E-Mail This Article to a Friend Not keeping the faith (continued)

WITH THE STATE doing nothing, a few local religious groups are stepping into the breach — and by doing so, they’re quickly becoming important power brokers. The Boston Capacity Tank, run by the Black Ministerial Alliance (BMA) and its partners, has become an "intermediary" grant-awarding agency of the Administration for Children and Families’ Compassion Capital Fund. BMA and its partners receive $2 million a year from the fund, use a half-million on organization and salaries, and award the other $1.5 million in grants to smaller local providers of services for at-risk youths. Dozens of local groups have received tens of thousands of dollars apiece through the Capacity Tank — not just churches, but also secular groups like Parents United for Child Care, and the Hyde Square Task Force.

A similar intermediary is Connections for Tomorrow, a partnership that includes Dorchester’s TechMission, a stand-alone outgrowth of Bruce Wall Ministries. The Parents Alliance for Catholic Education in Boston, meanwhile, has become a key procurer of public money for the state’s Catholic institutions.

BMA obtained its Compassion Capital grant by partnering with the United Way of Massachusetts Bay, which took the lead role for the first two years. (The partnership also includes the Ten-Point Coalition and the Emmanuel Gospel Center.) Just a few years ago, BMA was a tiny, ragtag organization; this fall, when it takes over from the United Way as lead agent, it will distribute $1.5 million in federal grants, choosing 19 recipients from among 47 local applicants. Has the US government made power brokers of these groups? "It’s a fair question," says Harold Sparrow, BMA’s executive director.

BMA does not keep its religion separate from any of its activities. Sparrow keeps a large VOTE FOR JESUS sign in his office window. When BMA has been in the news, at least in recent years, it’s usually to register the group’s strong opposition to gay marriage. Sparrow says that this stance is entirely separate from and irrelevant to the association’s grant-disbursing role. (Its partner is a little less comfortable with BMA’s flaunting its opinions. "When they have spoken out on controversial issues, we have stayed so far away from them," says the United Way’s Chase.) Applicant organizations that differ with BMA on any issue "would be treated the same as anyone else," Sparrow says. So would groups from any religion.

There is some discrimination involved, however. In a uniquely Bush twist on affirmative action, BMA is allowed to tilt the process toward the religious applicants in order to achieve its "balanced portfolio" goals, despite the fact that it has far more secular applicants than religious ones.

It’s unclear how other organizations dispense and manage the funds. "Once money leaves Washington, whether it’s faith-based or not, there’s not a lot of systems for tracking where it ends up," says Bryan Jackson, communications director for the Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy, in Albany, New York. What is clear is that BMA has, with United Way’s help, established an impressively safeguarded award process, drawing in independent outsiders and reducing its own ability to influence the outcome. Recipients have come disproportionately from BMA members and partners, but that might have more to do with who knows about the grants than with the selection process itself. (It may also explain why no Muslim organization and only one Jewish group has applied in three years.)

"There’s always going to be power brokers," says Brandes, who served on the Compassion Capital Fund committee in 2002 that awarded the three-year grants to BMA’s Boston Capacity Tank and TechMission’s Compassion for Tomorrow. "Better that it be a Black Ministerial Alliance than some outside bureaucrat."

BMA also seems diligent about keeping grantees accountable, to the extent it can. Allowable religious behavior is a sticky wicket, naturally; even with the great relaxation of the rules under Bush, there are still lines. After-school programs can leave religious material on the wall, but can’t teach Bible lessons. If they lead the children in prayer, they have to provide an "equally appealing option" to those who decline. As you can imagine, it’s hard to know whether a given church is adhering to those rules when nobody’s looking.

Still, at least BMA tries, and at least it metes out the money only to reimburse for demonstrated costs. It has also accounted carefully for its operating budget, and established auditing procedures. However, the evidence suggests that such measures are in place because the United Way insists on it, not because the government particularly cares.

