Catholic Charities in the NewsApril 16th, 2018
Catholic Charities was just featured in the April edition of Fairfield County Catholic in two separate articles. One article discussed the mission of the agency and how the Annual Catholic Appeal helps to support the good work we do. The other article promoted our upcoming annual golf outing and spoke about how this year we would be honoring the late Dan Caruso. You can read both of those article in this edition of Fairfield County Catholic, located here.
60 Minutes Producer Shines a Light on Public ServicesApril 6th, 2018
The Fairfield County Catholic ran a wonderful recap of this year’s Celebrity Breakfast featuring 60 Minutes’ Executive Producer Jeff Fager. You can read all about this signature event, which is now in its 14th year, here.
J. Randy Salvatore receives “The Founder’s Award”
Jeff Fager with Co-Chairs Sarita Hanley & Ed Kearns
USCCB National Call-in Day to CongressFebruary 26th, 2018
Please participate in the Call-In Day to Congress on Monday, February 26, 2018!
Your advocacy is critical to help the nearly 1.8 million Dreamers, young people who were brought into the United States by their parents as children. They may face deportation as soon as March 6th, unless Congress reaches a bipartisan deal to protect them. Please follow these easy steps:
1.) Please call 855-589-5698 to reach the Capitol switchboard and press 1 to connect to your Senator. Once you are connected to the Senator’s offices, please ask the person on the phone to deliver this simple message to your legislator:
“I urge you to support a bipartisan, common-sense, and humane solution for Dreamers:
Protect Dreamers from deportation and provide them with a path to citizenship.
Reject proposals that undermine family immigration or protections for unaccompanied children.
As a Catholic, I know that families are not “”chains,” but a blessing to be protected.
Act now to protect Dreamers, our immigrant brothers and sisters.”
2.) Next, please call 855-589-5698 to reach the Capitol switchboard one more time and press 2 to connect to your Representative. Once you are connected to the Representative’s offices, please ask the person on the phone to deliver this simple message to your legislator:
“I urge you to support a bipartisan, common-sense, and humane solution for Dreamers:
Protect Dreamers from deportation and provide them with a path to citizenship.
Reject proposals that undermine family immigration or protections for unaccompanied children. As a Catholic, I know that families are not “chains,” but a blessing to be protected.
Act now to protect Dreamers, our immigrant brothers and sisters.”
After completing your call, please go to the Justice for Immigrants website to learn more about the JFI campaign. Also, please visit JFI’s DACA and Dreamer resource page for materials in English and Spanish that you can use to support these exemplary young people.
Why Fairfield County Gives MattersFebruary 23rd, 2018
Catholic Charities Board Member, Bill Tommins penned this letter in a recent email to our Advisory Boards about important of Fairfield County Gives, which takes place on March 1st. Our agency made the decision to come together as a team and enter the competition as one unit under the Catholic Charities banner. We hope that you will read Bill’s letter and it will inspire you to donate to our agency next Thursday.
If you are like me, your email box is likely starting to fill up with emails from various local non-profits about Fairfield County Giving Day on March 1, less than one week from today. Giving Day represents a great opportunity for Catholic Charities and our various programs to reach new individual donors, and I’d ask each of us to consider forwarding an email to friends and family to encourage broad participation.
In my role at Bank of America, I have been intimately involved with Giving Day since its inception 5 years ago, as the bank was at the drawing board with the Fairfield County Community Foundation over the concept. Bank of America has been the lead sponsor of Giving Day since that time. Our financial support, in part, helps to fund the prize pool of over $100,000 that local charities are competing for to reward their successful fundraising efforts. Since inception, Fairfield County Giving Day has raised over $4.5MM for local non-profits from over 55,000 individual donations. Last year, Giving Day set a new record raising $1.5 million from over 13,000 individual donations to over 400 local charities. The two metrics that stand out to me are that the average donation was $77, and 34% of the gifts were from first time donors. Fairfield County Giving Day was really designed to expand the reach of local non-profits to source new donors, expand individual giving, and provide useful tools to non-profits to drive social media engagement.
Last year, Catholic Charities of Fairfield County raised just over $20,000 via Giving Day. This was an improvement over the prior year, but I think this program can be much more impactful to us, and our goal is to raise in excess of $25,000 on March 1. By comparison, a local community theatre organization in Stamford received over 1,000 individual contributions last year from their network of friends, and has raised significant funding over the past 5 years from this activity.
Please help us spread the word to those you know, and on March 1, “give where you live”!
Thanks
Bill
Striving To Be The Best – CCFC Receives COA & Hague AccreditationFebruary 21st, 2018
Catholic Charities has been fully accredited by the Council on Accreditation (COA).
This is a significant achievement for the organization and one we should be extremely proud of accomplishing. COA accreditation affirms that an organization meets the highest national standards of best practice and establishes the organization’s credibility as effective and professionally sound. In addition, it provides assurance to all of our stakeholders that Catholic Charities of Fairfield County, INC. is delivering needed, high-quality services in our community, conducting its operations successfully, and managing its funds effectively.
Although the formal part of the accreditation process has been completed, our work is far from over. COA accreditation is not an end in and of itself. Rather, it is a process by which our organization can consistently strive for and achieve new levels of excellence.
In that regard, we have received our Final Accreditation Report (FAR). This important and valuable document details the observations and recommendations our COA site review team formed through their evaluation of our self-study and site visit. The FAR provides a unique view of our organization as seen through the eyes of highly experienced professionals. The results were truly remarkable.
The FAR is intended to provide specific, tangible examples of how we can further strengthen our organization throughout our 4-year accreditation cycle. In addition, those standards that were not fully implemented must be addressed through our performance and quality improvement process as they will be a component of our reaccreditation process.
Finally, COA would like to take this opportunity to congratulate us for all of your hard work and continuing support and commitment, which has been instrumental in successfully achieving COA accreditation.
SHOWN BELOW IS THE SUMMARY OF OUR FINAL ACCREDITATION REPORT
- COA rated the agency across 17 program and management standards
- There were a total of 515 elements for which the agency received the following scores:
- 92% of our scores were a 1 – Full Implementation
- 7% of our scores were a 2 – Substantial Implementation
- 1% of our scores were a 3 – Partial Implementation
- 10 out of the 17 (57%) Standard Areas received perfect scores (all 1’s)
- 50% of our programs achieved perfect scores including CSP, HOT, PEP, and Family Directions Adoption Services (Adoption also completed their Hague Accreditation at the same time and received perfect scores in those standards.).
- Human Resources and PQI also received perfect scores.
Congratulations to the entire staff, as this success is a true reflection on your hard work and dedication to the agency and its clients.