Bloomington awards over $500K in social services grants as potential federal cuts loom

Last Wednesday (June 4), Bloomington's city council approved over a half million dollars in funding to 35 different social service agencies, continuing the Jack Hopkins funding program's 33-year tradition.

The exact amount of grant funding awarded was $510,377.27. Since its inception, more than $6 million has been awarded to local nonprofits through the Jack Hopkins social services program.

Residents serving on this year's committee were Nordia McNish, Camryn Greer and Eddy Riou. Councilmembers serving on the committee were Isak Asare (chair), Dave Rollo, Andy Ruff, and Courtney Daily.

At last Wednesday's meeting, it was Asare who presented the committee's report. This year there were 38 applications, which requested a total of almost $1 million. But in the end, the committee funded 35 agencies, using $500,000 in new funds supplemented by $30,000 carried over from previous years.

Asare highlighted two significant procedural changes from previous years.. One procedural change was the introduction of a formal scoring rubric. The second procedural change was to interview just some of the applicants, in a more focussed way.

Previously, all applicants had been allotted around three minutes to give a presentation. But this time around, Asare said, only those applicants were interviewed for whom the committee had specific questions, based on their written materials. "We asked them pointed questions, and we asked that they use their interview time to answer those questions," Asare said. Not getting invited to an interview didn't mean an organization wasn't awarded funding. The more focused approach, Asare said, gave the committee a chance to "really dive in and do due diligence on things that we were unclear about."

Next year, Asare said the committee wants to start the selection process earlier and add more meetings for deliberations on the awards. He also reported that the committee is interested in developing a universal application process that could be used across city funding streams as well as possibly Monroe County funds. The Monroe County council has a program for awarding social services grants, similar to the Jack Hopkins grant program, named after the late county councilor Sophia Travis.

The basic criteria for Jack Hopkins social services funding were first written down in a 1993 letter by councilmember Jack Hopkins, after whom the fund was named. Hopkins was a professor at Indiana University's public and environmental affairs. The resolution that named the fund after Hopkins was approved by the city council in 2002, the month after Hopkins died.

Among the funding streams that a universal funding application could serve is CDBG (Community Development Block Grant) money, which comes through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. In its discretionary 2026 budget request, the Trump administration has called for the elimination of the CDBG program, through which Bloomington has in recent years received around $800,000.

In her remarks to Bloomington's redevelopment commission (RDC) on May 5, Bloomington's HAND (Housing and Neighborhood Development) director, Anna Killion-Hanson told RDC commissioners that Trump's first administration made the same proposal, but did not follow through on it. She said, "I will say that that same administration proposed eliminating that funding every year from 2017 to 2020 so that didn't happen at that time." She added, "We don't know what's going to happen, but just putting everyone on notice that there may be some changes."

Even before CDBG funding was officially in jeopardy, some city councilmembers had called for dramatically increasing Jack Hopkins social services funding. Now that it's clear that CDBG money could disappear in 2026, councilmembers have begun to discuss the best approach to dealing with that shortfall.

This year's $500,000 allocation for Jack Hopkins reflects a significant boost over the last couple of years when it has been around $325,000. The half-million-dollar figure puts the Jack Hopkins funding this around the same level as in the years immediately following the COVID-19 pandemic. Jack Hopkins funding comes from the city's general fund, and has historically been administered through the city council's budget.

There's not a clear consensus among councilmembers that Jack Hopkins funding should be doubled to 1 million dollars to address the shortfall in funding from the federal government for social service programs.

At their April 30 meeting, council president Hopi Stosberg said she thinks it's important to support residents with basic necessities, but continued, "I'm not sure that doubling Jack Hopkins [funding] is the best way to do that." She added, "It's a kind of huge administrative burden in a lot of ways." Stosberg said that if a lot more taxpayer money would be going to support various nonprofits, she is uncertain that a city council committee process is the best way to make those awards.

Dave Rollo reacted to Stosberg by saying, "I couldn't disagree more." He added that Jack Hopkins awards provide money "for very basic needs in the community—food, housing, substance abuse." Rollo added, "Clearly we have a deficiency when it comes to the allocation compared to the requests."

Asare agreed that more funding is needed, but also agreed with a point that Stosberg made, that the funding needs to be tied to outcomes. Asare called for additional capacity for tracking outcomes of the funding.

Isabel Piedmont-Smith also agreed that the city needs to spend more to support social service agencies to help those in need. But she also expressed skepticism that it's the city council that is best positioned to administer the additional funding. Piedmont-Smith put it like this: "I just don't think that the city council is really in the best position to implement this grant program."

Piedmont-Smith said the executive branch (that is, the mayor's administration) has more capacity to administer such a program, pointing out that it's the administration that already handles CDBG funding allocations to different nonprofits. Piedmont-Smith said, "We can still send council members to sit on a committee. But why are we administering this?"

2025 Jack Hopkins funding allocations