An Interview With Alan Jennings

Alan Jennings is the Executive Director of Community Action Coalition of the Lehigh Valley (CACLV). Earlier this week, columnist and blogger Jon Geeting talked with him about how the federal budget affects what he does here in the Valley.

Jon Geeting: House Republicans just passed a budget that made deep cuts to Community Services Block Grants. Can you give me a brief overview of what the Community Services Block Grant is?

Alan Jennings: The SCBG is a little tiny piece of the overall federal budget pie, representing something like $700 million nationwide. The funds are allocated to the states for distribution to community action agencies on a formula basis. Here in the Lehigh Valley we receive about $850,000 a year, which we're able to leverage up to a more than $20 million anti-poverty effort. 

What does CACLV use that money for?
We run a vast array of anti-poverty efforts. We direct emergency assistance like the Second Harvest Food Bank, which distributes 5 million pounds of food to agencies that feed people; homeless shelters, the 6th Street Shelter and Safe Harbor Easton; two long term traditional housing programs for families to become self-sufficient. 

We have neighborhood development efforts in Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton that do everything from replacing sidewalks to creating neighborhood parks; a small business program; microlending with an outstanding lending portfolio.

We weatherize a few thousand homes a year; we do welfare to work; a technology center for kids. It's a pretty wide-ranging organization. We also do a lot of community problem-solving, and capacity-building, everything from working with banks to improve access to credit, to organizing the Green Futures Fund that generated almost $70 million for open space preservation in the 2 counties. 

So this is not just charity - there is some real private sector activity that depends on this.

Almost half of our budget comes from private sources, most notably utility companies and banks, and a lot of individual donors giving anything from $5 up to $50-60K a year. 

Our strategy is heavily oriented toward market-based solutions to neighborhood issues, and creating functional marketplaces that will build healthy, viable urban neighborhoods. Thats why we do programs to help people buy homes, save money so they can start businesses, microlending and other kinds of things that build assets in urban neighborhoods. 

What can Congressman Charlie Dent do to help you?

What Charlie could do is stand up to his leadership, which is radical in its disdain for government. That leadership's view of the world is something that is puzzling. I don't quite understand what their vision is for their society if they don't support investing in child nutrition programs and affordable housing, health care and education, community services and entrepreneurship and all those things that are critical to the common good. 

If you're going to erase those things, what exactly is your vision of society? 
Do you want a handful of lucky people and large numbers of people struggling to scratch out an existence, or a vibrant community in which everyone has access to opportunity? That's the fundamental question that I think needs to be asked of the leadership in the United States Congress right now. 

The best thing Charlie could do is stand up and say "I believe in a civil society, I believe in economic opportunity, I believe in fairness and justice, and the words we use in the Pledge of Allegiance, 'with liberty and justice for all.'"

Besides saving Community Service Block Grants, what would you like to see the congress accomplish this session?

The key issue is the waste of human resources, and the marginalized labor that is being devalued every day. The wage rates and purchasing power of working class Americans is declining. And the segregation of low income people into urban communities that are at risk of becoming permanent ghettos if we don't use the power of government to intervene in the marketplace to level the playing field.

Is there anything else you'd like to add?
I think it's important for people to understand that our administrative costs are about 7.6% of our total budget. That's an unprecedentedly low overhead for a non-profit organization.

We are very serious about squeezing every nickel we can and making it an well-spent nickel. You can't get any more efficient than we are, and we appear to be prepared to throw all that away, and that is just a damn shame.