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The Pestiferous Stink of Politics in Grant Writing: ORR’s “Residential Services for Unaccompanied Alien Children” (UAC) Program

As we’ve said before, politicians at every level usually like it when nonprofits in their districts get grants. They like it so much that they’re happy to take credit for a nonprofit’s grant writing effort, which they usually have nothing to do with. That being said, politics usually have little to do with grant writing, at least at the level experienced by most nonprofit and public agencies. As you might have guessed from the way we keep repeating “usually” in this paragraph, this post is about exceptions to that principle.

Ages ago, before I graced the world, Isaac worked as Grants Coordinator for Ed Valliere, City Manager of the City of Lynwood.* The city didn’t have a lot of money and Ed sicced Isaac on every grant Isaac could find, which is one way to effectively get a lot of grants (some of our retainer clients give us similar direction and latitude). Anyway, Isaac wrote a federal rat-control grant that got funded, but he didn’t bother to get a City Council resolution authorizing the submission.

Isaac didn’t think it would be funded, but he didn’t think too much about it: he just wrote proposals. Inexplicably, the rat proposal was funded.** This made Ed explode: the City of Lynwood wasn’t going to admit publicly that it had a rat problem, so Ed instructed Isaac to turn down the grant. The City Council remained unaware of the application, the award, and the rejection. Isaac and Ed kept their jobs.

Ed knew that politicians didn’t want reporters asking, “Hey, how’s the rat problem going?” Cities spend lots of money marketing themselves—you may have heard that “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” (a lie), and a motto like “Lynwood: We’ve solved our rat problem!” doesn’t work so well. Although Isaac does report that in the late 70s, the staff routinely referred to Lynwood alternatively as “The Town Too Tough to Die” or “The Town that Time Forgot.”

Which brings us to the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) “Residential Services for Unaccompanied Alien Children” (UAC) program. It has $350 million available, with average grants of $4 million—residential care services, especially for children, are very, very expensive. The program addresses the unexpected surge in unaccompanied Central American children at the southern border.

But not every residential services provider is going to want or be able to apply for this ORR grant program. By applying, nonprofit residential care providers—which are often large organizations deeply embedded in the local community power structure—announce that they’re going to house immigrant children and teens. As anyone who has paid attention to the news over the last decade or century should know, immigrants arouse fear, suspicion, hatred, and xenophobia. “They” will not be like “us” and don’t share “our” values.

Consequently, not every organization that could or should apply for a UAC grant will actually apply. As we said, most local politicos are happy for organizations in their districts to get grants, but they aren’t always. No one wants a crisis homeless shelter right next to them.*** The acronym “NIMBY” emerged as a catch-all term to attack this idea. But in the real world, a small number of people will fight much harder to keep a residential treatment facility out of their neighborhood than a large, amorphous number of people with vague feelings of kindness will fight to put it in.

We rarely discuss politics or the local political situation with our clients, but we can occasionally detect politics, much like astrophysicists detect dark matter, through the otherwise weird-seeming behavior of clients or potential clients. This is going to be deliberately vague, because we take confidentiality very seriously, but recently we have seen some unusual behaviors and desires that may be politically motivated. “Politics” seems like a likely motivator.

(Added later: I wrote most of the above a couple days ago and then had to work on other projects. Today, this is a top story at nytimes.com: “Towns Oppose Bid to House Child Migrants.” That didn’t take long. I wonder if the people hoisting American flags in opposition to immigration realize the irony in what they’re doing.)


* Another funny story I’ve heard many times: Isaac wrote many funded California Office of Traffic Safety (OTS) grants for Lynwood, including one that paid for the installation of strobes on traffic signals and in emergency vehicles. These strobes allow emergency vehicles to change the signal as they approach intersections. The then-Mayor of Lynwood, who will go unnamed to protect the guilty, insisted on having an strobe installed in his personal car, so he could flip the traffic lights as he tooled around town. He also had a police and fire scanner in his car, and when things happened he’d go flying across town to the emergency. Then the traffic people would get pissed off, because he’d screw up the traffic for hours. Eventually the City had to take the strobe away from him.

** Demonstrating yet again that it’s not possible to know what will be funded and what won’t be.

*** No one wanted World War II refugees either, as anyone on the S. S. St. Louis knows, or would know had they not been murdered by Nazis.

This is one argument for open borders, an important concept too rarely even discussed in the media.

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