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Ohio Community Development
News
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Volume 4, Issue 7 | September 30, 2013
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Greetings!
Below is an update with a collection of news items that are relevant to Community Development in Ohio and the Ohio CDC Association.
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Spotlight
|  The Annual Conference Is in 10 Days!
Cincinnati is the heart of Ohio's largest metro area, and the "Queen City" has continued to prosper despite the challenges facing many Midwestern cities like it. Local CDC's have led the resurgence of its historic downtown and neighborhood fabric. Thanks to their leadership, Cincinnati is the city that can't stop and won't stop!
Join us at the Hilton Cincinnati Netherland Plaza on October 10-11, 2013 for Ohio CDC Association's 29th Annual Conference! For more information about the conference, click here!
This year's keynote speaker will be Christopher P. Leinberger, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, President of LOCUS, a coalition of real estate developers pursuing smart growth policies, and author of The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream. Other featured speakers include green development pioneer Kaid Benfield, community organizing guru Jim Capraro, and cutting-edge urbanist Kyle Ezell, and other workshop sessions will look at creative financing, local food, and form-based codes, among other topics.
There's even a chance to ride a Segway through downtown. Register Today! |
Upcoming Events
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Event and Date
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Location
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Registration
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Annual Conference
October 10-11, 2013
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Cincinnati Hilton Netherland Plaza
35 W. 5th St.
Cincinnati, Ohio 45202
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Nuts & Bolts of IDAs
October 30, 2013
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Columbus Metropolitan Library - Main Branch
96 S. Grant Ave.
Columbus, OH 43215
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Tactical Technology Planning
October 30, 2013
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Webinar
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Sustainability & Universal
Design for Homes
November 18, 2013
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Jewish Community Center of Columbus
1125 College Ave,
Columbus OH 43209
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information!
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Effective Communication with Donors and Prospects
November 20, 2013
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Webinar
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Community Development:
The Art of the Deal
November 21, 2013
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TBA
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Rehab Lab: Advancing Healthy
Homes
December 10-11, 2013
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TBA
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Ohio Microenterprise
Working Group
December 13, 2013
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TBA
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Save the Date!
Ohio CDC Association Annual Conference
October 10-11
Cincinnati Hilton Netherland Plaza
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Revitalizing Ohio's Vacant Properties: Tools & Policies to Transform Communities Conference
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Ohio Housing Conference
Registration is open for the November 5th - 7th, 2013 Ohio Housing Conference - Rising Towards Tomorrow.
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Input Sought from OHFA
The OHFA Office of Planning, Preservation and Development is seeking your input on the customer service that they provide to their stakeholders. Please take the Planning, Preservation and Development Customer Service Survey to help them identify and plan for areas of improvement. All responses will be confidential and anonymous.
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Housing Assistance Council Updated
HAC's Rural Data Portal is an easy to use, on-line resource that provides essential information on the social, economic, and housing characteristics of communities in the United States. The rural data portal provides over 350 data indictors for your community. Most of the information provided in portal comes from HAC tabulations of the 2010 Census of Population and Housing, the American Community Survey (ACS) and Home Mortgage Disclosure Act Data.
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CountyCorp Youth Build
On the hottest day of the year, nearly 40 YouthBuild/AmeriCorps volunteers joined with CountyCorp staff to install landscaping at the newly completed home at 3552 Evansville Ave. in Ft. McKinley (Dayton). Adam Blake, CountyCorp VP of Housing grilled up hamburgers and hotdogs for the hungry workers, and there were plenty of refreshing cold drinks to help them battle the high humidity and mid 90 degree temperatures.
If you haven't heard of YouthBuild, it's an awesome program, new at CountyCorp this year. YouthBuild/AmeriCorps is funded by the U.S. Department of Labor and the Corporation for National Service. It targets at-risk youth and ex-offending adults 18-24 years old who have not completed high school. The program provides them with life skills, job training and professional certifications in the construction field. They earn their high school diplomas or GEDs, while gaining industry required credentials necessary to enter the job market. Participants also receive secondary education credits, in the form of AmeriCorps service hours, to be used at local colleges and trade schools.
Learn More by clicking here! |
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Green Organizational Transformation and Building Sustainable Organizations Grants
Enterprise is currently accepting proposals for grant funding from community development corporations (CDCs) and community housing development organizations (CHDOs) committed to comprehensively transform their design, development, property management and resident engagement practices at the organizational level to fully realize the health, economic and environmental benefits of green affordable housing. Through this Request For Proposals, Enterprise will award 18 grants, not to exceed $50,000 each, to support CDCs and CHDOs seeking to deepen their commitment to green across their organizations, throughout their development and asset management practice and in coordination with larger community efforts. To view the RFP and to apply online by October 4th click here.
Building Sustainable Organizations: Grant funds are available to help organizations improve long-term financial stability, preserve affordable housing, build capacity to provide supportive housing and preserve/enhance the delivery system for affordable housing. Examples include but are not limited to exploring joint ventures, strategic collaboration/shared services and preservation planning for rental housing, including maturing Housing Credit properties. Proposals are due on October 15, 2013.
