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CAAP Update provides regular information on items of interest to Community Action agencies in Pennsylvania. |
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| | What Will the Numbers Be? |
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The 2015 federal budget allocations battle is on. The National Community Action Foundation (NCAF) has reported on Labor-HHS allocations.
- The House Labor-HHS FY 2015 allocation is $1.1 billion below the FY 2014
 allocation
- The Senate Labor-HHS FY 2015 allocation (the 302b allocation) is $700 million above the FY 2014 allocation, but there are other "savings" that might generate another $2 billion
- We still expect the Senate Labor-HHS Appropriations mark-up to occur before the 4th of July
The big winners in the House Appropriations fight were the Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations Bill as well as the Energy and Water Appropriations Bill. |
| | DCED To Issue Consolidated Plan |  | | The PA Department of Community & Economic Development, Center for Community Financing will be issuing its draft 2014-2018 Consolidated Plan and 2014 Action Plan for review and comments on May 31, 2014. When posted, the draft document will be located on the DCED's Consolidated Plan webpage. There is a 30 day citizen comment period that will expire on June 30, 2014.
Allocations for the state in 2014 are:
CDBG - $38,158,835
HOME - $15,212,519
ESG - $ 5,049,113
HOPWA- $ 1,294,519 + PA portion of Allentown - $288,381 and Harrisburg - $291,022
A public hearing to take comments on the plan and the expenditure of funding will be held electronically on June 17th from 1-2 PM, please contact Jon Cherry if you would like to register for the hearing.
Comments or questions can be sent to RA-DCEDcdbg&homequestions@pa.gov.
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| | Beyond Poverty Report Released | | |
Representative David Reed (R-Indiana), who chairs the House Majority Policy Committee, recently held a press conference to officially unveil Beyond Poverty.
The report, which Reed first introduced during the CAAP annual conference, is the compilation of several months of work in the Empowering Opportunities: Gateways Out of Poverty initiative. CAAP has been a central organization working with Reed and his staff to organize community hearings and to supply data for the report.
The next step has been to organize the findings in the report around five legislative work groups:
- Outcomes That Matter - The committee discovered that government too often gauges the success of a program by the number of people participating, without an eye to whether the program is helping lift people out of poverty. A long-term vision is needed to evaluate anti-poverty programs, moving toward those which create the opportunity of self-sustainability.
- Life Skills 101 - A large portion of our society across all income brackets struggle with life skills, among them financial literacy and budgeting. Along with an approach that includes career readiness and education, anti-poverty programs must reinforce these skills in order to help people succeed.
- Benefits That Work - Anti-poverty programs must help lift people out of poverty, not create the situation of dependence on the government. The "benefits cliff" is the prime example of a structure which fails the neediest among us and our taxpayers. This is a situation where moving beyond the assistance of a government program, through success, actually results in a much tougher time making ends meet. Public assistance programs should reward success, not punish it.
- The Essentials - Successful programs and organizations focus first on providing essential needs such as food, water, shelter and clothing. Access to all four does not guarantee success but the absence of even one of them can mean certain failure.
- Educating Through Opportunity - Education is one of the keys to helping those in poverty move toward self-sufficiency. All aspects of education must be examined, from early childhood programs, to higher education and beyond, to make sure it is leaving the students of this Commonwealth with the skills needed to succeed.
CAAP has been asked to sit on each of these work groups and continue to provide support and expertise.
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| | Free CAPLAW Trainings | | |
CAPLAW has the following webinars in their series Strategic Issues Facing CAAs. The webinars are free, registration required.
- June 11th: Significant CSBG Issues to Examine when Planning for the Future
- July 16th: Head Start Risk Management
Member agencies of CAAP receive complimentary membership in CAPLAW and are eligible for all their benefits.
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| | Delivering the Cuts | | |
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee approved on partisan lines this week a measure that would effectively end door-to-door mail delivery by the USPS for millions. The hopes of the legislation would be to save the downward spiraling  organization close to $2 billion annually, according to committee chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA).
The measure calls for communal/curbside delivery, and has been opposed by Democrats for years who state how difficult it would be for disabled Americans to access the "cluster boxes", among other grievances.
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| | Community Needs Assessment Resources | |
Information on the Community Needs Assessment, a comprehensive tool that provides Pennsylvania's Community Action Agencies with the means to capture information about their community, analyze the data and identify the needs to be met within the community.
CAAP has also developed a toolkit to assist with navigating the CNA website and application. The toolkit, access to the CNA website and other pertinent information can be found on the CAAP website, CNA page.
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| | Switching Teams for Fall | | State Representative Mike Fleck (R-Huntington) was defeated in the Republican primary  by a write-in challenger according to official results. However, Fleck, Pennsylvania's first openly gay State Representative, won the write-in on the Democratic side of the ticket and will have a chance to retain the seat he has held since his first election in 2006. Fleck has been critical of the outside interest groups who have spent money to defeat him based upon his sexual orientation.
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| | PHFA Housing Service Conference | | The Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency (PHFA) will hold their annual Housing Services Conference from June 18 to 20 in Scranton.
Visit the conference website for more information.
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| | About Us | | |
Community Action Association of Pennsylvania
222 Pine Street
Harrisburg, PA 17101
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This newsletter is financed, in part, by a CSBG grant from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Department of Community and Economic Development. |
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