Tag: grants to non-profits

Trump Administration Cuts $500 Million from Central American NGO’s Budgets

~ Ann Corcoran ~ 3 Comments

Holy cow!  Who knew! Not only do millions of your tax dollars go to the nine federal refugee contractors*** in the US, but we send apparently billions to supposedly Christian social justice groups in places like Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.

Let the wailing begin as the groups claim that they use our millions to keep citizens of those countries from fleeing toward our southern border, so cutting them off is wrong they say.

It is pretty clear for all to see that even with billions of dollars over the years they have failed spectacularly in stopping the invasion and I assume the State Department has pretty much figured that out.

 

Honduran migrants on the way to the US in 2018

 

I wish I had time today to take a deep dive into past funding for the groups that include, Proyecto Aldea Global, Association for a More Just Society, International Justice Mission and World Vision, but I don’t.

Here is the story at Christianity Today:

Christian Nonprofits Reeling from Trump Cuts to Foreign Aid

Christian ministries in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador know they are in for a tough year. The US government has drastically cut aid to the three Central American countries in response to the large number of refugees who have fled north to seek asylum in America. Some of the more than $500 million of US taxpayer money was going to Christian nonprofits working on economic development, anti-corruption efforts, and helping children in poverty in the three countries. Those ministries will have to lay people off, reduce services, and scramble to find other funds.  [Just call George Soros and ask him to supply the funds—ed]

“The Trump administration shot itself in the foot with these cuts,” said Chet Thomas, director of Proyecto Aldea Global in Honduras, which has been forced to stop a job training program that gave teenagers alternatives to working for criminal gangs. “These projects are designed to … reduce the number of people migrating to the US.”

US foreign aid flows through various channels. In many cases, it ends up funding nongovernmental organizations, including Christian relief organizations in the area of Central American known as the Northern Triangle. Many of these address the conditions that cause people to flee their homes and seek asylum, leading to a crisis at the US border. Some ministries work directly with host governments to train national staff and increase the effectiveness of state institutions. Others focus more on community development, often building connections with local churches that don’t trust their government and don’t have many of their own resources.

Governments must do their jobs!

Justifying the cuts, the State Department appeared to downplay the role of nonprofit groups in addressing migration. “We expect the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to keep their commitments to stem illegal immigration to the United States,” it said in a statement.

More here.

Sure looks to me that the State Department calculated that based on the hordes flooding to the US border, we weren’t getting our money’s worth from these ‘Christian non-profits’.

However, some US ‘religious charities’ are not seeing huge funding cuts!

*** Here (below) are the nine federal refugee resettlement contractors.

I’m not posting my usual spiel, but only want to say that in my analysis of funds received by three contractors (so far) since Trump took office, only the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has taken a large cut in its federal funding.

Church World Service and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service are still about on par with federal funding as they were under Obama.

I’ll have more to say when I’ve been through all nine.

 

Come and get it! Free government money for “culturally appropriate” child care

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

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

(Lewiston, ME) Candidates for micro-enterprise loans from the federal government—“culturally appropriate” home-based daycare for special groups of people. Photo: AP

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!).