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Two local programs get United Thank Offering grants

By Melodie Woerman
Editor, The Harvest

Two programs for ministry within the Episcopal Diocese of Kansas received partial funding from the United Thank Offering for grant requests they made earlier in the year.

The representative payee program at St. Matthew’s, Newton, was awarded $6,500. A new program at Episcopal Community Services in Kansas City to assist juvenile offenders received $5,000.

The awards were approved during the Triennial meeting of the national Episcopal Church Women in June in Columbus, Ohio. A total of 112 programs received grants, totaling some $2.4 million. Of that total, 87 received partial funding and 25 received full funding.

Newton payee program

The representative payee program at St. Matthew’s, Newton, recently spun off from its parent program at Episcopal Social Services in Wichita. The UTO grant will help provide infrastructure needs, including office furniture and updates to the computer and phone systems.

The payee program provides help to people receiving Social Security checks who are unable to handle their own finances. Federal law requires some people to have assistance in managing their funds and making sure their bills are paid.

The St. Matthew’s program currently serves 103 clients, according to Donna Mills, payee coordinator at ESS and coordinator of the Newton program. She said the program should expand in the next 12 months to handle another 50 people.

That’s a lot of payee clients for a town of 18,000 people, she admitted, but said Newton has several large facilities that serve people with mental health or developmental disabilities.

The Newton program was created in 1997 with 30 clients and eight volunteers. It now has 22 volunteers.

The St. Matthew’s program, along with the payee programs at ESS and their satellite offices at Trinity, Arkansas City, and Grace, Winfield, do not charge to manage client’s finances. Other programs in the Wichita area charge up to $35 per month, which Mills said places a hardship on clients who receive an average of $600 a month in benefits.

VORP at ECS

Episcopal Social Services will use its grant money for its new Victim Offender Reconciliation Program, or VORP, to train adult volunteers to become approved mediators.

VORP provides face-to-face mediation between first-time juvenile offenders and their victims. The trained mediators serve as facilitators for these meetings and help guide discussions so offenders understand the impact their crimes have. They also help negotiate appropriate restitution and reparations by offenders.

Juvenile offenders who complete this process can have their convictions diverted by the courts.

Statistics with similar programs elsewhere in the country have shown that offenders repeat their crimes at a much lower rate after participating in this kind of mediation program than those who do not.

An international scope

There were 84 UTO grants made to projects within the United States. Other grants went to requests in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, South America, and Jerusalem and the Middle East.

Two grants went to programs of the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana in New Orleans, designed to assist with recovery efforts in the city after Hurricane Katrina.

UTO received 196 grant requests for 2006, totaling $7,235,649.77

UTO is a spiritual and financial partner in the mission work of the Episcopal Church and focuses on addressing compelling human needs and expanding mission and ministry.