Several media organizations, including WFAE, have teamed up to help find a solution. We call this project Charlotte: Mission Possible.

A company in Charlotte is also playing an instrumental role in the project. It’s tasked with asking the public for ideas to help charities improve their services.

WFAE’s Simone Orendain has this report on Edison Nation and its role in Charlotte: Mission Possible.

Joanne Ahern, the director of the senior center in Cornelius, says closing the center would leave many seniors in the lurch.

“It would be devastating to many of them,” says Ahern. “We have seniors who come and play bingo on Tuesday. They come and do knitting and crocheting on Monday. They play cards on Wednesday, and they come to the luncheon and the lectures on Friday. This is their life.”

Ahern says the center will stay open past August if the group can raise enough money from businesses and individuals. Charlotte Mecklenburg Senior Centers receives money from private donations, local, state, and federal grants.

WFAE is one of eight media outlets participating in Charlotte: Mission Possible.

Last night, more than 200 people gathered to figure out how Charlotte residents, community leaders, and officials should go about meeting basic needs.

And the answer that came back is that Charlotte needs a plan to raise money and efficiently parcel out assistance.

WFAE’s Lisa Miller has more:

The room at Little Rock AME Zion Church was packed with people from churches, non-profits and plenty of others who came on their own to take part in the discussion. A few county commissioners also showed up.

Early on, Carol Hardison, the director of Crisis Assistance Ministry, made an observation that stuck with the group.

“In the twenty-five, thirty years I’ve lived in Charlotte, we’ve had four strategic plans for arts and culture,” said Hardison. “We have never had a strategic plan for human services. We don’t have a single leader. We don’t have a plan.”

Hardison was part of a panel which fielded questions on how the community can work together to deliver food, shelter and job training to people in need.

The question of a strategic plan kept coming up. Lawrence Tolliver, a former vice president at the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce, stood up and said before the community can have a plan it needs to know what it’s aiming at.

“When Charlotte wanted a better airport it first had a vision of a better airport. When Charlotte wanted to have professional sports it had a vision for professional sports,” said Tolliver. “So I want to know when are we going to get the public and private sectors together for a vision of a real safety net?”

Panelists former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt and Mecklenburg County General Manager John McGillicuddy didn’t go into specifics, but they said the momentum for a plan needed to start at the grassroots. And Hardison said the community wouldn’t have to start from scratch.

“We do have people at the grassroots creating public-private partnerships that can be used as a model,” replied Hardison.

The audience broke up into small groups to start figuring out how the community should meet the needs of so many.

In one group, Bob Weeks offered Charlotte’s response to Hurricane Katrina victims as proof that with coordination the community can accomplish a lot.

“The community came together. They donated money. They donated homes that were vacant. They donated food, clothing,” recounted Weeks. “If the community was organized and asked to do something like that we could probably do it on an even larger scale for a longer period of time and help our own.”

Another member of the group, Brian Barger brought up a subject that was missing from the larger discussion last night.

“Everything from DSS issues to United Way, it makes people wonder ‘what I gave did it actually get there?’ You can’t have people wonder that or else they won’t do anything,” said Barger.

Mecklenburg Ministries organized the meeting with the help of the Community Building Initiative and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Community Relations Committee.

The United Way says it gave top priority to programs that meet critical needs brought on by the economic downturn.  As a result, Salvation Army’s Center of Hope shelter is the only program to receive more funding than it got last year.

Still Major Todd Hawks says the 4 percent funding increase isn’t enough to keep pace with the 22 percent increase in homeless women and children coming to the shelter.

“What it does do is we don’t have to dismantle any of the current infrastructure,” says Hawks.  “So that’s the good news.”

The bad news is the Boys and Girls Clubs operated by the Salvation Army had their United Way funding cut 45 percent.  That’s $310,000.

“So some of the scenarios we’ve had to look at is if the support doesn’t come in from the community to help offset some of that decrease, we will have to look at closure of some of our Boys and Girls Clubs,” says Hawks.

The United Way began warning of the cuts when its fundraising efforts fell $15 million short in the fall.  But the worst-case scenarios never included cuts as high as 70 percent, which turned out to be the case for some programs that don’t fall into the “critical needs” category. However, most of the funding cuts announced today are in the range of 20 and 30 percent.

The problem is that many agencies on United Way’s funding roster are interdependent.

For example, United Family Services operates a shelter for battered women.  Its United Way grant was cut 35 percent.  But Executive Director Mark Pierman says the shelter refers those women to a host of other nonprofits on United Way’s roster for help with rent, counseling, substance abuse treatment and many other services to get them back on their feet.  So the impact is compounded.

“If their funding is cut and they’re not able to serve as many people then it’s going to be more difficult for us for these people in the community,” says Pierman.  “If we can’t move people out of the shelter, then you’re backing up the system.”

Already, Pierman says the community-wide funding crisis is causing women to stay in the domestic violence shelter eight days longer than they were last year.  A similar pressure is at work in all of Charlotte’s homeless shelters.  Meanwhile, waiting lists for all essential services in the region grow longer by the day.

Editor’s Note: WFAE has joined other media outlets to help find solutions to the crisis facing the area’s charities, and the people they serve. Visit charlottemissionpossible.org to access stories on the crisis. You can also go to this site to find a charity to support.

Over the coming months, the Charlotte: Mission Possible effort will be seeking your input to help charities overcome their challenges.