A grant program created five years ago that’s sent millions of dollars to organizations serving communities with high rates of people returning from incarceration could soon end unless state lawmakers come up with more money to pay for it.
Established in a 2020 state law, the Community Empowerment and Reinvestment Grant, or CERG, program was designed to fund a range of services, including job training, high school dropout prevention, housing stabilization, addiction treatment and mental health care.
It supports 66 community organizations across the state that offer reentry programs for people returning from incarceration, and which work to prevent young people from entering the criminal justice system.
One of those organizations is Dorchester-based MissionSafe, which co-founder Nikki Flionis said works with a lot of youth who are either coming out of prison or on a pathway to jail.
Flionis said MissionSafe was first awarded about $400,000 in annual CERG grant money, and that dropped to $200,000 as the program was cut back.
She described MissionSafe as a “transformation program” that helps young people feel safe so that they can make good decisions and broaden their horizons, typically working with them over the course of about two to five years.
“Home life is tough. In this particular time in history, getting food is tough. Finding housing is tough,” Flionis said. “Having the right clothing in winter is tough, and we work on all that stuff with them.”
The state budget for the fiscal year that starts in July, as proposed by Gov. Maura Healey and passed by the Massachusetts House, does not include any funding for the CERG grants. The $63 billion budget bill is still being debated, and when the state Senate takes it up next week, an amendment proposed by Roxbury Sen. Liz Miranda would add $15 million to keep the program running.
At MissionSafe, Flionis said the CERG grant accounts for about 10% of the organization’s budget in the current year, down from 20% in the previous two years.
“This is going to be a very difficult year all around to raise money, and the loss of that key chunk of funding is going to impact us and impact how many staff I can keep, how many young people I can work with,” she said.
In 2023, Healey’s Executive Office of Economic Development launched a multi-year procurement round for the grant program, in which applicants could receive funding annually for three years. That year, the state budget appropriated $15 million for the program. The next year’s budget allocated half as much money, and economic development officials tapped a workforce trust fund to keep the funding levels stable.
Lawmakers did not include any money for CERG in the current state budget, and the economic development office put up another $7.5 million from the trust fund in the last year of the three-year funding round to keep the program running.
But starting in July, the economic development office plans to sunset the CERG program when the three-year procurement ends this summer.
The Healey administration says a new program which offers Community Workforce Partnership Grants, would supports similar projects. But advocates with the Massachusetts Reentry Coalition say many of the 66 CERG-funded programs wouldn’t qualify for that pool of money because they don’t offer job-training. Instead, they provide help with areas like housing, food access or mental health services.
Jamal Gooding, executive director of People Affecting Community Change in Brockton, was one of about 100 people who rallied at the State House in March to call for more CERG funding. He said people who have been incarcerated “need more than a job” when they’re released.
“They may need transportation, they may need an ID that they don’t even have $35 for, they may need a pair of boots, absolutely. But they also may need mental health counseling,” Gooding told GBH News.
He said CERG money “was absolutely instrumental in helping us do a lot of things,” like providing stipends to help men coming out of prison get new clothes after serving long sentences.
“Men were coming home with — I’ve got horror stories — clothes that wouldn’t even fit and nothing else, or it was winter and they got arrested in the summer,” Gooding said.
