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MICHAEL DUNNE: I'm Michael Dunne. By now, they've become as common as weather reports. Another day, another big budget cut to a federal agency by the Trump administration. From health to national security to the Forest Service, cuts in staff and money are happening fast and furious. But there's another level of budget cuts that permeates down to the state and local level. These are federal grants that nonprofits rely on to serve their clients and communities. Today, on the show, you'll hear from two local nonprofits, Heart of Oregon, Corps in Bend and Central Coast Food Web on the coast, and hear how federal cuts are impacting them and the services they deliver, and hear how they're making do and trying to find alternative resources.
Laura handy, the executive director of heart of Oregon core, thanks so much for coming on and talking with us.
LAURA HANDY: Thank you so much, Michael, it's my pleasure to be here.
MICHAEL DUNNE: What is heart of Oregon core? Why don't you know tell our audience what you do and who you serve?
LAURA HANDY: Heart of Oregon Corps is a central Oregon based nonprofit. Heart of Oregon Youth help solve central Oregon's greatest challenges as they transform their own lives through hands on workforce development programs. So, for our mission, it really stretches from housing affordability to the childcare crisis to wildfire risk reduction and conservation of public lands and waterways. Our youth are doing the work our communities need to thrive, while the youth are also receiving job training, employment support services that help them bridge to a new chapter of their lives. So, we really hold that by empowering our youth and young adults with this training that we support them to change their own lives while they also change their communities for the better.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Okay, maybe tell us about the operation. How many staffers you have, the physical locations, and also about the youth that come to you?
LAURA HANDY: They're from all over Central Oregon, the youth and young adults that Heart of Oregon engages are 16 to 24 years old, and they come from all over Central Oregon. So, they are primarily living in our three counties and seeking employment and training to be a full part of the workforce. While our youth are really diverse in their backgrounds. They all kind of share this desire to improve their communities and themselves. You know, many young people could kind of go get a typical first job, but they come to us because they have a desire to grow and to serve to belong and be a part of our Central Oregon Community. They have a large breadth of experience, many of them do overcome kind of significant barriers. We partner closely with community justice systems, with our regional Foster Care Network, housing support, social services, schools and we support our youth to access the kind of services they need to make that leap into adulthood and careers. And some youth experience our programs kind of like a gap year program, and they really see it as an exciting stepping stone to careers in the trades or wild land, firefighting and conservation. We get referrals from youth from every corner of the community, including, friends and cousins and adults in their lives, because it's such an embedded part of the Central Oregon Community.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Now, I understand that you're experiencing some cuts to your funding, and I kind of wanted to ask, how that might impact you? A lot of organizations are seeing budget cuts in almost every facet of our society. You know, how are you trying to overcome that challenge?
LAURA HANDY: Yes, we have lost some significant funding recently. We have lost more than $2.5 million in funding in the past month at the federal level for our workforce development services $1 million was appropriated in the 2024 federal budget for a new central campus that I'm excited to share a lot about. And we learned in March with the continuing resolution that that was gone. And then just two weeks ago, we learned that we'd lost another 1.5 million that was allocated for the next three years for an innovative new program teaching young adults forestry management skills in city and town settings. And so I think the thing that's really disappointing about that is that workforce development is a shared priority and a value in Central Oregon and in Oregon and in our country. When we invest in young people's skills, we build our economy, we build access to prosperity. So, learning losing this funding is a big setback that harms our prosperity as a region. But I also know that Heart of Oregon has weathered every storm we faced in our last 25 years. I've served with the organization for a while, and we saw ourselves through the Great Recession, we navigated the challenges of COVID while still showing up for our youth and community. And I believe that we're going to see this chapter through our programs and our campus. We're really setting our sights on the future right now, and not just the play-by-play drama of the news. We know that our champions feel this way too, and we know that, you know, we're keeping an eye on our future campus, our future development and the next 25 years, in the 25 years after that,
MICHAEL DUNNE: Let me reintroduce you to the audience. We're talking to Laura Handy, the executive director of of Heart of Oregon Corps. Well, let's talk about that. Talk about this new campus, because I understand, you know, even with these budget setbacks, funding cuts, it's not stopping you. Talk about what this campus means to you and what you'll be able to do for the next 25 years?
