Whether you're a non-profit targeting faith-based federal funds or are merely curious about what became of the initiative launched by President Bush and "revamped" by
the new administration, Rick Cohen of Nonprofit Quarterly has the skinny and shares it via Blue
Avocado. I'm taking the liberty of reproducing it here for for the inquiring minds that want to know:
In a nutshell, like Bush's
program, Obama's faith-based program welcomes congregations and religious
organizations in discussions and promotion of the social policies of his
administration.
But unlike the Bush
program, Obama's initiative does not direct money to faith-based groups. Rather
than a grantmaking program for faith-based organizations, federal moneys with a
faith-based "flavor" are hidden in pockets throughout the Obama
budget -- but you have to know where to look for them.
Bush's faith-based money
At face value, President Bush
believed that faith-based
groups -- particularly small, church-based ones -- had been
largely excluded from access to federal program dollars. His solution? The
creation of the Compassion
Capital Fund (CCF) to pump money into the faith-based sector
to promote local, grassroots efforts in human services.
The Bush program was mired in
controversy for its entire existence: critics charged that it was a pretext for
funding conservative religious bodies. High-level Bush appointees resigned
while publishing scathing critiques of the program. But the CCF did put money
into capacity-building intermediaries and into a variety of local
faith-oriented and community-based nonprofits.
And the money did seem to make a
difference. Evaluations conducted by the consulting firm Abt Associates and others attested that many organizations
benefitted from the capacity-building work, but perhaps even more so from
subgrants.
So despite the confusing
semantics and controversial politics of the Bush program, and despite the usual
criticisms about relying on intermediaries to funnel federal grants and assistance,
the Bush program did put money into the budgets of FBOs-and some of them took
advantage of it to build capacity, professionalize, and do good work. Real
money counts.
Where is the money under Obama?
In sharp contrast, there will be
no special program of faith-based grantmaking coming from the Obama
Administration's Faith-Based Office, which intends to measure success by
building "partnerships" rather than counting grant dollars.
As the new director of the
Office, Pentecostal minister Joshua DuBois told
National Public Radio, "The Faith-Based Office actually
does not do grant funding . . . Instead, we tell organizations where the grants
are and let them know what they need to do to apply for them." For
"both secular and religious organizations that are experiencing tough
financial times," he said, "we're just sort of pointing them in the
right direction."
In other words, there is money
in the federal budget for faith-based applicants, but they'll need a treasure
map to find it:
First, there's the leftover
Compassion Capital Fund dollars. The Fiscal Year 2009 budget allocated $53
million for the CCF. The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) in
Health and Human Services will announce an anticipated 35 grant awards for a
total of $17 million in CCF funding in October -- it's not clear yet what
happened to the other $36 million in the CCF budget.
[An intriguing political nugget:
tucked away in the new CCF RFP is
the note that CCF grantees from the Bush era -- even if hardly Bushies -- will
not be in the running. Because "CCF aims to fund a broad range of organizations
and program models . . . Fiscal Year (FY) 2007 CCF Demonstration program
grantees and FY 2007 Communities Empowering Youth (CEY) grantees . . . are not
eligible to apply for a 2009 CCF Demonstration program award." ]
Compassionate Capital replaced
by Strengthening Communities Fund
Earlier this year, the House of
Representatives tried to refill the CCF coffers with $100 million, but
the Senate balked. Instead, with the approval of the Obama White House, Congress replaced CCF with a new program, the Strengthening Communities
Fund, and gave it $50 million. The two-part program is not targeted at FBOs by
any stretch of the imagination although they are not excluded either. The SCF
includes $34 million for "
SCF grants will be announced
shortly, as the due date for proposals was just last month (July 2009). Because
the money moves to and through intermediaries, like the Social Innovation Fund
we profiled
in August [10], nonprofits should be prepared to mine the list of
grantees on the HHS website to find subgrant and technical assistance
opportunities.
Faith-based funding through
issue areas
The President has established issue priorities for the faith-based office:
- Reducing "unintended" teenage pregnancies and the need for abortions
- Encouraging responsible fatherhood
- Addressing domestic poverty and contributing to the economic recovery
- Environment and climate change
- Global poverty and development
- Encouraging interfaith dialogue
Sharp-eyed budget readers will
find federal programs in the Obama budget based on or heavily involving
faith-based groups, including:
- The Homeless Veterans' Reintegration Program (Department of Labor) makes grants to nonprofits to operate employment programs for homeless veterans, and references the role of faith-based groups.
- Youth Mentoring funding (Department of Justice) is targeted at "faith- and community-based nonprofit and for-profit agencies." Other DOJ programs with similar language include Local Delinquency Prevention Incentive grants (for comprehensive juvenile justice programs) and Byrne Competitive Grants (to assist victims of crime) -- and in fact, lots of Office of Justice Programs initiatives in addressing gang activity, illegal drugs, prisoner reentry, and more.
- At HUD, the welcome mat is out for faith-based groups at the Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS (HOPWA) program for the 10% of the moneys awarded competitively for "projects of national significance." Aiming at a related population, HHS includes faith-based groups in the mix for its programs for infants and children abandoned due to substance abuse and HIV.
The bottom line for faith-based
nonprofits? In an interview with Blue Avocado, one member of the
faith-based advisory committee noted, "If their programs deal with one of those areas, they're going to have a chance of accessing
funding."
Faith-based and neighborhood
offices embedded in other federal agencies
Within 12 federal agencies --
HUD, HHS, Labor, Agriculture, Homeland Security, and Justice, for example --
there are designated faith-based and neighborhood partnership offices to help
faith-based (and secular) groups overcome barriers to obtaining federal moneys.
They may not have their own
dollars to disburse, but they know where faith-based groups ought to look.
Community nonprofits already working in these issue areas should seek out these
offices through the agency's regional networks or through their elected
congressional representatives.
In the end, the Bush
Administration's faith-based program was hampered by murky politics and by charges and countercharges that it was funneling grant moneys away from
various federal agencies to buy political support from the religious sector.
The Obama Administration pledges to use a different metric: counting not grant
dollars to the faith-based sector, but measuring the strength of partnerships
between government and faith-based and secular groups addressing high priority
concerns.
In our view, money talks and
partnerships . . . well, usually don't. The challenge for the Obama
Administration is to ensure that its commitment to partnerships is accompanied
by real dollars to build and sustain faith-based and secular organizations,
particularly the smaller, community-based groups, so that they too become
capable and credible players in those partnerships. And the challenge for
nonprofits and our national organizations is to make sure that those dollars
and those impacts really happen.
