Advocacy

CCA provides a safe haven for individuals and families to build solid foundations through education, counseling and support to motivate and empower them to become productive economic and community contributors.

CCA’s primary programs include:

• CCA Complex: offers short-term, transitional program to help homeless families develop life skills and job assistance to break the poverty cycle in which they have lived.
• Emergency Assistance: support for households to fund specific needs (rent, utilities, etc.) when unforeseen financial strains threaten the loss of their home.
• Front Door is a program that began in Spring, 2009. It is providing broad information about government and local agencies as well as a stream-lined the intake process which will be shared between agencies to expedite processing for the client.

After 44-years of assisting members of the community in need, CCA is now entering a new era of service. Since 2005, CCA has grown and shows promise to our commitment. We have steadily quadrupled our capacity, tripled our facilities, and dramatically increased our operating budget to meet CCA’s needs. During this time, we have revised our services and funding sources. More importantly, we have targeted the challenges and needs of our clients.

CCA has consistently set new records for program intakes – a completed application received from a household seeking assistance. In May, more than 90 households completed intakes for either shelter or emergency assistance. In July, the requests increased by 60% with 153 households seeking assistance. On average, these were households with 3-5 people. One-hundred nine sought assistance from our Spring Valley residential program, and 44 households sought Emergency Assistance.

In order to serve these significant increases, move people out of poverty and begin to transform lives, we must address our clients’ three primary challenges:

1. Limited education, job training and/or understanding the value of a job and the importance of keeping it
2. Substance Abuse and its life controlling power over individuals and families
3. Mental Illness, either undiagnosed or improperly treated cases

CCA knows that the only way to truly address increasing poverty levels is to slow or stop the number of people who are currently living in it. Our community is being tasked and Federally-charged to end homelessness within 10 years. We are committed to working with members of other agencies, the local business community, and citizens to provide the tools needed to assist those in need.

With the pressing economic situation, more people are facing financial difficults than we have experienced in our agency's history. In addition, there household seeking outside help for the first time - this isn't just the low income and poverty households we have been seeing for the last 20 years.

As we talk with those seeking help, we hear that they struggle with the enormity of dealing with their situation. Then they have to try to figure where to start looking for help. There are of litany of places to start, but there's confusion about which agencies are really appropriate to help them in their situation. Add to the challenge, the that at each agency, a person has to start from scratch filling out forms and telling their story whether they the agency may provide food, heating assistance, gas cards, rental assistance or maybe nothing at all.

In recent years, more State-level agencies have reduced their office staff, pushing enrollment and information to toll free numbers and websites.

We must find a way to lower the hurdle to support and services. In addition, we must find ways to stream-line our processes while working closer together as agencies to reduce our overhead costs and get help to those seeking it quicker.

We are introducing a new program working closely with other agencies - both local and State-level - to serve people, more efficiently. Visit our solutions page for more information about Front Door.