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Capital Area Community Action Agency, Inc.

Mary Ware

SOC 5630 Community Organizations & Analysis

Instructor: Mitra Rokni

October 23, 2020

Capital Area Community Action Agency offices in Tallahassee, Florida.

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The Capital Area Community Action Agency, Inc. (CACAA) is a community-based organization (CBO) based in Tallahassee, Florida.

The CBO is located at the 309 Office Plaza Drive Tallahassee, FL 32301 USA.

The agency’s mission is to provide a comprehensive seamless system of services and resources to diminish the detrimental effects of poverty, equip low-income earners with skills, and inspire them to be self-reliant (CACAA, 2020).

Overall, the main purpose of its mission is to enhance the general quality of people’s lives, and the community at large.

  • The Tallahassee-based Capital Area Community Action Agency helps people in crisis (CACAA, 2020).
  • It helps citizens to make ends meet.
  • Assists the poor in the community to become self-sufficient.
  • Specifically, it offers services such as housing, shelter, child care, utility bills, rent, and so on (CACAA, 2020).
  • Thousands of community members receive support from the CBO’s programs.

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The Capital Area Community Action Agency, Inc. was started in 1965 (CACAA, 2020).

The CBO was started as not-for-profit private organization to serve the residents of the Leon County alone.

It undertook programs to alleviate poverty in Liberty, Jefferson, Gadsden and other gulf counties in 1980.

The name was changed to reflect the area served by the CBO.

- At first, it was created as the Leon Country-Tallahassee Community Action Program (CACAA, 2020).

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It offers educational and development services

Operates an early development program.

Offers health care services.

Provides housing, utility and rent help.

  • The CBO administers numerous education and child development programs. These include the Head Start Program, and support for disabled children.
  • It ensures local disabled children receive individualized training, access to safe and well-equipped classrooms, and free nutritious meals and snacks (especially for infants).
  • The Early Development Program offers learning opportunities that focus on the children’s and adult’s social, intellectual, emotional, physical, and healthful growth.
  • On health care services, the CBO collaborates with local health care professionals to provide health care services.
  • The CBO helps with major common health conditions affecting senior citizens in Tallahassee and the adjoining counties like Leon, Gulf, and Jefferson, among others.
  • The CBO helps families with housing problems or needs (housing, utility, and rent) to prevent them from being evicted and or rendered homeless.

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The CACAA’s Head Start Program augments the social competence of children from underprivileged family backgrounds.

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It has an Emergency Shelter Program (ESP).

Has a weatherization program that helps people to save money.

Provides direct emergency assistance to people with financial problems.

Offers on-the job training.

  • The ESP is for people with temporary but emergency shelter needs. People or families with urgent but short-term need for shelter are assisted.
  • The CBO’s weatherization initiative addresses air-infiltration problems and funds door and window repair or replacement. In a nutshell, the weatherization program does minor repairs and improvements to the homes of poor families or individuals.

- Through the Leon DEAP – Direct Emergency Assistance Program, the CBO donates money to individuals or families experiencing temporary financial problems due reasons such as death of a spouse or loss of a job. The program also helps people with money to buy food, medicine, or to pay rent/utility.

  • The CACAA’s on-the job training aims to equip deserving individuals with the necessary skills to help them get employed.

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Operates project independence.

Offers utility bill assistance.

Operates Project Share.

Offers other financial aid.

  • The CACAA’s project independence assists the poor in the local community to break the cycle of poverty and become self-sufficient.
  • Through the Project Quincy, the CBO provides emergency utility bill aid to the disabled and the elderly (60 years and above) to residents of the Florida’s City of Quincy.
  • The community agency pays cooling bills to the elderly, sick and disabled through the Project Share which depends on grants and donations.
  • Through other financial aid program, the CACAA give vouchers for food buying, transportation, buying gasoline, and so on.

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The CACAA has undertaken a needs assessment to determine priorities that require resource allocation (Altschuld & David, 2010).

The general steps taken to perform needs assessment include:

1. Exploration and identification

2. Data gathering and analysis

3. Utilization

4. Evaluation

- By carrying out the needs assessment process, the organization determined the needs between the CBO’s current state and its future.

- Needs assessment helped the community action group to develop a plan of action to close the identified gaps (address the needs) in order to enable the organization achieve its future goals.

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Exploration and identification entailed exploring the apparent needs and discovering the hidden needs.

