>> Thank you for having me. Have a great day.
>> You, too. Amid budget news and federal spending
cuts, it can be easy to lose sight of real life losses.
Families are encountering in Wisconsin, with 57% of its
residents living just above or at the poverty level. The
small community of Nekoosa relies on programs like
AmeriCorps and the 21st Century Community Learning
Centers for things like food assistance and childcare.
“Here& Now” reporter Aditi Debnath sat down with Tracy
Vruwink, who oversees these programs, to talk about what
these cuts mean for Nekoosa families.
>> You oversee the 21st century Community Learning
Center grant, which supports this Boys and Girls Club of
Nekoosa program. Can you talk about what that support
looks like in terms of what services you offer?
>> Yeah. So after school or actually it's before and
after school. So we open at 630 in the morning until
school starts. We do enrichment activities. We
feed the kids sometimes breakfast depending. A lot
of kids come to school, you know, hungry after school.
They come, we do activities. They go outside, they go to
the gym. We do homework help. We do career launch.
We do snack. And again, there's a lot of these kids
that come in here and have snack, and then they don't
eat again until they come back in the morning. So
which is very unfortunate. But we have, you know, food
to provide them. And we help support the backpack program
where the kids get to take home food for the week
weekend so that they have food to eat.
Community Learning Center grant was taken away, what
would that mean for your program?
>> We would probably have to scale it back immensely,
because the funding for this program is what. Helps the
kids. And if we don't have that funding, we'd have to
find the funding from somewhere else, or the Boys
and Girls Club would have to run it themselves. And I
don't believe we would be able to run a morning
program at that point. It would be strictly afternoon.
All the things that they do would be cut back because we
wouldn't have the funding to do that. So it would just it
would make a huge difference. We might be able
to even take less kids, and that would be an enormous
shock for the community. >> What would that mean for
the families who bring their kids here?
>> It would be devastating for them. It truly would.
Parents have to work, and a lot of parents can't be home
until, you know, after 6:00 at night. So without this
program, those kids are going to have nowhere to go.
And they need somewhere to go. And I think our
programs, all after school programs, help those kids to
be able to feel like they're safe and they're cared for.
They have food to eat, they're learning. There's no
learning loss. They don't have someone to help them.
They're not going to succeed. A lot of our
families rely on us to cover the cost of child care,
because the Boys and Girls Club, we can't charge a fee
here because of the grant. So that's free childcare,
which is saving families anywhere between 150 to $200
a week just for care for one child. Losing the after
school programs would exacerbate existing
inequalities in access to education and opportunities,
particularly for these kids, because 99% of them are low
income. It would reduce community engagement. The
kids come here and they just hang out. If they had to go
home after school by themselves, they would
probably be getting into trouble. When they're here,
we know they're safe. We keep them out of trouble.
They learn a lot of things. In the ten years that you've
been in this job, has it always been so uncertain?
>> Never. We've gotten the CLC grant to five year terms
in a row now. So funding goes away. I really,
honestly don't know what we're going to do. Like I
said, it would probably be on a smaller scale, but then
we probably won't be able to serve the 200 children that
we serve now, because, you know, the funding just won't
be there to do that. >> You also oversee the
AmeriCorps program, which helps the this community
Nekoosa get food on their table. Can you talk about
that program and how it came about?
>> We were contacted by the Wisconsin Partnership
Program, which is a grant, and they offered for us to
write a grant to get an AmeriCorps staff here in our
district. So we did that, and we got Nikki. She came
in and it's all about like the food insecurities. Nikki
started a food pantry, so we went from servicing three
families. We're up to 21 families now. We have a
couple of churches who do some fundraisers, and they
donate money so that we can buy groceries to donate to
the families. When AmeriCorps was cut out by
the federal government cutting the funding, we had
to stop doing that. We had nobody to do it. Well, then
we found a different way to go around it. Nikki's now
employed by the YMCA, and she is able to run the food
pantry through the Nekoosa School District because we
are a partner with the district. So she's still
able to, you know, service those families.
>> And what did that mean for that? You know, week
where Nikki was no longer your employee and that.
>> She volunteered that week, basically just so that
we could keep the families eating.
pantry, what would those families be experiencing?
>> They would have to find a means to get to Wisconsin
Rapids, to the food pantries there. A lot of them don't
have a means to get there. We don't have a bus system
here. It's generally if they can get a ride or something
like that. reinstated that. The
programing. Does that give you any relief?
>> Not really. Who's going to want to apply for a job
that they're not really sure if it's going to keep going
or not? You know, it's you need to have an income. You
need to support your family, even though the AmeriCorps
income is small, it's still something. And you can't
just not have that. That income. I've been doing this
grant for ten years. I've had an AmeriCorps staff
every year at this school and at the elementary
school. Some years. That staff is so beneficial to
helping the kids. They help them with their homework.
They help them with their reading. They're like an
extension of the teachers day because they're there at
the end of the school day, and then they're working
with them on their homework. It's just they're so
beneficial. I, I just honestly think that they're
important for every school to have. AmeriCorps is where