The Brattleboro Representative Town Meeting Human Services Committee submitted recommended funding for human services nonprofits at the forthcoming Annual Representative Town Meeting on Saturday, March 22 under the cover of this letter, signed by members David Miner (chair), Robin Morgan, Tara O'Brien, Trevor Stannus, Avery Thompson, and Sarah Turbow.
BRATTLEBORO-The Human Services allocation in the Brattleboro town budget is a longstanding practice to meet crucial community needs. These include food and financial insecurity; homelessness; disability support, mental health treatment; substance abuse prevention and treatment; harm reduction; elder, child, and adolescent health and well-being; and BIPOC, LGBTQ+, refugee, and immigrant support and safety.
The role of the Human Services Committee is to review and evaluate requests from organizations seeking financial support from the Town of Brattleboro to meet these needs, and to recommend funding levels for approval by the Brattleboro Representative Town Meeting (RTM).
At RTM in 2024, a budget of up to $461,276 (2% of the overall Town budget) was approved for the Committee to allocate. This year, 52 organizations requested funding amounting to $770,437, over $300,000 more than available.
What follows is an explanation of how the committee came to its recommendations for allocating the funds to meet the Town's most urgent needs while staying within budget.
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This year, seven people volunteered and were selected to serve on the Committee, six of whom continued through the end of the process. Meetings began in September 2024; each meeting was warned, open to the public, and available to attend via Zoom.
Application materials were made available on the town website and were also emailed to all prior years' applicants. Additionally, the Committee sponsored a hybrid informational meeting, which allowed organizations and the public to ask questions and seek clarification of the process.
The next several months were spent in over 35 hours of meetings and reviewing and discussing over 1,200 pages of application materials. Each application was scored according to a rubric, which considers the fiscal management and health of the applying organization, the need for and impact of the applying program, and the extent to which it provides services specifically to the residents of Brattleboro.
Applications were scored individually by Committee members, with the exception of those who recused themselves from evaluating specific organizations because of conflicts of interest. Variations in individual scores were reviewed and discussed; results almost always showed consistency within a narrow range that revealed consensus among Committee members.
The resulting average score enabled Committee members to address ultimate funding decisions in a transparent, fair, and equitable manner.
The Committee's application, processes, procedures, and scoring rubric (at brattleboro.gov/human-services-review-committee) were extensively reviewed and revised last year, for the 2023-24 funding cycle. (Those changes were detailed in last year's version of this letter.) This year, the Committee reviewed those changes and determined that they continued to best reflect current community needs.
Accordingly, the Committee's process remained the same, with one exception: This year, responding to last year's feedback, organizations that were poised to receive no funding from the Town were notified and invited to meet with the Committee. Several organizations took this opportunity to clarify aspects of their applications and receive feedback from the Committee. In some cases, upon review, partial funding was ultimately granted.
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The unprecedented requests in funding reflect the real and urgent needs in our community.
This was a year marked by inflation and rising food costs, housing shortages, and rising rents; the phasing out of Covid-era federal and state grants and programs; and visible problems related to mental health, substance use, and homelessness in our community which have become the subject of furious public debate.
Among other alarming statistics cited in funding applications were a 42% rise in Groundworks' waitlist for overnight shelter and a doubling of the use of the Putney Foodshelf by Brattleboro residents, comprising 28% of their overall visitors, and including more than 1,700 children. These issues impact all of us, directly and indirectly.
Confronting these realities required the Committee to take into consideration the areas of greatest need. Consequently, 51% of the proposed allocation is toward addressing substance use, mental and physical health, housing challenges, and victim support and safety services; 30% is toward youth, elder, and disabled care; and 19% is toward food access.
Difficult decisions had to be made, and several applications from deserving organizations received no funding or far less than requested. Other efforts were rejected for being outside of the scope of the Committee.
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What remains in the Committee's proposal includes, among many other things, free and subsidized after-school programming, meal delivery for homebound seniors, emergency weatherization and housing repairs, thousands of pounds of food for community pantries, overnight shelter, ESL and GED classes, recovery coaches and space for 12-step meetings, dental care for the uninsured, Narcan to prevent death from overdose, and the free summer lunch program for school-aged children.
It also funds programs, case managers, mental health workers, and peer support to respond to mental health crises, address isolation among at-risk populations, and support individuals in navigating Medicare, staying housed, finding safety from domestic violence, accessing affordable housing, and obtaining early-intervention developmental services for children.
Cumulatively, 25,000 Brattleboro residents were assisted by the organizations that applied; in our town of 12,000 residents, this represents, on average, two services used by each person who lives here.
We live in a small town that does not have the capacity to provide many of these services directly through, for example, a Department of Homeless Services or a Department of Housing. Instead, we rely on these organizations to fill in the gaps; it's hard to imagine what would happen to the health and safety of our town if they didn't.
Given that, the Committee believes that human services funding is absolutely crucial - and the least we can offer in exchange. Some organizations simply could not operate without funding from the town, and others must shore up against expected cuts to the federal funding they rely upon in the coming year.
Other organizations may have larger budgets but provide such essential services to the town that they warrant public funding. Groundworks, for example, is this year's largest proposed recipient of funds; yet the $75,000 that we propose comes down to just $20.89 per Brattleboro resident they serve with food and shelter support over the course of a year. (This figure is calculated using an unduplicated count of Brattleboro residents served between July 1, 2023 and June 30, 2024.)
As residents of this town, we are concerned about rising taxes and taking on unwieldy costs. This is why we take our responsibility as members of Representative Town Meeting and its Human Services Committee seriously, and engage in a rigorous, months-long process to ensure that our public funds are being spent well and effectively. We also understand that we and our neighbors rely on these organizations to provide services where our town cannot.
For these reasons, we believe that the $461,276 allocation proposed here is well worth the cost for the services it provides.
The Committee is proud to put forth the funding of these quality, vital, and mission-driven efforts for Representative Town Meeting's consideration.
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