Grants? Maybe it’s time to rethink CDBG

I doubt very seriously there isn’t a nonprofit on a local level that is not struggling financially to help people. As many nonprofit leaders will tell you, the need continues to grow.

But this column isn’t about their need or the services they offer but the status quo in which they get or do not get funding.

Sometimes, the way things are done has to be challenged with a different point of view and I believe the government should rethink its priorities when administering Community Development Block Grants.

It is impossible to disagree that organizations the agency funded for 2018 — such as W.H.E.A.T., which feeds the hungry, and Clifford Beers, which helps people with “behavioral, physical and social needs” — are not worthy of every dime they received.

But I disagree that grants should only fund programs of woe and not those nonprofits that are lifting people on to better things in life.

Carroll Brown, the president of the West Haven Black Coalition, which received zero-funding this year, filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, arguing the decision not to fund her organization was motivated by race. She did not win.

The head of HUD’s Hartford office and the manager of West Haven’s Community Development Administration, which administers the local grants, say the process was both fair and transparent.

I won’t argue the transparency. As I have pointed out, the agencies that did receive funding are definitely worthy. But I will strongly argue the fairness as it follows a disturbing pattern of nonprofits headed by blacks nationwide that are thrown loose change — or nothing at all — when it comes to funding their organizations, thereby making it impossible for them to succeed.

And, that too, is transparent — and black leaders of nonprofit agencies nationwide are beginning to fight back to get the funding they deserve.

The grants doled out by CDBG continues to fund the same programs of woe year after year and it can be strongly argued that many of the services the programs offer are available in plenitude from other nonprofits.

It has been pointed out to me that many of the programs funded this year provide services utilized and needed by minorities. But that isn’t the issue.

My issue lies with the fact that nonprofits headed by blacks to help blacks get scant funding — or none at all. That is puzzling because who knows better what it takes to lift blacks and other minorities out of poverty than the blacks and minorities who have lifted themselves out?

Nat Chioke Williams, the executive director of the Hill-Snowdon Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based funder that invests in community organizing, told the website insidephilanthropy.com, in part that “philanthropic investment in black-led organizations remains meager” and “what’s still missing is a major and sustained investment by funders in black-led organizations.”

There will always be people who are in crisis and it is certainly the duty of CDBG and other government funding sources to fund these critical agencies. But there also will always be people trying to come from under the help of nonprofit agencies and move forward in life.

And, they too, are deserving. Grants? Maybe it’s time to rethink CDBG.