The Fund for Community Progress

The new Executive Director of The Fund for Community Progress was profiled in the Newsmakers section of the November 13 19, 2006 Providence Business News (page 4).

The George Wiley Center, under the direction of Henry Shelton, organized volunteers to protest in front of National Grid offices at noontime throughout October and November, 2006.

Providence's mayor, the dapper David N. Cicilline, objected on Oct. 5 to the accusation that he shops at Barneys New York warehouse sale.

Your superior correspondents were very glad to see last week’s Bob Kerr column about Nondas Voll, longtime head ramrod of the Fund for Community Progress. If you don’t know who Nondas is, you should, because she will enrich your life.

The banner showed a pile of twisted lumber, a roof propped at an improbable angle – the remnants of a New Orleans home shattered by Hurricane Katrina. Next to it were the words “We will rebuild.”

At the roast of Providence Mayor David Cicilline on Thursday night, Nondas Voll quoted Sen. Edward Kennedy: “The works goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die.”

Four community organizations or coalitions are joining forces this weekend to celebrate National Neighborhood Day with cleanups, barbecues, block parties and other events.

Fall 2006, Federal Reserve of Boston Community Development Fall 2006 Publication

First Person with Sharon Conard-Wells, Executive Director of West Elmwood Housing Development Corporation
In spite of being told it couldn’t be done, Conard-Wells spearheaded the transformation of Rau Fastener, an abandoned Providence factory. Today, attractive mixed-income rental units anchor a larger revitalization effort in the West Elmwood neighborhood.

This article will open in Adobe Acrobat. To read, view and print the forms, you must have the most recent Acrobat Reader, which is free and available from Adobe.

The Rhode Island Local Initiative Support Corporation recently invited federal, state and local officials to tour a rundown, abandoned building site in Woonsocket that has been converted to affordable residential apartments and commercial space by Woonsocket Neighborhood Development Corporation.

Summer Sweeps was created three years ago as a way to keep West End youths off the streets and out of trouble. When 14-year-old Aileen Matos showed up for her first day at the summer youth employment program last month she had mixed feelings.

Canvassers fanned out on the south and west sides of the city yesterday, starting a door-to-door effort to register residents in poor and minority neighborhoods and urge them to go to the polls in November.

The state Public Utilities Commission yesterday decided not to enact an emergency ban on utility shutoffs when outside temperatures exceed 90 degrees.

Nancy Whit remembers a time 30 years ago when the housing situation in many neighborhoods was less than ideal.

Nondas Hurst Voll to retire as Executive Director of The Fund for Community Progress

Excerpted from NACG Online June 19, 2006 - Nearly fourteen years ago, a single mom named Nondas Voll was busy earning a living and sending the last of her four children off to college. She had a long commute to Cambridge, Mass., where she served as Director of Communications at Lesley University. She had served in a similar capacity at Roger Williams University where she also taught and had worked as Deputy Press Secretary for the Governor of Rhode Island.

The Greater Elmwood Neighborhood Services plans to transform Park Avenue into 106 affordable condominiums and apartments.

PROVIDENCE -- When prosperous businessman John Parkis sought to make a home in the city in 1857, he selected a large plat on the South Side. During the 1870s and 1880s, he sold off parcels to South Providence owners of stockyards and meat-packing plants.

Advocates say the state is too willing to pay for nursing-home care and needs to divert more money to community and home-based care.

PROVIDENCE -- Seniors donned handcuffs in the State House rotunda yesterday, in a symbolic gesture aimed at persuading the state to redirect money from nursing homes to home and community care.

The Samaritans, a suicide-prevention and resource center, is hoping some unemployed college students will volunteer this summer to answer the agency's hot line. Those who perform 300 hours of service may be eligible for a $1,000 scholarship from AmeriCorps.

At its annual breakfast fundrasier attended by nearly 400, CHisPA also handed out community awards.

Latinos in Rhode Island bring a vital, young population to the labor force and contribute to the economy with a growing number of businesses, but they also face high poverty rates and live in impoverished neighborhoods with low-performing schools.

