10-01-2002, 11:04 AM
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#1
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Contributor
Join Date: Jun 2000
Location: Los Angeles area
Posts: 40,549
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Faith based funding (aka vote buying)
<a href="http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020930-91570420.htm" target="_blank">Bishop trains pastors to win grants </a>
Quote:
Bishop Harold Ray, who three years ago opened the National Center for Faith Based Initiative at his West Palm Beach, Fla., megachurch, passed through Washington last week for a two-day "economic empowerment" forum, funded partly by federal grants to impart management skills to grass-roots religious workers.
"We want to get you to the point where you can function," Bishop Ray told a gathering of 350 mostly black pastors at the Renaissance Hotel in the District.
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Bishop Ray began the tour in April with partial funding from the Prudential Financial Group, and last week was granted $2.1 million as one of about 20 recipients of a total $30 million from the Compassion Capital Fund (CCF) appropriated this year to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
On Thursday, HHS will announce all the grants at a major event in the District, an agency official said. "What this fund mainly does is provide a way for [ministers] to learn from people who know how to do projects and make grant requests," the official said.
The charitable-choice law has allowed ministries to bid for federal grants to provide welfare services since 1996. But the Bush administration proposed the CCF as a way to pool government and foundation money to train grass-roots charitable groups.
Groups such as Bishop Ray's have been called "intermediaries" in the training process.
The $30 million was appropriated by Congress because the CCF has not yet been legislated. The fund is part of a House bill, and is mirrored in the Charity, Aid, Recovery and Empowerment (CARE) Act that Senate backers hope to bring to a vote in the next two weeks before Congress recesses for the election season.
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