An Overview of The Council of Churches of Greater Bridgeport

July 1, 2009

The Council of Churches of Greater Bridgeport is a 65 year old ecumenical and social service agency.  Originally founded just after World War II as The Council for Interchurch Cooperation, we respond to human need and develop cooperative action to leverage hope and change lives.  Our service area is concentrated on people from Bridgeport and the suburban ring: Fairfield, Easton, Trumbull, Shelton, Monroe and Stratford, with additional partners in Westport, Milford and other portions of Fairfield and New Haven counties.

Our mission is to turn faith into action by enabling congregations and community partners to combine resources and expertise to provide programs that help people at risk meet their urgent needs.

We live this mission through five program emphases.  Three form our continuum of care:

 Project Learn provides after school homework tutorial help for elementary school students through community-based centers in churches and public housing sites. 

 The Janus Center for Youth in Crisis provides intervention services for conflicted youth and their families and respite care for youth aged 11-17. 

 CO-OP Center provides second chances for ex-offenders through short and long–term reentry services enabling them to become productive members of society.

Two others address immediate and systemic needs:

Hunger Outreach manages federal funding and assists 35 area feeding programs in coordinating their services. 

Bridge Building offers ecumenical and interfaith opportunities to build community through education and dialogue.

  

This overview examines The Council of Churches’ unique

contribution to Greater Bridgeport in services in which we are

The ONLY, the BEST or the BIGGEST provider.

 

THE ONLY

 

The Janus Center for Youth in Crisis (JCYIC) provides the only 24 hour mobile crisis intervention services for conflicted youth and their families, and respite care for youth aged 11-17, in Greater Bridgeport.  We offer a combination of in-house care at two leased apartments, one for boys and one for girls; and host homes.  Reconciliation rate with families for children who participate in the residential program is 95% up to three months after reunion.  We offer “wrap around” services of counseling, mentoring and academic assistance.  Host home stays average ten days or less.

Project Learn is the only after-school academic tutorial program located in the Bridgeport Housing Authority’s Trumbull Gardens, providing services there since 1969.  We are also the only academic program that partners with The Unique and Unified Program at Marina Village.  We recently became a partner with the Johns Hopkins Center for Gifted and Talented Youth. Finally, we are the only model that partners with churches that enables them to deliver quality service in a cost-effective manner (approximately $1,000 per pupil per school year = $5 day.)  We currently serve five centers in Bridgeport.

Bridge-Building is the only partnership known to us that promotes continuing Christian-Muslim-Jewish dialogue in Greater Bridgeport.  We are the only provider of chaplain services to Greater Bridgeport Mental Health.

 

THE BEST

 

The State of Connecticut Department of Correction’s most recent standards audit gave CO-OP Center 100% compliance on over 25 standards covering client services, facility and financial management, and more.

The Council’s financial and business integrity has resulted in our Hunger Outreach being named the fiduciary agent for FEMA hunger funds – $155,951 has been allocated for the current phase.

Bridge Building gets invited to facilitate serious, potentially explosive conversations on race, the most recent our work with the town of Stratford.

Project Learn provides a compassionate and child-friendly environment based on feedback by teachers and parents.  Our student-teacher ratio is a low 8 to 1, and our students show objective improvement by improved grades, citizenship and attendance at school.  One of our goals is to develop additional objective evaluative criterion beyond grades and attendance and, where possible given the high mobility of this population, to track student performance after leaving the program.

 

THE BIGGEST

 

Hunger Outreach is, by far, the biggest network of feeding programs in Greater Bridgeport.  Through 35 providers in stationary kitchens, mobile kitchens and food pantries, over 1.4 million meals were delivered in 2008-2009.  While some providers could function without our assistance, others would certainly close due to lack of funds and/or accounting expertise.  Our connections and credibility allow us to work cooperatively with the providers and with other networks and funders to feed hungry people.  We provide administrative costs, so 100% of the allocated FEMA funds ($155,951) meets hunger needs.

 

THE BIGGEST

 

Janus Center for Youth in Crisis is the only, and therefore the biggest, provider of temporary respite care in Greater Bridgeport since moving in 2002 from a long-term residential program to a host home/respite care program.  The benefit of respite care is significant, though difficult to quantify.  The youth enter this compassionate environment, avoiding the need to survive the destructive “street life” of Bridgeport.  The youth and parents are given an opportunity to cool off, a necessary element prior to successful reconciliation.    The community benefits, in both the short and long term, as a substantial number of youth are diverted from anti-social behavior, and the number of youth requiring state services is reduced.  The Janus Center processed a total of 396 referrals and has provided “wrap-around” services to 134 potentially delinquent youth who were referred from Juvenile Probation, schools, and other community agencies. The program provided respite Host Home care to a total of 34 youth for a total of 350 days. In most cases, the respite care component of the program proved essential in stabilizing the youth on the brink of becoming delinquent.

