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From Napa Valley Register: Letter to the Editor – Clarifying Community Foundation aid plans

August 11  • 

Thank you very much for your Aug. 7 story about the next phase of grants from the Napa Valley Community Disaster Relief Fund, which is managed by my organization and was launched with a $10 million gift from Napa Valley Vintners (“Community Foundation planning more earthquake aid”).

I’m writing to expand upon, and clarify, a couple of points raised in this article.

The piece says that we are contemplating two broad categories of funding for our final phase of work, which is true: grants to help qualified homeowners make earthquake-related repairs if their dwellings are still unsafe; and grants to make the community at large more resilient in the event of a future disaster.

However, we haven’t made a final decision about the dollar amounts we will devote to these two areas of work; and we haven’t entered into a partnership with the Long Term Recovery Group, or any other nonprofit, as of yet.

We expect to announce our plans, and our partners for this last phase of grants, before the end of this month.

In the meantime, what I can share with your readers is that we will most likely begin the final stage of this initiative with an investment of $2 million to $2.5 million. We will focus resources on both the future and the past. And we will build a budget that takes into account two important things: first, the $52 million that’s already been distributed to Napa County residents for remediation ($46 million from Federal disaster relief programs; $6 million in direct aid from our Fund); and second, the knowledge that any process for delivering assistance to the victims of a natural disaster — including our process — will regrettably miss some residents who face barriers to their own recovery.

Once again, thank you for your coverage of our work.

Terence P. Mulligan, president

Napa Valley Community Foundation

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