Stories from Rhode Island's Floodwaters

By Brett Warnke

After the floodwaters drowned her home in Bradford, R.I. last March, Danielle King, 38, and her three girls lived in a temporary shelter for nine days. When she finally crossed the plastic yellow tape she wore garbage bags around her feet. Gazing at the debris, she knew her children’s beds were destroyed but she also knew she didn’t have enough money to afford new ones. Community action paid for a hotel for her family and—having nothing but the clothes they were wearing—offered clothing, shoes, and gift cards for household items.

The money that assisted Danielle came from the Community Services Block Grant (CSBG). The grant and community action programs themselves have been an enduring legacy of the Great Society programs but last month, during President Obama’s state of the union, he placed them on the butcher’s block. Having extended tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans in December, Obama has proposed slashing funds to the neediest in areas already stung by unemployment and mugged by Wall Street’s recklessness. If the cuts are made, the President will have disemboweled the programs in ways that no right-wing populist ever could.

In 1969 Daniel Moynihan wrote that community action was “the most notable effort to date to mount a systematic social response” to integrate ethnic minorities into government. “It must stand,” he wrote in Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding, “as a perceptive and timely initiative.” He wrote that he would have focused community action’s strategy around employment. They adapted.

Since then, community action has performed quiet but necessary tasks which have gone underreported and taken for granted. They helped crack apart political machines and set the standard for grass-roots organizations; they are the “go to” agencies in communities which now focus on self-sufficiency and even offer classes to teach people to pay their taxes.

Cuts to these grants are indecent and unserious and they will hurt the Northeast. Local politicians, like cats before a quake, are jumping at the proposed cuts. Senators John Kerry, Sheldon Whitehouse, Jack Reed, and other local politicians have written letters opposing cuts and so has the U.S. Conference of Mayors. 100 metropolitan areas throughout the country are projecting double digit employment. They argue that grant funds created jobs, leveraged economic development, built infrastructure, promoted home ownership, and supported energy improvement.

Paula McFarland, the Executive Director of Rhode Island’s C.A.A. proudly showed me the bi-annual reports she discloses. In four years she has never received a criticism, comment, or recognition of receipt! These unread reports include pages of documentation, graphs, narrative, and figures. Every jot and tittle details the 109,000 people in Rhode Island assisted on a meager budget. Rhode Island is not alone, as the Globe reported, in 2010, community action served over 2,700 people in Summerville, Mass., including Head Start.

Who advocates for successful agencies when a President does not follow-up with his own administration, the media won’t or can’t cover its successes as they occur, and its patrons are some of the country’s neediest? This is the dilemma of community action.

Look at the White House website. Community Action is eighth on the President’s “top ten performers” for federal stimulus funds. $5 billion were funneled into the program for weatherization projects in 2009. It is either mordantly funny or tragically ironic that President Obama, a community organizer during the unsentimental Reagan years, intends to cut community action, one of his administration’s greatest successes.

According to a recent Brown University study, half of respondents affected by Rhode Island’s 2010 floods applied for FEMA assistance, 52 percent, and about half did not, 48 percent. Of the respondents only 25 percent received it. Gertrude Simmons, 71, a Warwick widow whose basement was destroyed in the floods was rejected by FEMA three times for a flood inspection. Her daughter and granddaughter have endured a fierce winter with no heat or insulation in their basement, but Gertrude knew about community action from previous help with heating assistance. Once she called the program she had new walls and carpet from block grant money within a month. “We were so cold but the men that community action sent in finished work within a month,” she said. “I wish I had something I could give them to say thanks, they deserve it. But I am having problems.”