LAURA HANDY: Yeah, absolutely. You know, our youth, their fingerprints and boot prints are everywhere across our region, because they build affordable housing and they help with after care, child care services. They remove thousands of pounds of flammable debris from our national forests. And so, the demand for our programs has just really grown and grown over the past 25 years, and so much so that we have been working on this legacy 25 capital campaign for a new campus. Our youth and young adults have led us to the doorstep for the first youth Workforce Development campus in Central Oregon. We just closed on our campus site, and we're looking to create a vibrant location with the type of hands-on facilities and infrastructure that is needed to do our complex programs and really make sure that we can move out of some of our current spaces that are limited and borrowed and have been tucked into partnership based borrowed spaces for 25 years, and we've just been busting at the seams and cramped, and our partners have, you know, helped us stretch as far as we can go in those sites. And we really need to create a permanent home so we can keep delivering for our community.
MICHAEL DUNNE: You mentioned, you know, your champions, your supporters. Talk about that. Talk about, how the Central Oregon Community has embraced you and helped you for these past 25 years.
LAURA HANDY: Yes. Heart of Oregon Corps is a Local Conservation Corps. So, all our youth are from the local community, and they serve in their own backyards. You know, we're not a residential style Conservation Corps, so young people are really just coming to our locations and engaging in their community each and every day, our partnerships stretch from the city and county levels to sister nonprofits across our community. We do significant work with state level partners, such as Oregon Parks and Rec and Oregon Youth Core opportunities. And then we also partner with federal programs. And we actually, you know, help leverage and invest those federal resources and help make sure that the federal government can can do its job right. So we partner with the US Forest Service, the BLM workforce development with the Department of Labor, and are proud to enroll many of our youth as AmeriCorps members as well. As I said, it's really true that our young people's boot prints and fingerprints are literally everywhere in the community, from the trailhead sign that you might see when you hike on-trail, to wildfire fuels reduction surrounding Smith Rock State Park to, you know, some local watershed restoration. So, we truly are, are deeply embedded with our partners and collaborate on that. We also partner with education services and social services to meet the needs of young people in our communities.
MICHAEL DUNNE: I saw there was a nice editorial in the Bend Bulletin about, the situation with your funding cuts. And I just kind of want to ask you, what it meant to you that the paper of record for most of Central Oregon was sort of taking up the cause, and what did that mean to you in terms of just the overall support you're getting?
LAURA HANDY: Yeah, we're really grateful to the Bend Bulletin, to you all at KLCC and other media outlets for covering the essential regional asset that this campus and our services are for our community and recognizing the, scope of our operations. Of course, we're also grateful for the many Oregon state and foundation partners that help us and help fund this project, and of course, the businesses and individuals that have stepped up to in the legacy 25 campaign to make sure that this goes forward. We're so close - we can do this, and we need to get the project across the finish line.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Well, I wish you the best of luck to overcome these, these current challenges, but also for that exciting campus you just talked about. Laura Handy, the executive director of Heart of Oregon Corps, thank you so much for coming on and chatting with us.
LAURA HANDY: Yeah, thank you so much.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Let's head out to the coast now and hear how another nonprofit is impacted by the federal government and its budget slashing. Jim King, the executive director of the Central Coast Food Web, thanks so much for coming on and talking with us.
JIM KING: Well, thank you for having me.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Why don't you start with this? Tell us what the Central Coast Food Web is? What do you do?
JIM KING: Originally, it was created to provide an alternative for the smaller fishers here in the harbor, other than your your large processors. Nothing against the large processors, but by doing what we're doing, we're providing a place for the fishers to actually process their own catch. We have an online market that they then can put it on the sell it, along with their other avenues that they have. And what this does is help them to be more self-determinant. They obviously would get more of the profit from the fish if they're doing everything themselves than just selling it to the processors. And as we were putting this together, we realized the small farmers in this area face their own levels of challenges, they cannot grow everything that the people in the valley can grow, so they're kind of limited on what they can grow and what they can provide for markets. Once again, being on the coast, their markets are limited. So they also go on our online market. We are right now building on a commercial kitchen that will allow both the fishers, the farmers and others, bakers and candy makers to use this commercial kitchen. There's not a lot of them on the coast, so this will open up some opportunities. We also put in a seawater system so a fisher has a lot of crab that they need to store for a day or two to purge before they put them on the market. They can do that here as well. We have commercial dehydrator smoker and other tools that can come into use for them as well. We're beginning to dive deeper into R and D and doing value added products that we can talk about at some point along with this, but that's essentially what we do. We're here to serve fishers and farmers and help them create markets for their products and value-added products as well, and to keep local food and the local area, and what defines the local area.
