engaged couples, and individuals interested in marriage. Responsible Fatherhood programs target all fathers, including non-custodial parents and fathers who have or will soon reenter their communities from incarceration.

What are we paying Catholic Charities of Wichita, KS to do with almost $1.5 million of your tax dollars?

The Healthy Marriage Program serves 60 grantees and 73,346 participants; the Responsible Fatherhood program serves 55 grantees and 14,894 participants; and the Fatherhood Ex-Prisoner Reentry Pilot Project serves 4 grantees and 945 participants.

Grants totaled nearly $60 million in one year alone!

I did find a list of grant recipients which includes some of our usual resettlement contractors here for 2011, but haven’t the time or patience to search for newer lists of who is receiving millions of tax dollars—just short of $60 million in this one year!  Be sure to look down the whole list.
I wonder if these mostly non-profits are ever audited???  I doubt it.
Readers are always asking what can we do?
Well, here is one thing,  find one of these grant recipients located near you and find out exactly what they are doing with hundreds of thousands of dollars per agency to ‘help the children.’
Become like the investigative journalists of old!
More tomorrow or later this week on other outrageous grants (culturally appropriate daycare, refugee matched savings accounts, refugee gardening projects, etc.).

Tampa: Could you make 6 acres productive if you had an $85,000 gift?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment
Diversity wheelbarrows! Do you think the Tampa refugees will get these through their federal grant?

Maybe, maybe not!  I know a little about farming and I’m not sure even with an $85,000 grant from the US government, refugees in Tampa will be able to support and maintain much food production on 6 acres of land.

This is yet another feel-good story about refugees with no work “finding” satisfaction and “community” by growing foods they are familiar with back home inspired by none other than Michelle Obama’s pronouncement on refugee gardens—“It’s a model for the nation, for the world.” 

Go here for the Refugee Agricultural Partnership Program and see if your city is getting gardening grants. The Tampa project is first on the list.

From the Tampa Bay Times:

Pastors Joseph Germain and Berhanu Bekele started the garden 3 1/2 years ago. Germain led a congregation filled with refugees and noticed that many were leaving the state because they couldn’t find a livelihood.

He wanted to find a way to help them settle and find community, something often missing in resettled immigrant populations.

A little helpful background for new readers on what refugees in Tampa receive from the feds:

About 9,000 refugees live in Tampa, said Janet Blair, Community Liaison for the SunCoast Region Refugee Services Program offered through the Department of Children and Families. They come from countries including Burma, Iraq, Somalia and Sudan.

Refugees must prove to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that they are unable or unwilling to return to their home country because of fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in social groups. They come to Tampa with legal status and a small set of benefits — cash assistance, Medicaid and food assistance for eight months — provided by DCF.

The goal is to enable refugees to find employment within the first eight months, Blair said. After a year, they become eligible to apply for citizenship.

At first there was admirable private Christian charity!

Nearly four years ago, Pastor Germain attended a meeting of people who work with refugees. He mentioned what he had seen in his congregation. Bekele, pastor of St. Mary’s Ethiopian Orthodox Church in Tampa, said he had 6 acres of land.

Most of the people from his congregation came from agricultural backgrounds, Germain said. It was a perfect marriage of resources. The refugees could tend a garden and plant any crops they chose, including plants from their native lands if the soil was right for it. Refugees could do what they wished with the crops, even selling them on the side if they had extra.

Bekele and Germain received $10,000 from the Allegany Franciscan Ministries, enough to buy plants, tools, chickens, sheep and goats. But foxes got to the chickens, and the grant ran out. The pastors had been essentially sustaining the garden on their own.

Who needs private charity when here come the feds!

Now the group has received almost $85,000 from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services, which has stepped up funding of community gardens across the country.

If any of you live in the Tampa area, or any other community garden getting federal grants (here), keep an eye on this project and let us know how it’s going.  BTW, I wonder if this counts when immigrant advocates claim refugees are more entrepreneurial than Americans? (The latest hot open-borders talking point!)

The photo is from a post back in May where we learned that similar refugee gardens had gone bust in Ft. Wayne, Indiana.  No one wanted to work!

More from the Office or Refugee Resettlement’s year in review

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Did you know that we pay for day care centers offering “appropriate cultural competency!”  What happened to the idea that refugee kids should assimilate into our culture?

A week ago I reported that the Director (Eskinder Negash) of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) within the Department of Health and Human Services had sent out a 5-page e-mail report on how the ORR fared in 2012.  Here is more from that letter.

Do you have day care centers in your town?  You know! the small entrepreneurial ones run by a stay-at-home mom or maybe an older woman whose kids are grown.  Wouldn’t putting immigrant kids in those day care programs help integrate the kids into American culture?

And, do you think those small American home-based day care centers get FEDERAL GRANTS AND MICRO-LOANS to get started?  I doubt it!

According to Director Negash, refugee women do get federal (your!) money and support to set up their businesses.  This is from his year-in-review e-mail:

At the inception of the Microenterprise Development – Home-Based Child Care program in FY 2011, ORR awarded 13 grantees in 13 states grants totaling $2.225 million per year for two years. The primary goal of the program was to assist women refugees to become economically self-sufficient and integrated into the mainstream. A secondary goal was to expand home-based child care business options for other refugees, to enable them enter the workforce with confidence that their children are being cared for by individuals possessing appropriate cultural competency. ORR is pleased to see the overwhelming successes achieved by this new program thus far, encouraging continued support and expansion of the grant: in FY2012, ORR increased funding to the program, raising it from $2.225 million to $5,752 million, and offering grants to a total of 34 agencies.
During the first year of the project, the original 13 grantees have collectively:

* Enrolled 879 refugee women in the program;

* Trained 745 refugees;

* Helped 172 refugees obtain business licenses;

* Assisted 160 refugees to start home-based child care programs

* Created 1,061 childcare slots for children;

* Paid $249,000 in grants to partially cover business startup costs, and assisted the home-based child care owners to obtain an additional $208,000 in subsidies;

* Helped 207 refugees find and secure jobs, and

* Taken 79 refugees off public assistance.

Wow!  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.