Disputed invoices, failed efforts to coordinate services and questions over the number of participants served have left a local center intended to prepare at-risk youth for employment operating on a fraction of the half-million dollar grant money available to it.

Former interim director LaTosha Brown traces much of the trouble to difficulties in administering a federal grant whose guidelines she labels “insane.”

Brown resigned her position with the 21st Century Youth Leadership Project’s Youth Opportunity Center to seek the state House of Representatives District 67 seat. She faces Yusuf Salaam in the Democratic runoff Tuesday.

The is operating under a $562,868 federal grant made available through the Federal Workforce Investment Act. The grant, which became effective April 1, 2001, and is scheduled to run through the end of June 2002, is administered by the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs.

The grant was designed to provide employment, training and career development opportunities for eligible youth in Dallas, Perry, Sumter and Greene counties.

Internal ADECA memos and correspondence between ADECA and the Youth Leadership Project detail a number of concerns with the services provided under that grant, including disputed invoice expenses, failed efforts to coordinate services, and questions over the number of participants served by the center.

The Workforce Investment Act was enacted by Congress in 1998. Grants awarded under the act are typically administered through the various states and are considered to be “draw-down” or performance-based grants, in which grant money is allocated only after an invoice that meets the guidelines of a particular grant contract is submitted.

According to Brown, that system was one of a number of “strings” which came with the grant that hampered early efforts to get the Youth Opportunity Center operational.

“My job, basically, was to go in and set the center up,” Brown explained. “But I had very limited resources.

“The upside to the system they are using to administer that grant is that you have a high level of accountability. You have to document all your expenses and submit an invoice before you ever receive any money, and I have no problem with that. The downside is that the program has to spend money to get money.”

The problems began early on. The center is located on Church Street, in what had been an abandoned warehouse. In preparing the building to house the center, Brown said, expenses were incurred which were not included in the original grant contract.

“It’s hard to find acceptable buildings that don’t need lots of repair in rural areas like Dallas County,” she said. “So we were able to renegotiate parts of the grant contract to accommodate some of those expenses.”

Further exacerbating the center’s funding problems is the exacting nature of the invoice approval process required under federal guidelines. Brown labeled the effort required to satisfy those guidelines an administrative “nightmare.”

As of December – nine months after the grant went into effect – only three invoices totaling slightly more than $65,000 had in fact been approved.

Brown pointed out that under federal guidelines if an invoice is submitted that does not meet all grant contract guidelines, no further invoices are accepted until all questions regarding the first invoice have been resolved.

She recalled submitting one invoice that included a number of items, including a receipt in the amount of $1. But the printing on that receipt had faded, rendering it illegible.

“I asked them, ‘Why didn’t you just subtract the dollar and send the rest of the money?'” an obviously exasperated Brown recalled. “They told me, ‘It doesn’t work that way. You have to resubmit the entire invoice.'”

She cited other examples of invoices rejected, not because an expenditure was unacceptable, but because one or more of the guidelines had not been met.

“For example,” she said, “I submitted an invoice that listed a copy machine as office equipment. But according to the guidelines a copy machine is not equipment, it’s considered to be part of office supplies. And, of course, when we sent that invoice in it was rejected and the process had to start all over again.”

Brown said that similar repeated snafus with invoices kept the center’s cash flow so low that it became virtually impossible to hire staff. The shortage of staff, in turn, made it difficult to meet not only the administrative demands of handling the grant but in getting participants certified to participate in the program.

“We were not the only ones having this problem,” Brown said. “There were 12 youth organizations that got funded through this program. Half of those folded in the first six months. Some of them wouldn’t even take the money because after they saw what a headache it was, they just folded rather than try to deal with it. The paperwork was horrendous.”

To be certified, participants in the program must be between the ages of 14 and 21 and come from low-income families. They also must be deficient in basic literacy skills, a school dropout, homeless, a runaway or foster child, pregnant or parenting, or be a juvenile offender.

Guiding potential participants through the certification process proved to be nearly as difficult as dealing with the bureaucratic red tape required by the invoice guidelines, according to Brown.

She also noted that the grant provided no funds for recruiting program participants.

“You have to understand,” Brown said, “we were dealing with low-income children. Most of them don’t have transportation, so that becomes a barrier. They had to produce a birth certificate, for many of these kids that was a barrier.”

She explained that many of the at-risk youth targeted by the program live with grandparents or other relatives and no longer have a birth certificate at home.

The certification process also requires proof of income for each member of the household. Brown said that many low-income families are reluctant to reveal such information for fear it could be used to disqualify them from receiving government aid.

“It was insane,” said Brown. “Whoever designed this program, I just don’t think they thought it out in terms of the population it was intended to serve.”

After participants are certified at the employment service office, they are required to go to the CareerLink office – “Another barrier,” said Brown – to have their skills level assessed.

Only then are participants officially eligible to access the services provided by the Youth Opportunity Center.

Said Brown, “You find me a 14 year old that can overcome all those barriers. Anybody who works with children in this city would tell you, that’s just not reasonable. I don’t know many adults who could deal with that process. The process was very intimidating.”

Brown contends that administering the Workforce Investment Act has been challenging for the various agencies involved as well.

Certification required close coordination between the Youth Opportunity Center, the federal authorities overseeing the program, ADECA, the Alabama Employment Service and the Alabama CareerLink office – a coordination which did not previously exist.

Brown said she no longer had access to the number of students that had successfully certified for the program. When contacted by phone, Lee Mason, the current administrator, declined to say how many certified participants the center served.

Lee Childers, director of communications for ADECA, said that agency currently has no record of the number of certified participants served by the center other than an estimate of 130 provided by Mason over the telephone.

Said Brown, “The bottom line is nobody was prepared for this grant. The organizations weren’t ready. The state wasn’t ready. Nobody was ready. The kinks are still being ironed out. It’s even a problem for local governments, with all their resources, to administer federal grants. Imagine what it was like for these youth programs to administer a grant where they couldn’t even get paid until they had first met the requirements.

“The point is we survived when other programs folded, and we’re surviving still.”

If there is an upside to her experience administering the Youth Opportunity Center grant, Brown said that she now has a better understanding of the hurdles faced by such community organizations in trying to secure adequate funding.

“We need our local, state and federal agencies to create the kinds of programs that allow these community organizations to deliver good, quality programs,” she said. “There are a lot of organizations in this community that do phenomenal work, but are afraid to deal with these long arduous processes.

“What ends up happening is that a lot of organizations that have good programs, that do good work, don’t get funded.”