Cooperating Ministry offers only emergency assistance, board members say
Misunderstandings about the mission and resources of Cooperating Ministry of Logan County have caused some frustration within that venerable institution.
Richelle Greenwood, executive director of CMLC, said Wednesday morning that people are saying the organization won’t help them after they’ve already been helped to the limit of CMLC’s resources.
The Journal-Advocate was invited to attend the CMLC board meeting on Wednesday in hopes of clarifying the organization’s mission and the resources available. Board chair Kathy Guerin said it’s hard for outsiders to see how much assistance Greenwood and her staff provide, and how hard they work to get the funds they need.
“I come (to board meetings) with anticipation because I like to hear what they do, and they do so much for the community,” Guerin said. “But if you’re not a part of it, maybe you don’t know what they do, and they do have a lot of restrictions.”
Greenwood said those restrictions, many of which are imposed by the organizations providing the funding, are meant to spread the limited funds as far as possible. Unfortunately, some in the community see them as a private sector counterpart to Social Services.
“People seem to feel like we should have ongoing assistance, but that’s not what we do,” Greenwood said. “We’re here to get people through an emergency situation, but we just don’t have the resources to continuously pay their bills.”
Greenwood used the example of water bills being in arrears. When the water gets shut off, the customer appeals to CMLC for assistance, which Cooperating Ministry can provide, in limited amounts and on a one-time basis. But if the person is thousands of dollars in arrears – and many are, Greenwood said – CMLC doesn’t have the money to cover all of that. And when assistance is rendered, the same people return the next month expecting to have their water bills paid. That’s when they get turned down.
A general rule of thumb for water bills and housing assistance, Greenwood said, is that a family or person can be helped once a year or four times over a lifetime.
Almost all of CMLC’s funding for public assistance comes from grants. Greenwood said her staff gets between 15 and 20 grants per year, some as small as $2,000 a year. And all of those grants have restrictions and conditions on them. Greenwood pointed to the Energy Outreach Colorado program as an example; it has a long list of the types of energy bills its grant money can be used for and an equally long list of documentation required and restrictions imposed.
For instance, an electrical utilities customer with a past-due bill can receive a single payment of up to $1,000 if they provide a bill with a past-due notice. Similar restrictions apply for gas, combined gas and electrical, propane, fuel oil, firewood and coal, with total benefits topped at $2,000, depending on how many accounts are involved.
Those are one-time-only payments, Greenwood emphasized.
Other grants provide assistance for utilities, housing, medical care and other necessities, but all have limitations on how often a household can be helped.
To make matters worse, some household received numerous federal government checks as part of the American Rescue Plan that temporarily fattened unemployment benefits and provided direct payments of up to $1,200 per person. Unfortunately, Greenwood said, the funds weren’t always applied to the things they were meant for, and when the checks stopped coming, they were right back where they started.
The pandemic also has pushed poverty upward into the working and middle classes.
“We’re seeing people we’ve never seen before, people who’ve lost their jobs and just can’t get back on their feet,” Greenwood said.
Meanwhile, some sources of funds have shrunk as budgets have tightened over the years. The City of Sterling used to provide $7,500 a year for CMLC to use to help people pay their water bills. The funds always ended up back in the city’s coffers, so in effect the city was funding assistance of its own customers but without the bureaucracy of a fee forgiveness program.
“It was a win-win, because they showed they were committed to community support, they got their funds back, and they helped people,” Greenwood said. “Now, we get $1,000 a year for that program.”
That, in turn, has had an impact on CMLC’s ability to land some important grant funding. Grantors like to see local government committed to helping community members, Greenwood said, but when they see the city cutting back so dramatically on its assistance, they question whether CMLC actually has the community support it claims to have.
Board member Julie Lenox said local residents who are struggling with the cost of living need to seek assistance from Logan County Human Services because they can assist on an ongoing basis, and can help people become more self-sufficient.
“We’re here to assist, not to enable,” she said.
Here is a more detailed Fact Sheet on Cooperating Ministry.
View more on South Platte Sentinel