Saturday, May 20, 2006
BY RANDAL EDGAR and MARK ARSENAULT, Journal Staff Writers

Protesting housing problems, The Journey Home will begin tomorrow in Westerly and culminate Thursday with an afternoon rally at the State House.

PROVIDENCE -- Activists working to end homelessness will cross the state on foot this week, embarking tomorrow on a five-day march to bring attention to the problems of homelessness, high housing costs, and the "failure" of the housing market to end the problems.

Two national figures who ought to know visit Rhode Island to promote community development projects.

PROVIDENCE -- To former Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, there's a link between community development to help the poor at the local level and economic competition at the global level.

During a visit to Rhode Island yesterday, Rubin called local community development "an economic imperative" for the United States as it strives to compete with China and India.

On June 16, the last day of school, students plan to take their anti-gun message to the streets.

BY LINDA BORG
Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE -- On April 6, 2005, 18-year-old Barry Ferrell was shot to death at a bus stop outside the Hartford Park housing complex.

Ferrell was a student at the Alternate Learning Project, but played basketball on the Mount Pleasant team because his small South Side school doesn't have a team.

The Greater Elmwood Neighborhood Services plans to transform Parkis Avenue into 106 affordable condominiums and apartments.

NOW THAT that the leaves have fallen and the temperatures are dropping, Rhode Islanders' anxieties about high heating bills are rising. All of us will be affected by these increased costs. But those already struggling with their bills, particularly the low-income elderly and families, are going to be hurt the most.

by Caroline Ellis Federal Reserve Bank of Boston
Photographs in this article by Rik Pierce.

On one level, this is about a new idea in affordable housing—rental units specially designed for in-home day care so that low-income providers may get licensed to work at home and low income neighbors may have safe child care while they are at work.

Gloves symbolize lead-poisoning victims

Tuesday, December 13, 2005 By Brandie Jefferson, Journal Environment Writer

Jan Flaherty of the Childhood Lead Action Project hangs a pair of gloves yesterday on a clothesline in Memorial Park, in downtown Providence. The 1,164 gloves and mittens represent the number of Rhode Island children poisoned by lead in 2004.

Across the street from the Frank Licht Judicial Complex, where the state hopes litigation will solve the problem of childhood lead poisoning, about a dozen people gathered to seek redress in a different way.

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Home-buyer classes start next month

December 13, 2005, Journal Metro Digest

Stop Wasting Abandoned Property will hold home-buyer education classes on Wednesdays for eight weeks, beginning Feb. 11.

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Partners applaud loft project

Monday, December 12, 2005 by Karen Davis, Journal Staff Writer

A $15-million investment converts an abandoned mill complex into housing.

After years of neglect, it took a team of supporters, board members and financing partners to transform an abandoned West Elmwood mill complex into homes for dozens of families.

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The gift of good deeds

Friday, December 9, 2005 by Johnette Rodriguez, Providence Phoenix

Spotlighting some worthy local causes.

In the wake of the news coming out of New Orleans in September, one could only hope that those images of hungry and thirsty, exhausted and ill, very young and frail elderly, homeless and heartsick Americans would remain in people's minds as the year turned toward winter and residents of every state experienced those same conditions.

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AS220 starts discussion series

Friday, November 25, 2005, The Providence Journal

PROVIDENCE -- The arts organization AS220 is beginning next week a series of discussions. The first program, on Wednesday, deals with housing affordability.

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Help on way to stricken Guatemala

Friday, October 28, 2005, BY KAREN LEE ZINER, Journal Staff Writer

For one family, 'October will never be the same'

Sunday, October 16, 2005, BY MICHAEL P. McKINNEY,Journal Staff Writer

BARRINGTON -- Kathy Luther says some in her family would rather she not talk about the suicide and just sell bouquets.

But she can't stop, not after the year she's had since she first sold pumpkins in memory of her brother Peter DeSisto, who took his life in the family's backyard 20 years ago. A dollar from each pumpkin sold this month at her Wild Flower Florist store goes to suicide prevention efforts by the Samaritans of Rhode Island.

