CWS Emergency Response Specialist Joann Hale talks with Ironbound Community Corporation Director of Administration Mayra Ramirez outside the corporation’s offices, in the Ironbound District of Newark, N.J. Photo: Carol Fouke-Mpoyo/CWS
The American Red Cross has awarded Church World Service $305,395 for its work to help communities that are struggling to recover following Superstorm Sandy.
“There are many communities in the storm’s impact area where people are struggling,” CWS Associate Director for Emergency Response, Barry Shade said. “We help bring communities together so that everyone has a chance to recover, and this grant will help us extend our reach.”
The grant allows CWS to expand significantly its support to Sandy survivors through providing local long-term recovery groups with intensive training, consultation services and start-up assistance, with particular attention to identifying and serving communities of the most vulnerable survivors.
Since the storm, CWS emergency response specialists have reached out to affected communities up and down the East Coast to offer assistance. CWS “Recovery Tools and Training” workshops in New York and New Jersey this spring reached more than 900 people. Two more workshops will be held August 28 and 29 in West Virginia, to be followed by workshops in Connecticut and New Jersey.
With the Red Cross grant, CWS will intensify its schedule, adding in more trainings in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Rhode Island. CWS’s goal is 105 trainings and 60 in-person consultation meetings in Sandy-affected states between now and May 31, 2014.
CWS has decades of experience providing support to local long-term recovery groups throughout the United States. It helps these community-based groups organize to find and use the resources of survivors, the community, government programs and other partners to address cases of need. The focus is on the most vulnerable to sustain their physical, social, economic and spiritual well-being.
CWS has received approximately $600,000 for its Hurricane Sandy Appeal and has spent about $150,000 to date for trainings, for shipping of donated CWS Kits and Blankets (value: more than $1.1 million) and for undesignated “seed grants” – typically $5,000 – to long-term recovery groups. The remaining $450,000 will be used for grants, trainings and for food pantry support.