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Letter from the Director
As need for services has grown, so has SCCAP
The hardships and pain of this economic depression grab your attention every day at the South Central Community Action Program in Bloomington.
So do the efforts of people striving to create a stable, comfortable future for themselves and their families.
Over the past couple of years, we've seen many new faces of people who never thought they'd be forced to seek public assistance. These include, among others, people who’ve lost their jobs or had their hours cut, or who got sick and weren’t adequately covered by insurance.
SCCAP has also seen many of the chronically poor who are finding it harder than ever to get jobs and to pay their bills. We’ve seen elderly people who are forced to choose between paying their heating bill or buying medicine they need because they don’t have money for both.
During the past year, the South Central Community Action Program has served more people than it did in any previous year in its 45-year history, more than 13,000 individuals.
Fortunately, in the past five years that I’ve been at SCCAP, we have been able to increase our funding and staffing to help low-income people to escape poverty and reach their potential.
And in the past year, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has aided this effort. SCCAP has been awarded $3.3 million in Recovery Act funds. This money has allowed us to expand our Head Start program for 3 to 5 year-olds, create an Early Head Start program for infants and toddlers under 3, expand our Weatherization Program to provide energy efficiency improvements to more homes and launch several initiatives to help children from low-income families succeed in school.
These are investments that will change lives and reduce the need for future public expenditures.
Besides helping hundreds of local families with low incomes, these stimulus funds have allowed SCCAP to provide jobs for 35 local residents and to boost the sales of numerous local businesses.
Another relatively new program expansion at SCCAP is the Circles® Initiative, which started in 2008. The Circles Initiative is part of a national campaign to eliminate poverty. It aims to increase the emotional and financial stability of participating families and reduce their use of welfare benefits.
This initiative puts renewed emphasis on SCCAP truly living its mission to help low-income people become self-sufficient. This will be our focus in the years ahead. Currently, our board of directors and staff are exploring additional program expansions in areas such as Circles, housing, job training, transportation and weatherization. These expansions will fill gaps in local resources and allow more low-income people to bring stability to their lives and ultimately to escape poverty.
In doing so, we are committed to doing everything we can to reverse the growth in the numbers of local people who are struggling to provide for the basic needs of themselves and their families.