At the data gathering phase, the CBO collected the necessary information to better comprehend the needs.

At the utilization stage, the organization utilized the analyzed data to develop a plan of action and implement it.

Evaluation involved the organization evaluating the outcomes of its needs assessment (Altschuld & David, 2010).

  • The hidden needs may be hindering the organization from proceeding to achieve its targeted goals and objectives.
  • Once identified, all needs need to be ranked in their order of significance.
  • Once the data is collected, it needs to be analyzed.
  • In the plan of action, priorities are set, solutions are analyzed, and a cost-benefit analysis done. A plan to execute the solution is formulated, and resources for the appropriate implementation of the solution are allocated (Altschuld & David, 2010).
  • Evaluation helps in determining why the plan of action succeeded or finding the weaknesses that affect the plan of action or needs assessment (Altschuld & David, 2010).

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The CACAA is governed by the Board of Directors.

Members of the board are volunteers who are either elected of appointed to their positions.

The staff or employees are headed by the Chief Executive Officer (CEO).

All stakeholders (government, community, private businesses, and so on) are equitably represented in leadership.

  • The Board of Directors is the highest-ranking governing body.
  • Board members represent the private, public and low-income sectors (CACAA, 2020).
  • The CEO runs the day-to-day operations of the CBO.

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The CBO has a weatherization program in which it repairs homes of disabled or disadvantaged members of the Tallahassee community.

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The CACAA develops social capital through communication.

Improved collaboration – the community-based agency collaborates with all the stakeholders (Novkov, 2019).

Building trust – the CBO must build trust between its diverse teams.

Ensuring reciprocity – this facilitates interactions between individuals (Novkov, 2019).

  • Developing social capital cannot be achieved without communication. That is to say, the management of the CBO has to find an approach to enhance its interaction with individuals, the community, and other partners (Novkov, 2019).
  • Communication and collaboration entails sharing of information between the staff, departments, and external stakeholders.

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Religious beliefs (McCambridge, 2012).

Racism and ethnicity.

Language.

Food.

Cultural norms (McCambridge, 2012).

  • Religious beliefs, ethnicity, and race may affect the CBO’s work at the community level (McCambridge, 2012).
  • Language differences may affect the agency’s outreach programs especially in areas where different languages (English and Latin) are used.
  • Bearing in mind that America and more so Florida is a melting pot of cultures, foods that differ from the American cuisine may be unavailable for individual’s who qualify for food rations from the CBO.

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Financial fraud.

Poor accountability.

Paying lavish salaries and perks.

Conflict of interest (Springer, 2016).

Tax evasion (Springer, 2016).

  • Often, failure to engage an independent auditor to review the CBO’s source of income and expenditures may lead to negligence and embezzlement of finances donated to the organization.
  • Poor accountability means funds not going where they are intended or supposed to go.
  • Bestowing lavish salaries and perks upon its leaders such as CEOs and board members may be considered unethical, especially if it depends on donations and funding rather than doing its own fundraising.
  • Conflict of interest may arise when, for instance, the CBO tries to award tenders to an executive, board member, or donor, among other close senior leaders (Springer, 2016).
  • Tax evasion may arise when the CBO fails to pay taxes for business income that is not related to its nonprofit mission.

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Some of the changes that the CACAA will experience in the next ten years include:

An empowered community.

Drastically reduced poverty levels.

Highly employed population.

A healthy community.

  • Programs run by the CBO currently aim to help people in crisis; hence, in the next 10 years, the CACAA will have assisted many community members with education and skills that will give them employment opportunities.
  • this will greatly decrease poverty rates in Tallahassee; thus, only a few people will need the CBO’s assistance.

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Altschuld, J., & David, D. K. (2010). Needs assessment: An overview. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Capital Area Community Action Agency (CACAA). (2020). About capital area community action. Retrieved from http://capitalareacommunityactionagency.com/about-capital-area- community-action/

Novkov, A. (2019). Successful organizations run on social capital. Retrieved from https://kanbanize.com/blog/successful-organizations-run-on-social- capital/

McCambridge, R. (2012). External influences on nonprofit management: A wide-angle view. Retrieved from https://nonprofitquarterly.org/external-influences-on-nonprofit- management-a-wide-angle-view/

Springer, C. G. (2016). Ethical issues in nonprofit organizations. In: Farazmand A. (eds) Global encyclopedia of public administration, public policy, and governance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31816- 5_2333-1