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2 city projects win housing award

Roasted and toasted in good taste Channel 10's president and general manager Lisa Churchville arrived at Rhodes-on-the-Pawtuxet on Sept. 28 prepared with comebacks, rebuttals and one-liners.

She was this year's honoree at the Fund for Community Progress's annual roast. And she rarely had to deliver anything from her arsenal of rejoinders as the event ended up being a reverent toast.

Woonsocket has its share of mill-rehabilitation projects, some with units affordable to lower-middle- and low-income people. Yet even more remarkable is its "affordable housing" built anew. Among the latter is Heritage Place, across the Blackstone River from downtown.

At a public hearing, a lawyer for Narragansett Electric cites rising fuel prices as the primary reason for the increase.

NEWPORT -- Narragansett Electric's plans to raise rates 12.4 percent may be unstoppable, but that doesn't mean the utility can't do more to help those who will be hit the hardest by the biggest rate hike in seven years, a social activist testified last night.

William F. Flynn Jr., representing the antipoverty George Wiley Center, sat at a Public Utilities Commission hearing and listened to a variety of officials describe the proposed rate increase as all but certain. The law, they said, essentially permits the utility to pass on to its customers the higher prices it pays to buy energy.

Narragansett Electric yesterday filed a request to raise rates in Rhode Island by 12.4 percent, the highest single rate increase that the utility company has sought in at least 7 years.

In a filing with state regulators, the company said it needs the increase because of a projected rise in fuel costs through the end of 2006.

If approved by the Public Utilities Commission, the rate hike would bring electricity rates to their highest level in Rhode Island since the industry was restructured by a 1998 state law, according to the company.

PROVIDENCE -- The Samaritans of Rhode Island, the state's only nonprofit agency exclusively dedicated to suicide prevention and education, has embarked on a statewide media campaign to raise awareness of its education, support and referral services, said Denise Panichas, the group's interim director, in a statement.

July 16, 2005, By Ryan McBride, The Providence Business News

A Harvard University real estate study places Rhode Island in one of a few areas of the country with the greatest increases in property values and growing demand for affordable housing.

The State of the Nation’s Housing for 2004, completed by The Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, indicates that the divide between incomes and housing prices in areas with booming real estate markets has continued to widen since 1999.

“Not surprisingly, (the study) says the East Coast and West Coast have seen the highest appreciation in housing prices,” said Brenda J. Clement, executive director of the R.I. Housing Network.

PROVIDENCE -- The DuPont Corporation has agreed to pay nearly $12 million to settle its case in the state's lawsuit against companies that made lead-based paints years ago that continue to poison children.

Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch said yesterday that he negotiated the deal, in which the money will go to the Children's Health Forum, a nonprofit agency based in Washington, D.C. that focuses on preventing lead exposure. The group would then channel the money for use in Rhode Island.

PROVIDENCE -- Landlords might mark their calendars for Nov. 1 as the date to start complying with the state's new lead paint safety regulations. But they probably should use a pencil.

Just when it seemed no one could forge a compromise between supporters of the new regulations and critics, the Senate Committee on Health and Human Services unanimously endorsed a compromise bill that leaves both sides just a little uncomfortable.

They say that a bill that would boost the state's current contribution to create more affordable housing units is not not nearly enough to cope with soaring prices and increased need.

Nestled between a law office and a two-family home, the former St. Francis Convent, in Warwick, stands a few yards from the nearest bus line and just minutes from the nearest mall.

Once a residence for nuns, the two-story structure is being transformed into a place for the homeless and mentally ill. House of Hope, a nonprofit developer, plans to open 11 studio apartments there in December.

The work that lies ahead -- construction, upgrades, screening for tenants -- is the easy part.

A bill would create a new state agency with the power to set surcharges on utility bills to pay for the plan.

A major heating-assistance bill being considered by the Rhode Island Senate would help low-income families pay their heating bills and provide emergency funds to help get service restored.

