NeighborWorks America released its ranking list of their 82 NeighborWorks HomeOwnership Centers.  The Portland Housing Center was number 3 following New York City Neighborhood Housing Services and Great Falls Neighborhood Housing Services a statewide organization.  The NeighborWorks HomeOwnership Center rankings are based on number of new homeowners, whose purchases were ‘facilitated’ by a center’s home buyer education, counseling and/or financial assistance.  The Portland Housing Center’s served 869 home buyers with education and counseling who purchased homes from January 1, 2003 to September 30, 2005.

The NeighborWorks HomeOwnership model is to prepare first time home buyers using group and one-on-one services to cover an array of information such as credit, qualifying for a loan, shopping for a home, understanding closing documents and working with real estate professionals.  From January 1, 2003 to September 30, 2005 the Portland Housing Center provided these services to 2,473 prospective home buyers.

In 2006, the Portland Housing Center will work to boost the home buying success of ethnic and racial groups.  To date, about 32 percent of new homeowners whose purchase was ‘facilitated’ by the Portland Housing Center are African-American, Latino, Asian and Native American.

First time buyers can attend a free home ownership orientation session.   Orientations are held the first three Wednesdays of each month from 6:00-7:00 PM.  The Portland Housing Center is located at 3233 NE Sandy Boulevard.   For more information call 503.282-7744 x101.

Help Kick Off AHN 2006 Housing Opportunity for Portland Advocacy Feb 8

Please join Affordable Housing NOW (AHN) Wednesday Feb 8 at 9:15 a.m. at Portland City Hall and help kick off our 2006 Housing Opportunity for Portland advocacy initiative.

AHN is continuing our advocacy on the $30 Million Housing Investment Fund ($13 secured, $17 to go) as well as asking the City Council to ensure that public Urban Renewal Funds are used to meet Portland housing needs by requiring at least 30% of Urban Renewal funds to be dedicated to affordable housing.

If you support increasing housing opportunity for working families, seniors, people with disabilities and others currently being left behind by Portland's inflating housing market, come join Affordable Housing NOW! at City Hall of Feb 8. We will have one or two speakers that will make a very brief statement outlining our request for the Housing Investment Fund and Urban Renewal Reform.  The event will be a fun, exciting start to three month effort to secure needed resources during the 2006-07 City of Portland Budget process.

Want to download the specific AHN proposals?

$30 Million Housing Investment Fund

Urban Renewal Recommendations

If you would like more specific information about AHN! advocacy plan for the Housing Investment Fund and Urban Renewal Reform, come to a briefing Monday evening, February 6 from 6:30-7:30 pm at Community Alliance of Tenants office, 2710 NE 15th Ave (Augustana Lutheran Church). 

Questions? Contact Michael Anderson at (503) 335-9884 or mike@cdnportland.org

Housing Alliance Releases 2007 Housing Opportunity Agenda

The Housing Alliance announced its 2007 Housing Opportunities Agenda, outlining a 5-point plan that advocates for the state to use one-time windfalls, dedicate new sources of funds, and creatively employ policy tools to meet the critical housing needs of Oregon’s communities.  The Housing Opportunities Agenda emphasizes strategies to meet the housing needs hardworking Oregonian families relying on low wage jobs, as well as seniors, people with disabilities and others left behind by Oregon’s escalating housing market. 

The lead item for the 2007 Housing Opportunities Agenda proposal to allocate $100 million in a combination of one-time and ongoing revenues to house Oregon’s workers, seniors and people with disabilities. A portion of the $100 million would be used to build up the balance of the Housing Trust Fund from its current level of $12 million. Ongoing revenues would be dedicated to fund proven strategies to prevent the loss of existing affordable housing and to develop more.

The Housing Alliance specific targets for the funding are:

·       Develop new housing for very low income populations that the market cannot serve, including rehabilitating existing rental housing and keeping it affordable

·       Invest into the Housing Trust Fund to fund future development

·       End and Prevent Homelessness

·       Support vulnerable populations with permanent housing plus supportive services

·       Maintain a vital network of community based housing providers

·       Put homeownership in reach for more Oregonians

·       Meet farm workers’ needs for decent affordable housing

To read the full 2007 Housing Opportunity Agenda, go to: http://www.oregonhousingalliance.org/agenda.html

Candidates for Portland City Council will address resource needs and other issues about affordable housing in our community at a Community Development Network sponsored forum on Thursday, February 16, 2006, Noon – 1:30 PM at New Genesis Community Church. The Forum will feature candidates for the Commissioner seats #2 and # 3.

Candidates participating in the Forum running for Commissioner seat #2 are Ginny Burdick, Emily Boyles and incumbent City Commissioner Erik Sten.  Participating candidates running for Commissioner seat #3 are Bruce Broussard, Amanda Fritz, and Jeff Kogan who will be representing incumbent City Commissioner Dan Saltzman.

The February 16 City Council Candidates Forum is part of CDN’s regularly bi-monthly Public Forum series. In continuing the custom of these meetings, feel free to bring a brown bag lunch.  The forum will start promptly at noon.

