Remaking Urban Citizenship by Andrew M. Greeley

Author:Andrew M. Greeley [Greeley, Andrew M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781315128436
Google: BPQZtAEACAAJ
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2017-01-15T04:36:08+00:00

Access to Public Resources

Cities provide important resources to their residents through services, access to space and buildings, and disbursement of funding for programs or initiatives that the city does not provide directly. Communities with more publicly present organizations are better able to access these services and resources.

These dynamics are most evident in city contracting and public grant-making to nonprofit organizations. Often 501(c)3 status is necessary to receive certain kinds of funding (Bell, et al., 2006). Inequality in organizational capacity can thus lead to funding inequality for immigrant-centered services, which are sorely needed but often inadequately resourced. A needs assessment conducted in 2000 by Santa Clara County found that, compared with US-born residents, immigrants had between 2 and 4 times greater the service needs, yet they received only half as many services as the native-born (Santa Clara County Office of Human Relations, 2004).

An analysis of San Jose's disbursement of federal Community Development Block Grants found similar inequalities (de Graauw, et al., 2010). In 2005-06, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development dispersed $11,476,479 to San Jose in CDBG funds. Added to carry-over funds from prior years, the city made $13,150,009 in expenditures to city agencies, non-profit organizations, and other grantees. The amount allocated to community-based organizations was about $4.1 million, which was disbursed to 38 groups.13 Among the 38 organizations, only 7 groups (18 percent of grantees) were primarily oriented to immigrants. These immigrant-serving organizations received 23 percent of the total grant monies allocated to community-based organizations ($957,307 out of $4,082,095).

It is worth noting that the proportion of organizations funded, and the amount of money given to these organizations, is roughly similar to the proportion of immigrant-origin organizations among all registered non-profits in San Jose (21 percent). This suggests that the source of the funding inequality for the city's immigrants—who make up almost 39 percent of residents—lies less in the process of allocation to formal nonprofits and more in the relative lack of such immigrant-oriented nonprofits in the city. As we noted above, major segments of immigrant civil society are not registered as nonprofit organizations, and less formalized groups, of course, are ineligible for this type of city support.

Access to other city resources is also affected by organizational capacity. Cities can provide local groups with access to sports fields, meeting space, and venues for cultural productions often at no cost or with a modest fee. Such public goods greatly facilitate residents' ability to create a thriving civil society, which includes volunteers who run baseball leagues (or, in Silicon Valley, cricket and soccer leagues) as well as those who teach children the dances and songs of their parents' homeland. Access through organizational capacity, for example, is an underlying factor in the frustration expressed by a young, second-generation Latina who heads up an Aztec dance troupe:

The city Parks and Recreation Department provided space [for rehearsal] and for years it was $50 for every three months. But a couple of years ago, it was really stressful because you have to be a nonprofit [501(c)(3)] organization, and we don't have that.

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