The bill, introduced by Sen. William A. Walaska, D-Warwick, would create a new state agency with the power to establish surcharges on utility bills to pay for the program.

The Committee on Financial Services, Technology and Regulatory Issues, chaired by Walaska, held a hearing on the bill yesterday.

The legislation would create the Energy Affordability Fund Corporation, a government agency charged with establishing and overseeing the assistance program.

WOONSOCKET -- You could say the Woonsocket Neighborhood Development Corp. is a bit of a local secret in how to develop affordable housing that blends with the community it serves. The nonprofit WNDC revitalized the Constitution Hill neighborhood with its 110 units of subsidized apartments in 36 well-maintained buildings. It has built 26 affordable homes in brand new duplex buildings constructed off Rhodes Avenue on Steve Lopes Way and is now at work on a 43-unit apartment complex off Front Street that will mix upper-level residential space with downstairs commercial uses.

But Saturday, WNDC took a step toward showing other communities how to find similar success with a series of bus tours out to its local developments.

Visitors from across Rhode Island were driven out to the WNDC home sites, took walking tours of the neighborhoods, and even visited some of the homes themselves through the hospitality of their residents.

They will pass up Powder River, Wyo. It's too small. There's no one to talk to. They'll pedal on through.

They learn things like that from those who have gone before them on this hard, good ride to Seattle.

They learn, too, that while the country can open up to a person in a beautiful, often breathtaking way, it is best to remember that they're on bicycles, and getting too distracted by the natural beauty can cause a person to ride into a guardrail, as someone did last year.

More than 150 people rally at the State House, calling for more affordable housing and detailing the human and economic price of homeless.

For two months, Maria Ramos and her three children stayed with relatives, moving from one home to another. With a little help, she found temporary housing and a job, and then went back to school, earning a GED and a certificate in phlebotomy at Community College of Rhode Island.

Now, she and her children -- two daughters and a son -- live in a subsidized apartment in South Providence.

"Me and my children are so happy to say that we have a roof over our heads," she said yesterday at a rally in the State House rotunda. "I have a career, and I have a home."

"Our goal is basically, as parents, to make a stand and say that we're fed up and tired," says one demonstrator.

PROVIDENCE -- Dozens and dozens of youngsters, parents and education advocates marched from Classical High School to the State House yesterday to demand adequate funding of public schools.

The marchers plodded through city streets during evening rush hour, wearing red T-shirts and carrying signs that read "Kids come first" and "March for our kids, March for our schools."

The demonstration was organized by Rhode Island ACORN. At the State House, marchers joined with a larger group of demonstrators from Working Rhode Island, a group that advocates for families from Providence, Pawtucket, Woonsocket and Central Falls.

Sen. Elizabeth H. Roberts says she is concerned about balancing the needs of patients with the appropriate time to tell the public about problems.

PROVIDENCE -- Bills endorsed by House and Senate leaders require the state to flag and investigate nursing homes that are financially unsound, but the legislation as written would delay telling the public even when shaky finances have affected the standard of care.

The American Civil Liberties Union and advocates for the elderly yesterday argued that the state is obligated to tell the public immediately when the Health Department has confirmed a financial crisis severe enough to affect care.

The "Nursing Facility Quality Monitoring and Early Intervention for Resident Safety" bill debated yesterday by the Senate Health and Human Services Committee would keep validated financial problems confidential until the nursing home has filed a "plan of correction" with the Health Department. There is no timeline for the process, and in the meantime, the residents would not know they were in an unstable nursing home and people searching for a nursing home would not have the facts needed to choose a facility, advocates argued.

The George A. Wiley Center in Pawtucket, a statewide community action program that manages a campaign to eliminate childhood poverty in Rhode island, has asked legislators to boost by $4 million the amount the state sets aside for the poverty-tax relief program each year.

That way, all applicants would receive the full amount for which they’re eligible, said Henry Shelton, coordinator at the center.

SWAP, Stop Wasting Abandoned Property, is the first Citizens Bank Housing Heroes Award recipient for 2005. SWAP will receive a $50,000 grant from the Citizens Bank Foundation, $10,000 of which will be used for a resident-related flower box program.

