Catholic Charities drops refugee, foster programs

By Daniel Patrick Sheehan, Of The Morning Call

Like hundreds of refugees before him, Mu Kpaw began a new life in America with the help of Catholic Charities, the most visible and active social service agency in the Diocese of Allentown.

Mu, 35, had fled turmoil in Burma as a young man, crossing into Thailand and spending years in a refugee camp. In 2007, his fortunes changed, as Burmese refugees who had registered with the United Nations were allowed to resettle in the United States.

Catholic Charities brought Mu and his wife and three children over and, in a typically ecumenical way of doing business, partnered with a Methodist church that helped the family find housing and employment. They settled in Emmaus and have since moved to Lower Macungie Township. But Mu, now an American citizen with a job at a lighting company, still stays in touch with Catholic Charities.

"I do contact them in case of things I am not familiar with," Mu said, speaking of the occasional cultural puzzlements or bureaucratic mysteries that can challenge newcomers. "There are so many things I don't know about."

Mu is a success story, one of some 1,400 since Catholic Charities started its refugee resettlement program in 1975 to aid Vietnamese fleeing their homeland after the fall of Saigon.

But the program has quietly ended. So has the agency's venerable foster care program, which found stable families for hundreds of children displaced from their homes by domestic troubles.

In the first case, federal funding for the Office of Refugee Resettlement — part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — has been a target of deep cuts in recent years and continues to face the knife. The appropriation recommended for 2013 by a House budget subcommittee is $658 million, about $112 million less than the current year.

The decline in federal funds has meant fewer clients for the public and private agencies that partner with the government in resettlement. Catholic Charities Executive Director Pam Russo said the agency placed 137 refugees in the 2010 fiscal year, 69 the following year and 43 through the middle of this year.

At that point, the agency decided to get out of the resettlement business. However, Russo said it will continue to assist families that have already been resettled, providing job assistance and other services. And traditional immigration services, such as document assistance and citizenship classes, will continue.

The foster care program was dropped because of an increased emphasis by the state on in-home counseling and other strategies aimed at keeping families intact. That dramatically cut the number of children in need of foster care, Russo said. The agency placed 147 children in 2008 but only 41 this year. It had placed nearly 700 since 1991.

With those programs gone, Russo said the agency — which was incorporated as the Catholic Social Agency in 1961, the year the diocese was founded, and known by that name until 2005 — will redirect its resources across the diocese, which includes Berks, Carbon, Lehigh, Northampton and Schuylkill counties.

It has cut seven positions, mostly because of the dropped programs, and will move forward with 42 employees managing what is generally a massive clientele, especially in recessionary times. Last year alone, the agency aided more than 32,000 people.

"You want to focus on core services," Russo said, rattling off a list of them: elder care, marriage and family counseling, infant adoption.

A major portion of the money for these programs comes from government sources. In 2011, revenues were $4.6 million, with nearly $1.9 million coming from government.

The diocese provided a little over $1 million more, about half of which came through donations to the Bishop's Annual Appeal, the major yearly fundraiser. Private grants, fees, fundraising and miscellaneous donations comprise the rest.

Given the state of the economy in the past several years, it is perhaps no surprise that the Allentown agency isn't alone in scaling back or refocusing. In the first quarter of 2012, 34 percent of Catholic Charities offices reported cutting programs or reducing services, according to a survey by Catholic Charities USA, a national lobbying office in Washington, D.C.

The majority of offices also reported an increase in requests for help from the working poor and homeless. The greatest needs were in emergency financial assistance and utilities assistance, where about 60 percent of agencies reported putting clients on waiting lists or turning them away.

By far the biggest expense for the Allentown agency is services to children, which accounted for nearly $1.3 million of the expenditures in 2011. Other programs include pregnancy support and the ecumenical kitchen at the former Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in Allentown.

The latter, which will mark its 30^th year in November, remains one of the most vital of all Catholic Charities outreaches, serving more than 40,000 meals a year to indigent and homeless individuals and families.

Like all other Catholic Charities services, it is open to people of all faiths.