This meeting space is wheelchair accessible by elevator.

Please call Karen Walker at CDN at 503-335-9884 to let us know if you will need to use the elevator, or if you have any other questions.

House Approves Budget Cutbacks of $39.5 Billion in Social Programs

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, Feb. 1 — House Republicans eked out a victory on a $39.5 billion budget-cutting package on Wednesday, with a handful of skittish Republicans switching their votes at the last minute in opposition to reductions in spending on health and education programs.

The vote helped President Bush deliver on his promise to rein in federal spending while underscoring deep anxiety within his party over cutting social welfare programs in an election year.

The measure represents the first major effort by lawmakers since 1997 to cut the growth of so-called entitlement programs, including student loans, crop subsidies and Medicaid, in which spending is determined by eligibility criteria.

It passed 216 to 214, with 13 Republicans voting against. The Senate, with Vice President Dick Cheney casting the decisive vote, approved the spending cuts in December. The bill now goes to the White House for Mr. Bush's signature.

Coming on the heels of the State of the Union address, the vote was a critical test of Mr. Bush's ability to hold his fractured party together.

The House also voted Wednesday to extend the broad antiterrorism bill known as the USA Patriot Act until March 10, giving House and Senate negotiators time to settle differences on another of Mr. Bush's priorities, a measure to revamp the act and make it permanent.

The spending bill, which covers a five-year period ending in 2010, will achieve savings of $6.4 billion in Medicare, the health care program for the elderly, through a variety of changes that include higher premiums for all beneficiaries, with steeper increases for the more affluent and a freeze in payments to home health care providers.

In the Medicaid health care program for the poor and disabled, $4.8 billion will be saved in part by increasing co-payments and reducing payments for prescription drugs.

Mr. Bush said that he looked forward to signing the legislation and that the budget proposal he would send to Congress on Monday "will continue to build on the spending restraint we have achieved."

After years of cutting into social programs, the budget vote spotlighted how difficult it will be for Mr. Bush to press ahead with even deeper cuts this year. While the bill has strong appeal to fiscal conservatives who are Mr. Bush's Republican base, it makes party moderates nervous — so much so that four switched their votes to oppose the bill after intensive lobbying from advocacy groups over the holiday break.

Determined to see the measure pass even as they knew it would make life tough for party members, Republican leaders waged their own intense lobbying campaign. Representative Roy Blunt of Missouri, the Republican whip and acting majority leader, could be seen on the House floor deep in conversation with his colleagues as the roll was being called, apparently counting votes until the last minute so he could determine which moderates could be released to vote no.

With House leadership elections set for Thursday, Mr. Blunt, the front-runner for majority leader, had a personal stake in the outcome.

"Clearly, if we hadn't won it would be a huge thing," Mr. Blunt said after the vote. "But it's really not about me. It's about the members coming back and taking a very tough vote."

Some tough that some moderates who voted in favor of the measure later felt compelled to defend themselves. Among them was Representative Sherwood Boehlert, Republican of New York, who called it "a very agonizing" decision. But Mr. Boehlert, one of three Republicans to vote against a recent tax-cutting bill, said he had become convinced that entitlement programs must be revamped before they gobbled up the entire federal budget.

"The present course is unsustainable," he said. "We can't keep cutting taxes and cutting revenues, while cutting programs to protect the most vulnerable in society."

But conservatives, who pushed hard within their caucus for the cuts, were delighted. Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana, a leader of a group of House conservatives, called the vote "a step toward restoring public confidence in the fiscal integrity of our national legislature."

With the Senate taking up a tax-cutting measure at the same time, Democrats used debate on the measure to sound what will be a major election-year theme: that Republicans are cutting taxes for the rich at the expense of services for the poor.

"A vote for this bill is a vote, literally, to take away from health care from our children so we can give more money to the super-rich," Representative Louise M. Slaughter, Democrat of New York, said.

At a time Congress is consumed by a lobbying scandal, Democrats complained bitterly that the measure had been written without them, with the help of paid representatives from the drug and insurance industries, and then presented for a vote before they had a chance to review it.

"This is a product of special interest lobbying," said Representative John D. Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, "and the stench of special interests hangs over the chamber as we consider it today."

The budget-cutting bill is actually a holdover from last year. It first passed the House just before Christmas in an all-night marathon session. The vote was 212 to 206, with nine Republicans joining 196 Democrats and one independent in opposition. The bill then went to the Senate, which made a few minor changes, forcing the House to reconsider it on returning this week.

Those tweaks, and the resulting delay, gave groups like AARP, which represents retirees, and Americans United, a progressive advocacy group that fought Mr. Bush's plan to revamp Social Security, time to mount an aggressive campaign against the cuts, and they did.

Brad Woodhouse of Americans United, said his group ran more than 300 events nationwide during the Congressional winter recess "to create the type of wave we created against the privatization plan." John Rother, AARP's policy director, said his group had run print advertisements and focused on Congress members in swing districts.