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National Endowment for the Arts Releases Funding Guidelines for Our Town
Now available on the NEA website are guidelines and application materials for Our Town, the agency's primary creative placemaking grants program. Pending availability of funding, grants will range from $25,000 to $200,000. Our Town will invest in creative and innovative projects in which communities, together with arts and/or design organizations and artists, seek to improve their quality of life, encourage greater creative activity, foster stronger community identity and a sense of place, and revitalize economic development. The application deadline is January 13, 2014 at 11:59 PM ET. A webinar to learn more about this funding opportunity will be held on November 4, 2013 at 2:00 PM ET. For program inquiries, please email [email protected] with specific questions and a design specialist will respond.
Now in its fourth year, Our Town has provided $16 million to support 190 projects in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. These projects are diverse in geographic distribution, number and types of partnerships, artistic discipline, and type of project. In FY 2013 alone, 35 of the 59 grants supported projects in communities with populations under 100,000.
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Community Development Collaborative of Greater Columbus Operational Support and Housing Development Grant
The Community Development Collaborative of Greater Columbus recently released their 2014 Operational Support and Housing Development Grant application. The maximum award of each grant is $75,000. The grant process is competitive and awards are not automatically renewed. Collaborative operating grant dollars are not intended to fund direct construction activities; i.e. physical improvements to real estate or real estate development projects. For more information and to view the application, please click here.
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For current postings Click Here.
Organizations with employment opportunities in the housing and community development field, please send your employment notices to Mark Harris, at [email protected]. |
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Neighborhood Infrastructure Assistance Program Status
OCDCA along with coalition partners has been working to expand legislative and coalition support for the innovative tax credit program to assist communities with physical and economic revitalization. It is anticipated that House and Senate sponsor testimony and the first committee hearing will take place this autumn. Sponsored by Senator Bill Beagle (R-Tipp City) and Representative Jim Butler (R-Oakwood), the companion bills of SB 149 and HB 219 would create a program that will provide tax credits to for-profit corporations that invest in place-based, catalytic community projects. The Neighborhood Infrastructure Assistance Program (NIAP) is intended to help leverage private dollars for community projects critical for the attractiveness and economic competitiveness of the state. For more information about this program, please click here or contact Nate Coffman at [email protected] or (614) 461-6392 x 207. If you support the creation of this program, you can add your name to the growing list of private, public and nonprofit supporters. We'll keep you posted as the legislation moves through the General Assembly.
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CHDO Certification and Operating Grant
The list of 2013-2014 state certified Community Housing Development Organizations (CHDO) was released and is available here. It is anticipated that the CHDO operating grant program application will be approved at the October OHFA Board meeting and distributed to CHDOs shortly thereafter.
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Federal Government Shutdown Looms
One day prior to the start of FY14, Congress has not passed appropriations bills for any department and is not close to reaching agreement on a continuing resolution (CR) to continue to fund the federal government. Unless something unforeseen happens on today to break the impasse, the federal government will shut down at midnight. Early Sunday morning, the House rejected the clean CR passed by the Senate on Friday, September 27 and instead again made the CR dependent on delay of implementation and other changes to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which the Senate and President Obama have vowed to reject. The House of Representatives has been divided over how to proceed with a CR. The week of September 16, the House introduced a CR to continue funding at FY13 funding levels that was pulled from floor consideration because it lacked sufficient votes for passage. House Democrats objected to continuing post-sequester funding levels and some House Republicans insisted that the CR should include language to repeal funding for the ACA. The House then passed a redrafted CR that prohibited funding for the ACA and would provide FY13 post-sequester funding levels through December 15. The Senate resumed session today and rejected the most recent House version. There is scarce time to negotiate the differences between the House and Senate and a temporary government shutdown seems unavoidable. Looming in the near future is the even greater consequence of inaction by Congress to raise the debt ceiling by October 17th that would lead to turmoil in the broader national and international economy.
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OMB Calls for Replacing Sequestration
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a "Sequestration Update Report" as required by the Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA). The report describes the actions that would be necessary to enforce the revised BCA discretionary spending caps under the House and Senate FY14 budgets. OMB finds that both the House and Senate proposed FY14 budgets would be out of compliance with the BCA discretionary spending caps for FY14 and require the administration to sequester funds. In FY13 nearly all HUD and USDA Rural Housing Service programs were cut due to the sequester. In its report, OMB comments on the first round of the sequester saying, "economists estimate that the reductions implemented on March 1, 2013 are harming the economy and costing hundreds of thousands of jobs."
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U.S. Median Income and Poverty Rates Unchanged in 2012
Median household income and nationwide poverty rates remained largely unchanged between 2011 and 2012, according to the U.S. Census' Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2012. The data in the report are from the latest Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS ASEC), which asked detailed questions about income, poverty and health insurance levels to measure change at the national and regional levels. The study shows that while the median household income did not fall for the first time since 2007, the 2012 figure ($51,017) was still 8.3% lower in real terms than the 2007 median household income) and 9% lower than 1999 when median household income was at its peak. Poverty rates also did not improve: the official poverty rate was 15% in 2012 with 46.5 million people living in poverty.
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Nonprofits and Lobbying
It is common for non-profits to have the misconception that they are prohibited from lobbying and advocacy activities. An article by Russell Balthis of Benesch Attorneys at Law summarizes the rules.
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Thanks for subscribing and reading! Please feel free to email us with any comments or suggestions!
Sincerely,
David Foust
Membership Manager
Ohio CDC Association
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Office: (614) 461-6392
Fax: (614) 461-1011
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33 North 3rd Street
Suite 200
Columbus, Ohio 43215
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Copyright � 2013. All Rights Reserved.
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