By Susan Gallagher and Eric Connolly

Bob Oaks drove by Missoula’s Whittier Court and talked about its construction as a housing project of the North Missoula Community Development Corp., a nonprofit that improves low-income enclaves in Missoula and receives help from the Catholic Campaign for Human Development.

“This little blue house was here and the rest of it was just empty,” Oaks said. Completed in 2002, the five-dwelling Whittier Court is one of several affordable- housing projects undertaken by the corporation. A nearby park was “filled with trash and old refrigerators and couches, and that was the neighborhood cleanup project,” Oaks said. “It’s a little pocket park now.”

Missoula Community Development also launched a food cooperative offering attractively priced food to members who volunteer some time to keep the place going, and a food program to help nourish low-income children when they’re on school breaks and cannot receive the free or reduced-price meals that schools offer. In the works: a community kitchen/café for processing local foods.

It’s all intended to help strengthen quality of life among people struggling with serious economic constraints and lack of opportunity.

Around the country, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, which is the U.S. bishops’ domestic antipoverty campaign, has helped in myriad ways, from post-tornado reconstruction in Tennessee to followup for Chinese garment workers whose wages for their New York City labors were withheld unjustly. Besides the work of North Missoula Community Development, evidence of CCHD’s impact in the Diocese of Helena includes advancements fostered by a similar entity, the Arlee Community Development Corp. on the Flathead Reservation.

CCHD’s profile heightens around this time annually because the national CCHD collection takes place the Sunday before Thanksgiving—this year, Nov. 21. The giving helps support grants, such as the $40,000 that went to North Missoula Community Development this year, following grants of $25,000 in 2009 and $40,000 in 2008. A national board awarded that money.

Arlee Community Development received about $7,000 in local grants that gave some projects enough traction to have a shot at nationallevel funding. Those local grants were possible because 25 percent of the money that Diocese of Helena parishes give to the national collection remains in the diocese, for use within its boundaries.

Achievements with Arlee Community Development as a conduit include an afterschool program hailed as a step in breaking the poverty cycle on part of the Flathead Reservation; a farmers market and the development of Native American instructional materials state-approved for use in Montana’s public schools, which are required to offer Indian education for all students.

“We wouldn’t be anywhere close to where we are without those key moments of help from the diocese, as well as the encouragement,” said Donna Mollica, Arlee Community Development executive director.

CCHD grants “help move people to a better situation in their lives,” said Deacon Jim Butts, CCHD coordinator for the Diocese of Helena and a former member of the national board that decides which grant proposals to fund.

In the past, and particularly last year, controversy erupted over assertions that some recipients of CCHD funds had affiliations inconsistent with teachings of the Catholic Church. Certain organizations then discouraged Catholics from giving to CCHD. People should feel confident that measures have been “put in place to better police the system,” Deacon Butts said from Bigfork, where he serves at Pope John Paul II Parish. A professor of moral theology from Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Maryland recently became CCHD’s consultant on moral and ethical issues. Father Daniel Mindling is to advise when there are questions about activities of a group assisted by CCHD.

The campaign helps people whose needs may lead to requests for funding from multiple sources, Deacon Butts said. That opened the way for situations in which a CCHD grant recipient might also have received funds from a source incompatible with Catholic teaching, he said.

The USCCB document titled “The Review and Renewal of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development” states “…in this past year five groups (out of 270) violated CCHD requirements and lost all CCHD funding because they acted in conflict with Catholic teaching.” The document was posted on the USCCB website on Oct. 26.

Amid the controversy last year, CCHD continued about its work, distributing more than $7.8 million to 223 grant recipients nationwide. Now the immediate tasks include preparing for the grant year that begins this July. Grant applications were due Nov. 1.

Oaks knows what a difference a grant can make. For the North Missoula Community Development Corp., “there were times that help from CCHD kept us going when we had hit rough times,” he said.


To learn more about the national CCHD collection and The Review and Renewal report, visit www.usccb.org/cchd.


Published in The Montana Catholic Online, Volume 26, No. 11, November 19, 2010.