Consider, for example, what’s happening to the money going to the partnership that includes TechMission. Although Lasky says that "our office is in a very strong monitoring role" with the Compassion grants, she admits that when it comes to TechMission, "I haven’t spent much time with them."

TechMission, run by Andrew Sears inside Bruce Wall Ministries’ Dorchester Temple near Codman Square, operates the Association of Christian Community Computer Centers. In 2002, TechMission joined in a partnership with CTCNet, a secular group then based in Cambridge (since relocated to Washington, DC), to apply to the new Compassion Capital Fund. CTCNet is the lead agency, and appears to have tapped TechMission just for faith-based cred. "We partnered with TechMission in order to pursue this grant opportunity," says CTCNet national program director Amy Lesser. TechMission’s actual duties in the partnership are a little vague: Lesser says TechMission staffers sit in on calls, and "help us with outreach." For this, the group gets $150,000 of the annual $1.5 million check from the US government. (Of this check, $750,000 is handed out in grants, $100,000 goes to a third partner, Alliance for Technology Access, and the rest goes to CTCNet operations.) Neither CTCNet nor the federal government pays much attention to how TechMission spends its money. "We don’t monitor it very closely," says Lesser.

The one key thing TechMission does have is veto power — representatives from all three partners must agree on grant recipients, Lesser says. In the last two years this hasn’t meant much here locally, since the grants have gone to groups in Illinois and California. But this year the money will all go to Massachusetts recipients, in a round of grants just announced this week. "This year we do expect TechMission to take a bigger role," says Lesser. And while the partners use an objective score sheet to rate applicants, "at the top level there probably is a little leeway to choose one over the other," Lesser admits.

There is also apparently some leeway in how grant recipients spend their money, which is meant for programs that teach technology skills to the homeless and at-risk youth. They get the grant money up-front in one check and they’re not audited — although recipients are advised to keep their receipts in case the government comes calling. CTCNet hires one person to oversee all the recipients from one year, which can be as many as 40 different programs.

THERE IS ANOTHER set of religious entities seeking government money in Massachusetts these days: Catholic parishes. "That is exactly what I do. That is my sole focus," says Berna Mann, director of federal and community grants for the Parents Alliance for Catholic Education (PACE), in Boston. The recent financial troubles facing the Boston archdiocese have coincided with the opening of public-grant opportunities.

Much of what Mann does is help Catholic schools identify and obtain their share of federal funds earmarked for low-income students. For example, she got an extra $700,000 for Catholic schools in Boston and $70,000 for those in Lynn. The money cannot go directly into church bank accounts, so the distributions come as supplies or teacher training.

She also seeks out other federal-grant opportunities, including technical-assistance grants, reading-first grants, and others. She helped St. Anthony’s, in Allston, and Sacred Heart, in Roslindale, get funding from the federal Boston Community Learning Center grant. She helped the Paraclete Center, in South Boston, get $20,000 from the BMA, and just wrote a proposal for more this year. St. Mary’s Parish, in Lynn, got a $25,000 grant from the Department of Labor.

PACE has quickly become a critical player in bringing FBO-targeted money to local institutions. So have TechMission and BMA, which will not only dole out federal funds to roughly 60 Massachusetts service providers this fall, but are also holding conferences to train these groups in the grant-application process, and are actively searching out more sources of federal money for them.

Both BMA and the TechMission partnership are, however, entering the last year of their three-year contracts, and neither is especially optimistic about renewal. That would leave the small FBOs foundering. "I do think it’s an issue here in Boston," Brandes says. "For the work that’s been done ultimately to be successful, the intermediaries need to access more federal funds."

Unless, of course, the state government finally gets into the game. If John Kerry wins the presidency, much of this could become moot. But if Bush is re-elected, the initiative will expand tremendously — particularly since Karl Rove has acknowledged that he is counting on religious conservatives to make the difference in November. And that would mean Bay State providers — and their needy clients — would miss out on an even greater chunk of money in the years to come.

David S. Bernstein can be reached at dbernstein[a]phx.com