Category: Community Activism

The first night of inter­views for Round VII of the Neigh­bor­hood Con­nec­tions grant pro­gram was last night. I did­n’t have to haul ass out to Mt. Pleas­ant this time, since my group was meet­ing at St. Ignatius. We were sup­plied with cof­fee and tea which was great since I was fight­ing some sinus stuff. We had six inter­views to cov­er in three hours, from stray ani­mal care to beau­ti­fi­ca­tion to school read­ing pro­grams. One fledg­ling block club had a grant writ­ten for beau­ti­fi­ca­tion, but the per­son who wrote the grant from Clark Metro Devel­op­ment, did­n’t show up to the inter­view, and the woman who came in his place had nev­er seen the grant and had no idea what it was about.

I felt sor­ry for her because it was obvi­ous that her block club had start­ed some­thing good that was­n’t being served by the CDC. One of the oth­er mem­bers of my com­mit­tee want­ed to call the per­son who wrote the grant and give him the what for. The grant was hand-writ­ten and dashed off in about ten min­utes. Typ­i­cal­ly we choose to inter­view this kind of grant because it indi­cates that the peo­ple apply­ing for it are first-time grant-seek­ers and tru­ly grass­roots. That explains our sur­prise and indig­na­tion when we real­ized that an employ­ee of a com­mu­ni­ty devel­op­ment cor­po­ra­tion had writ­ten it. The rea­sons Clark Metro has lost its fund­ing are becom­ing self-evi­dent.

Anoth­er grant was for a good project but the funds being request­ed, all $5000 are essen­tial­ly going to a mid­dle-man non-prof­it that has been back­ing the same pro­gram city-wide and apply­ing to NC under the guise of PTAs from dif­fer­ent schools. They’ve received fund­ing from NC at least 4 times, which could be up to $20k in fund­ing that they’ve gar­nered from us using engaged par­ents and teach­ers as a proxy. This non-prof­it gets all the mon­ey and the par­ents and teach­ers do all the work as vol­un­teers. The tough part is that if we don’t fund it, the pro­gram dies at those schools. So who gets hurt? The chil­dren of course. At the next meet­ing of the full com­mit­tee we’re def­i­nite­ly going to be dis­cussing this type of disin­gen­u­ous­ness.

I tried to stop at Dav­e’s because we got out at a 8:45, but they were locked up tight, despite their store hours until 9. So instead of get­ting bananas and some oranges, I stopped at Tremont Con­ve­nience and got pota­to chips and ore­os. I got home, popped a Sudafed, and my nose slow­ly stopped run­ning. This is com­mu­ni­ty meet­ing week for me. Tues­day was a Tremont Strate­gic Invest­ment meet­ing [anoth­er 3 hour tour], yes­ter­day was grant inter­views and tonight is the Auburn Block Club meet­ing and ice cream social.