Mr. Rother said AARP objected in particular to a provision in the bill that would temporarily strip Medicaid coverage from elderly nursing home residents if they had given away money in the previous five years. The provision would cover money given to charity, he said, or to a grandchild for tuition; recipients would lose coverage in an amount equal to what they had given, he said, adding that lawmakers were often surprised to learn of the language.

"It's really punitive — inhumane is the other word I would use," he said. "I think a lot of these guys had no idea that was in there when they voted on this." Still, he said it had been difficult to persuade lawmakers to switch their votes. "It's tough for these people to say openly, 'I made a mistake; I didn't know what I was voting on.' "

The four who did were Representatives Rob Simmons of Connecticut, who announced his decision last week, Jim Gerlach of Pennsylvania, John E. Sweeney of New York and Jim Ramstad of Minnesota.

In a statement after the vote, Mr. Gerlach said he was "very concerned about how the legislation reduces funding for mental health and education as well as important health care areas that will ultimately target our nation's most needy citizens."

Sabin Community Development Corporation kicked off its new computer training initiative  with partners Cascade Campus of Portland Community College, Microsoft Corp. and Dell Inc. at a festive event on January 19^th 2006. The kick off took place at the Moriarty Arts and Humanities Building at the Cascade Campus, 705 N Killingworth St. with music, food galore and interactive entertainment. Those in attendance celebrated the ground-breaking partnership of community, public and private entities which will provide area students with access to state-of-the-art multi-media and computer training tools.

The event was attended by the Hon. Mayor Tom Potter, Dr. Algie Gatewood Ed. D., Rane Johnson-Stempson/ Microsoft, Tracy Frey/Dell, Alex Hernandez/PPS Office of the Superintendent, Elizabeth Kennedy-Wong/Neighborhoods and Education Office of the Mayor, as well as training partners Black United Fund of Oregon and the Urban League of Portland.

The event included demonstrations of:

* Jumpstart: College Bound, a college readiness program with Sabin CDC and Microsoft Corp.

* 3D and 2D Modeling and Animation with Portland Community College.

* Microsoft Unlimited Potential Curriculum designed by Linda Testa/MS and will be instructed by Sabin CDC

* “Serious Magic” television broadcast design software

* Studio Recording Technology

* A look at the new Learning Portal and Website that will link N/NE high school students, parents and community to educators and advanced multimedia training centers and curriculum.

For more information about the next steps for Spring classes and training or Summer tech projects, please call Sabin Community Development Corporation 503-287-3496    

Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner Mark Everson, speaking to the Greater Washington Society of CPAs, recently announced that in 2006 the IRS will increase its enforcement efforts for exempt organizations, building on a trend of the past few years. Among the agency's top priorities, according to Everson, will be enforcement of the ban on political intervention by charities and religious organizations. The announcement comes as the IRS continues to draw criticism for its Political Intervention Program (PIP) of 2004, which included audits of organizations based on statements critical of administration policies.

The IRS, whose budget for investigating nonprofits rose 23 percent last year alone, has increased its compliance contacts with nonprofits from 14,000 in 2003 to more than 20,000 in 2005. While no such budget increase will take place this year, the agency plans, according to Everson, to "catch [its] breath and train the few hundred employees that came on last year..."

Some of the agency's unfinished work includes audits of 130 charities, specifically "501(c)(3) organizations" the IRS suspects of conducting prohibited partisan political activities. Everson said almost half these organizations are churches, and that most problems stemmed from one-time events that were easily resolved. He anticipated the IRS will continue to receive questions from the public and Congress about its examination of religious organizations.

The 2004 PIP program came under fire for audits under the program of the NAACP and other groups that criticized Bush administration policies. Although a report by the Treasury Inspector General found no partisan retaliation, the problem of interpreting criticism of public officials as partisan intervention remains unresolved in 2006.

Get Involved: Oregon Food Bank’s Citizen Advocacy Network Meets Feb 14

“Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

Come to a special St. Valentine’s Day meeting of the Citizen’s Advocacy Network, from 6:30 – 8:00 PM on Feb. 14^th at Oregon Food Bank (7900 NE 33^rd Drive). There’ll be chocolates for everyone, and a door prize for a lucky winner! Attendees will be compensated for gas mileage, child care, and lost wages. 

The CAN is a group of volunteer advocates working with the Oregon Food Bank to end poverty in Oregon. At the meeting, you’ll learn important information about how to advocate for policies that will make your community a better place to live, and you’ll strategize on how to address problems in your community. For example, CAN members were recently featured on television, radio, and newspaper pieces for testifying at a State House of Representatives interim committee on payday loan regulation. Legislators listened to their stories, their concerns, and their solutions. You can make your voice heard too! Join the CAN!

To find out more, contact Mat Lewis at mlewis@oregonfoodbank.org

TechSoup Explains How Technology is Funded: The Basics

As an accidental techie, what can you do to improve the prospect that your organization will get funding for needed technology? In this excerpt from Sue Bennet's book "The Accidental Techie," Eugene Chan describes how you can help your nonprofit raise funds and appeal to donors. To read article, go to: http://ga0.org/ct/Np16yKS1empT/