CO-OP Center provided services to more than 540 unduplicated clients in 2008-2009.  Over 400 of these clients received assistance obtaining one or more forms of legal identification; and more than 175 were assisted in securing employment.  CO-OP Center has provided leadership to the Bridgeport Reentry Collaborative, a coalition of fifteen local agencies providing comprehensive services for those returning to the community, and is involved in two, federally funded collaborative reentry pilot projects in Bridgeport.

CO-OP Center also participates in Proyecto Nueva Vida (New Life Project), a unique collaborative community-based program focused on providing comprehensive services to the Bridgeport Latino population with HIV/AIDS and/or substance abuse issues and a history of incarceration.  In April, 2009, the eight year old program was chosen as one of six culturally specific projects nationally to be evaluated by auditors from the University of South Florida. The evaluators will submit their recommendation by the end of this calendar year on which projects they are recommending to be replicated in other states.

 

SO WHY GIVE TO THE COUNCIL OF CHURCHES?

 

A gift to The Council of Churches of Greater Bridgeport is an investment.  Lives reclaimed are of sacred worth.  These reflections focus on giving as an investment.

We are a “company” with a 65 year history of reliable performance.  We seek continuous improvement and new opportunities while maintaining quality in core programs and spinning off programs when they are ready to be self-sufficient.  The Marina Village site of Project Learn is new.  The chaplain’s position at Greater Bridgeport Mental Health is new.  Our mission statement was revised in February, 2008 through a new initiative with the Harvard Business School Club of Connecticut’s Community Partners consultants, with balanced scorecard matrices in development for 2009-2010.  Our membership in the Connecticut Sponsoring Committee, a faith-based community organizing effort, is new; tracing its lineage, in part, to Greater Bridgeport Interfaith Action, an initiative of The Council.  Proyecto Nueva Vida was innovative at its 2001 inception and remains one of the few successful multiple-agency collaboratives.  Few may remember that The Watermark at 3030 Park Avenue, senior residence housing, was an initiative of The Council of Churches.

Our 2008 audit was unqualified by Venman and Company, finding that our internal controls and processes governing financial reporting either met or exceeded industry standards.

An investment in The Council saves taxpayer dollars

Bob Francis, Executive Director of the Regional Youth and Adult Substance Abuse Program (RYASAP) and member of the Connecticut Juvenile Justice Alliance, observes one child placed in a Department of Children and Families residential facility costs $100,000 per year.  Placed in the Connecticut Juvenile Training School in Middletown, the cost is $1/2 million.  He also noted that the daily cost for a teen placed in the Juvenile Training School is $1,370; and for DCF shelter care, $275.  Compare those figures to the $143 per day cost for host home shelter care through Janus Center for Youth in Crisis. 

The direct cost of supervising a prisoner in a Connecticut prison is almost $30,000/year.  Giving a returning ex-offender a second chance by hiring him/her creates a new taxpayer. Ex-offenders with community supervision who are engaged with a reentry program like CO-OP Center have an almost 50% higher rate of not re-offending according to DOC studies.

The feeding sites we help fund through Hunger Outreach provide hot, nutritional meals.  Because individual sites obtain funds and in-kind donations from other sources, an accurate overall per meal cost is difficult to calculate. A composite estimate is well under $1 per meal.  Area programs served over 1.4 million meals in 2008-2009.

Children and youth who do better in school are more likely to graduate.  2006 Department of Commerce statistics clearly demonstrate that a person’s level of education is intrinsically linked to one’s earning potential.  The annual salary of someone without a high school diploma averages below $19,000 – a high school graduate can expect to earn 37% more.  A college graduate earns on average 137% more that one without a high school diploma, and 73% more that one who was graduated from high school.  Individually, educated and competent citizens enjoy an enhanced quality of life – and together, as a group, they strengthen and grow the community in which they live.

Thank you for your interest in the work of The Council of Churches of Greater Bridgeport. 

 

Together, we

Turn Faith into Action…

Leveraging Hope and Changing Lives.

 

Most sincerely,

  

 Rev. Dr. Brian R. Bodt

President and Chief Executive Officer