SWAP was selected from 12 applications for its project-25 homes in 25 months- in the Potter Avenue neighborhood of South Providence. SWAP brought land, arranged financing and began an aggressive effort to sell the homes. All were sold within 25 months and SWAP sold 70 more to families whose income is below 80 percent of median income in South Providence.

A commission studying the issue is expected to draft legislation and send it to both houses of the General Assembly.

PROVIDENCE -- It is beginning to look like new lead paint regulations for thousands of landlords will go into effect sometime this year, but it also looks like they won't be the same rules that came out of the state Health Department last year.

The special legislative commission studying the new regulations met yesterday at a round table with the intent of listening to each other rather than the many witnesses who jammed recent hearings.

The Public Utilities Commission allows dozens of appeals hearings for gas and electricity customers, but refuses to loosen its rules for debtors.

WARWICK -- Backed by a crowd of sign-waving activists, 73 people requested hearings yesterday to keep their gas and electricity on, as protesters converged on the Rhode Island Public Utilities Commission headquarters to mark the end of the winter utility-shutoff moratorium.

The regulatory agency granted dozens of hearings after receiving identical, one-page documents from people demanding three years to pay their accumulated utility bills.

But the commission denied a proposal that would forestall utility shutoff for debtors who immediately pay 10 percent of their bills and cover their remaining debts within 36 months. First-time debtors must now pay 25 percent of their bills to delay shutoff, and complete all payments within a year.

Starting in December, units will be available in Westfield Lofts, formerly the Rau Fastener mill complex, on Dexter Street near the Cranston Street Armory. The West Elmwood Housing Development Corporation is the force behind the $15 million rehab project, remaking the 1890 mill complex into 69 one- and two-bedroom lofts. Upon completion, Westfield Lofts will be the city’s only CDC-sponsored mill redevelopment effort, offering units of low-income housing, and moderate-income units far cheaper than other loft projects in town.

The project is almost 10 years in the making. Sharon Conard-Wells, West Elmwood’s executive director, says the seeds were planted in 1997, when neighborhood residents asked her, "What are you going to do with this thing in the middle of the neighborhood?" Her response was "We don’t do mills." But neighbors felt so strongly that they presented petitions and letters to West Elmwood’s board, in hopes it would tackle the four-story, 109,000-square-foot building.

The grants are for programs that focus on housing, children and families, health and other issues.

A number of local organizations have recently received grants from the Rhode Island Foundation that focus on a range of needs.

Issues addressed by more than $3 million in allocations statewide include affordable housing, advocating for children and families, examining economic opportunities, health care, education and protecting natural resources.

The Strategy Grants include one to ACORN a member of The Fund for Community Progress:

American Institute for Social Justice, $35,000, for ACORN's (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) efforts to assist in organizing families with low and moderate incomes in such areas as education, financial literacy, predatory lending and utilities in Providence, Pawtucket, Central Falls and Woonsocket.

Sunday, February 27, 2005, BY SUSAN KUSHNER RESNICK, Journal Health & Fitness Writer

The woman with cancer insisted everyone in the small office act as though nothing had changed. Her colleagues at Brown University found that tough to bear.

"Everyone would leave work and break down crying on the way home because it was so hard to act as if nothing was happening," says the woman's supervisor, who requested anonymity to preserve the patient's privacy.

The boss knew that something had to change, so she called the Hope Center for Cancer Support, in Providence. The center signed the office up for its new "How Can I Help?" program.

Community advocates predict that cuts in the president's proposed budget threaten crucial services such as education, housing and health care.

WARWICK -- In a mini-mall corner of America yesterday, community leaders predicted widespread fallout from President Bush's proposed budget cuts that they say means a potential $300-million loss in federal funds to Rhode Island.

And after the final speaker left the podium at the West Bay Community Action Office and after the coffee cups and pastries were cleared, the ire still glowed red-hot.

