Diocese has poverty-fighting money that no area groups qualify to claim

By Timothy Pratt

Monday, Feb. 2, 2009 | 2 a.m.

For the past four years, the Diocese of Las Vegas has been unable to give away money Las Vegas Valley churchgoers donated to fight poverty.

The program, called the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, has raised about $500,000, and although 75 percent of it has gone to the program’s national office in Washington, the remainder, $125,377, has stayed in a local bank account, untouched.

The campaign is based on annual collections held in parishes across the nation the week before Thanksgiving. Most of the nation’s 300 dioceses keep some of the money and send the rest to the national office. Poverty-fighting groups can apply to either or both for grants.

The main problem in Las Vegas has been finding a group that qualifies, said Tim O’Callaghan, the local director. Only groups run by poor people can get the grants, and only for projects that target the underlying causes of poverty. The money can’t be used to give out sandwiches, for example.

O’Callaghan, co-publisher of the Las Vegas Sun’s sister newspapers, has spent the past two years meeting with dozens of groups without success.

The campaign’s national director, Ralph McCloud, initially told the Sun it was “very rare” for years to go by in a diocese without any groups tapping into local funds. McCloud, who took over the program in 2008, called back two days later and said he never made such a comment. Instead, he said, “I haven’t heard of it happening and haven’t heard of it not happening.”

O’Callaghan said the campaign supports worthwhile projects across the nation, including small businesses run by former gang members. The campaign has spent $280 million on 7,800 projects nationwide, according to its Web site.

The program is also no stranger to controversy. Sun stories in 2005 revealed that some funding was being spent on anti-abortion campaigns. More recently, the national program decided in October to cut funding across the nation to ACORN after that group was linked to faulty voter registration. In Las Vegas, the national office gave grants totaling $105,000 to the local ACORN chapter from 2005 to 2007.

O’Callaghan said the lack of grass-roots groups in the Las Vegas Valley may be due to the area’s “lack of maturity.”

“This is not the same as Los Angeles or Boston,” he said.

O’Callaghan and McCloud said they hope the current economy would produce change, necessity being the mother of invention and all. They said on-the-ground groups to fight poverty have to pop up soon in the valley with unemployment rates nearly in double digits and foreclosure rates continuing to rise.

At the same time, O’Callaghan said,

“I can’t sprout these groups.

“Somebody will come.”