| Tell your Senators to preserve poverty-focused international assistance!
What you can do: Contact your member of the Senate Appropriations Committee and ask them to give priority to poverty-focused international assistance within the Foreign Operations Appropriation, and to protect poverty focused assistance from disproportionate cuts proposed by the House.
Current Situation/Background/Context: The Senate Appropriations Committee is scheduled to take up the Fiscal Year 2012 Foreign Operations Appropriation Bill next week. This bill will have a substantial impact on poverty-focused development and humanitarian aid, and could help prevent disproportionate cuts proposed by the House of Representatives.
This Funding has a direct impact on Catholic Relief Services’ ability to save lives around the globe.
Poverty-focused international aid amounts to less than 1 percent of the U.S. Budget and provides help for people suffering from severe poverty, disease and violence. Each year this small amount of aid will: - feed 46.5 million of the world’s starving persons;
- feed 5 million schoolchildren;
- prevent more than 114,000 infants from being born with HIV;
- provide millions of HIV-positive people with counseling or treatment;
- save 3 million lives through USAID’s immunization programs.
(Bread for the World, 2011)
In the last decade this aid has brought safe, reliable drinking water to more than 1.3 billion people, preventing disease.
Cutting funds to poverty-focused development and humanitarian assistance will cost lives.
USCCB Position/Church Teaching: The USCCB supports federal programs that provide assistance for “the least of these,” (Mt 25:45). In a joint letter to the Chairman and Ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Bishop Howard Hubbard and Mr. Ken Hackett, President of Catholic Relief Services, addressed the importance of preserving and prioritizing international poverty-assistance. These programs include vital funding for food aid, child survival and maternal health, HIV/AIDS and infectious disease assistance and prevention programs, development and disaster relief programs, transition and refugee assistance, the millennium challenge account, debt relief, and peacekeeping initiatives.
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