Low-income children and families, disabled people and other vulnerable populations would suffer, they said, predicting that the cuts would hobble crucial services such as education, housing, energy assistance, health care and community development, as well as roll back environmental progress.

Schools Supt. Melody A. Johnson sought the layoffs of almost 100 teachers and other employees because of a projected deficit of $19 million.

PROVIDENCE -- A divided School Board refused last night to lay off 21 nurse-teachers and 10 social workers but agreed to send pick slips to 20 guidance counselors and 47 elementary school teachers.

About 150 people attended the meeting to appeal to board members to hold their ground and send a message to Governor Carcieri and the General Assembly that the board believes the proposed 1.7-percent increase in state aid is woefully inadequate and that they won't adopt any further cuts that jeopardize children's safety and education.

The School Department has a projected deficit of $19 million for the next fiscal year.

An old nursing home. An empty warehouse. Inner-city apartments.

In the last three years, LISC Rhode Island has helped them all become viable child-care spaces: Child Care Connection Central Falls, serving 260 youngsters from mostly low-income families; A Place to Grow, serving about 110 families in Wakefield; four home-based child-care centers in a renovated apartment complex on Woonsocket’s Constitution Hill.

The projects are part of a statewide effort to create, expand and improve child-care spaces that has invested nearly $3.3 million since 2001, including $2.6 million in low-interest loans as well as grants to community groups and family child-care providers.

The Woonsocket Neighborhood Development Corporation last month received a $6.9 million loan to build affordable housing and commercial space on Front Street from Citizens Bank.

The “Heritage Place” loan is the first approved under the Citizens Housing Bank $200 million loan effort to provide funds to nonprofit housing developers in New England. Citizens has a dozen loans for similar projects in the pipeline, said Kathy O’Donnell, vice president/director of public relations for Citizens.

Joseph Garlick, executive director of the Woonsocket Neighborhood Development Corporation, said the Front Street project includes 43 units of rental apartments and mixed commercial/community storefronts.

Sixteen sites in Providence help low-income families file for the Earned Income Tax Credits.

PROVIDENCE -- City leaders are joining a community coalition in urging low-income residents to take advantage of more than $10 million in untapped tax benefits by filing for Earned Income Tax Credits.

Mayor David N. Cicilline is also working with community agencies to encourage residents to have their income tax forms processed at Volunteer Income Tax Assistance sites. The first site opened Thursday.

At an annual conference on childhood poverty, advocates and utility representatives say they hope to get legislation introduced soon to help low-income Rhode Islanders.

PROVIDENCE -- Advocates for the poor and representatives from the energy industry are nearing agreement on a proposal to help low-income residents pay their utility bills.

A committee of advocates and industry officials plans to submit the proposal to the legislature detailing the assistance plan and whether rate payers would be asked to subsidize it.

The governor's proposal aims to improve coordination among agencies that deal with housing.

PROVIDENCE -- Pointing to low housing production and a 91-percent rise in prices from 2000 to 2004, Governor Carcieri yesterday announced plans to create an office that will give housing a more prominent place in state government.

Carcieri, speaking to more than 70 housing advocates, said the state is working hard to address its housing needs but lacks coordination among agencies that deal with housing.

The National Community Development Association honors the city for rehabilitating old homes in Elmwood and converting them to affordable housing.

PROVIDENCE -- The city recently received a national award for its support of a renovation project that preserved historic homes by turning them into affordable housing.

Mayor David N. Cicilline recently accepted in Washington, D.C., the firstTerrence R. Duvernay HOME Program Award, given by the National Community Development Association.

The award recognizes the Melrose Preservation Project, which rehabilitated historic homes in Elmwood and converted them to 47 units of affordable housing.

WOONSOCKET -- When they tell you they're "Not your typical bank," they're not kidding.

To bolster construction of affordable housing in Rhode Island, Citizens Bank recently launched a multimillion-dollar low-income loan program for nonprofit developers.

Never mind that affordable housing has become something of a political football in recent years, Citizens officials say their program responds to a statewide crisis, while getting involved in the communities where they do business.