The Coalition on Human Needs is sharing sequester impacts and challenging people of faith to raise their voices for the less fortunate. Real cuts are harming our most vulnerable children. We need to remember that one in five children in NC is already living in poverty and many in wrenching poverty.
The Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) reports that members of Congress are hearing a lot from Pentagon contractors right now. But congressional staff tell us they’re not hearing enough from other people who are seeing—and in some cases feeling—the effects of deep cuts to human needs programs. FCNL challenges us to let our Senators and Representatives hear from us. The message we’re hearing from Congress is that persistence matters
We are starting to see plans emerging for cutting the number of children served by Head Start next fall. Programs made one-time cuts to get through the end of this school year, by closing early, eliminating summer programs, reducing staff benefits, etc. In this week’s update, you’ll read about 68 children to be dropped from Head Start programs run by Riverbend Head Start and Family Services in Illinois, and 80 fewer children served in central New York. Meanwhile, the Machinist Training Institute in Detroit, which has a 70-percent job placement rate, is now on indefinite hold, and lay-offs are affecting health care and housing programs.
Click here for this week’s lowlights.
Click here for the page with all the weekly impact summaries since March 5 (and other sequestration information, too).
We encourage you to contact your Congressional delegation or attend forums they may hold, to tell them to:
- Stop the cuts to programs that serve children, homeless veterans, low-income seniors, and the unemployed;
- Stop letting rich corporations and individuals get away with low tax rates while low-income people get hit with cuts that are holding back economic progress for all of us;
- Champion a plan in Congress that halts the worsening cuts and invests in education, health care, and communities, while demanding fairness from those at the top and responsible savings from the Pentagon.There’s still an email you can send on the CHN website, with a similar message – why not?
FCNL encourages us to remind your Senators that the federal government could buy a home for every homeless veteran in the United States with the amount of money that Lockheed-Martin receives in just one year. You can find more of these comparisons here.
–Sandy Irving, Volunteer Program Associate
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