MICHAEL DUNNE: How far do you serve fishers and farmers and whatnot?
JIM KING: Technically, it's probably about 50 miles. But as we're working with other hubs and webs and the state to develop distribution routes, what we're planning on is getting the fish, inland more, because 90% of the fish caught off the coast of Oregon goes somewhere else. And if we can increase that - when I say goes somewhere else - I mean, like Japan and China and Korea, etc. We consider the state of Oregon overall as local. In that sense, we want to get more of our seafood into the mouths of people that live in Oregon, whether it's McMinnville or Lincoln city, we really want to see us decrease the number of fish that goes everywhere else, and increase what we keep here and that people are using and enjoying here.
MICHAEL DUNNE: I read some reports that that you've been experiencing some federal funding cuts to programs. How is that going to impact what you do?
JIM KING: Well, I guess the easiest way to say this is things out of Washington have been, if nothing else, confusing. Back when we started hearing about freezes and cuts, and he actually released an executive order doing that to one of our major funders, USDA. We were worried, and we made sure that we got all our reimbursement requests in before everything kind of came down. There were some moments of silence from USDA, which others have experienced as well, because lots of people were thrown off their jobs, and there was a lot of confusion. So, we went a few months really struggling with how to make this work, but all of a sudden, our contact at USD contacted us and said, it's open. Go ahead and send me more reimbursement requests. So, we did, and so far, we're okay. Our biggest bite out of this apple from what is going on in Washington is we had two grants into NOAA, that we were partnered with the Oregon Coast visitors Association. They're the lead agency on this, but we worked with them to develop these grants that will enhance the kind of services that we have and more on the coast. And that was completely eradicated. We heard not that long ago, a couple of weeks ago that there's that there won't be no grants. So, we've had some grants completely canceled. We've had one grant continue to pay out, in spite of what we had heard on the effect is simply that it causes quite a bit of unsettledness with staff, with the people we work with and serve, because if you don't know what's going on, it's a lot harder to run an organization and to provide what we are here to provide. And honestly, we've got a small staff, and under the threat of losing funds for our paychecks and more, it's not a fun way to work, but we've managed to keep our focus and continue moving forward.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Let me reintroduce you to the audience. We're talking with Jim King. He's the Executive Director of the Central Coast Food Web. Are you looking at other potential funding sources to either make up funding shortfalls or to hopefully provide you with a source of revenue that's more certain than the federal government?
JIM KING: It's uncertain. What we are doing is we're going more to private foundations and like the, Oregon Community Foundation, The Roundhouse Foundation, and others that we're reaching out to. They have been amazing, by the way, both of those entities have been really good to keep all of us informed, to be there, to encourage us, and in some cases, actually providing more money than they had been. But they cannot really comfortably touch what the Feds were able to give us. Basically, we are working as much as we can with private foundations, private individuals, corporations, banks, credit unions, etc., so that they know what's going on, and we can give them the opportunity to support what we're doing. And we're just continually moving forward with this, and any new opportunity to apply for a grant, whether it's someone we've been with before or not, we're moving forward with that.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Okay, probably my last question for you, Jim is this, you mentioned that you're trying to sort of roll out new services and products, and so my last question is, what's your hope for the future? You know, if funding stabilizes as you continue to move forward, what's your hope for the next one to three years?
JIM KING: That we continue to sign up fishers and farmers to our programs, that we finished the build out. We just completely renovated our processing area. We're building the commercial kitchen right now. We have a sea water system that can hold live entities. We want to be sure that we have what our producers, meaning the farmers and the fishers, need in order to succeed and to build a life and a business of their own. We work with them for licensing certifications and with SBDC to help along the way as well. I'm hoping that we see a lot of producers that have actually created their own companies and are flourishing. Their success is our success, and that is what we would most like to see.
MICHAEL DUNNE: He's the Executive Director of the Central Coast Food Web. Jim King, thank you so much for coming on the program, and best of luck to you and your organization.
JIM KING: Thank you. I appreciate the time.
MICHAEL DUNNE: That's the show for today. All episodes of organ on the record are available as a podcast at klcc.org. Tomorrow on the show, you'll hear from a national organization called Defenders of Wildlife who are in the fight of their lives against the Trump administration's effort to shrink and possibly destroy the landmark Endangered Species Act, and hear what that might mean for the environment in Oregon. I'm Michael Dunne, and this has been organ on the record from KLCC, thanks for listening.
