A nonprofit that has provided immigration integration services to Somerville residents for decades lost city funding in July.
The Massachusetts Alliance of Portuguese Speakers, which provides a caseworker to serve vulnerable Portuguese-speaking residents, won’t be able to serve 320 clients this fiscal year because it no longer gets a $17,000 Community Development grant, said chief executive Paulo Pinto, expressing disappointment and surprise in a press release.
Pinto called it “crucial funding for a program that has never been more essential.”
But Maps is only one among many nonprofits with funding needs that have grown as federal support has declined, said a spokesperson for Somerville, which will depend on internal capacity to meet needs that Maps had filled.
This is the second blow in three years for the organization; it was displaced along with the Somerville Media Center from its location at90-92 Union Square in 2023, when the city stopped leasing space, citing structural deterioration. It found a new home at 362 Somerville Ave., where it continues to advocate for and provide health, education and social services to area Brazilian, Cabo Verdean, Portuguese and other Portuguese-speaking communities. Maps has been a “role model organization” and partner in connecting its community with immigrant support services for more than 50 years, Pinto said.
The nonprofit closes its Brighton office at the end of the month “due to a substantial rent increase amid budget cuts and a shrinking local Portuguese-speaking community,” Maps said Monday. Though it had been in Allston-Brighton for three decades, another $1,000 in monthly rent costs was unsustainable, Pinto said.
The loss of funding in Somerville resulted from a competitive evaluation of need – a “highly competitive grant process” that brought funding applications totaling “roughly twice the funds available,” city spokesperson Denise Taylor said.
The $17,000 in funds Maps requested has gone into the general pool of funding. Other nonprofits that serve low and middle-income residents, including non-English speaking ones, got some of the $384,570 at stake from federal Department of Housing and Urban Development grants to the city.
While last year available funds were slightly lower at $382,321, overall the federal grant amount has been declining since a high of $435,616 in the 2022 fiscal year, Taylor said.
Four categories identified
The funding decision was not a reprioritization away from immigrant support services by Somerville, Taylor said, but the same grant proposal process includes work around such needs as nutrition, child care, senior transportation and domestic violence.
The grant decision reflected “an overall summary of outcomes after the fact-based review of each application” and was not a statement about Maps, Taylor said. “Maps is unique in offering one-stop-shop comprehensive services for Portuguese speakers, and the withdrawal of this approach to concentrated services is a loss to the community.”
Until the grant announcement, Map expected to keep contracting a caseworker for eight hours a week to help residents with such things as housing aid, job needs, access to public and government benefits such as Social Security, unemployment payments and other basic needs.
The city will spread the equivalent of the organization’s work across multiple city teams “to ensure our residents remain served,” Taylor said. “This includes social workers within several teams, housing specialists in our Office of Housing Stability, food access staff in our Health and Human Services Department, immigration services staff in Somerville Office of Immigrant Affairs who also conduct social service and housing referrals, and more.”
Abrupt cut
Before 2020, the same category of grants gave Maps roughly $5,500 a year; Maps stepped up and served more clients between 2020 and 2025 because of an increase in need during the pandemic, Taylor said. That led to funding levels upward of $17,000 annually.
This fiscal year, “with pandemic funds expended, federal funding overall … available for the city to award to local nonprofits is greatly reduced,” Taylor said.
Maps had to cut services abruptly upon learning of the funding loss, which meant no warning for the people being helped by the caseworker. “We are contacting clients with scheduled appointments to let them know and help them schedule new appointments at SOIA,” Pinto said, referring to the Somerville Office of Immigrant Affairs.
“We are concerned that members of our community with no or little English skills will have a difficult time getting through the city’s telephone system,” Pinto said. “One of our staff members, who was helping a client get an appointment to complete an unemployment claim, was told that it required the assistance of a city attorney to ensure the adequate completion of forms and documents. This is something that our trained case workers did in less than one hour’s time and highlights the importance of the city being efficient in the use of its limited resources.”
The organization started as the Somerville Portuguese-American League in the late 1960s, merging in 1993 to become Maps with a slightly younger nonprofit called the Cambridge Organization of Portuguese Americans.
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USA DEBT = $37 Trillion = goal bankruptcy? “We are concerned that members of our community with no or little English skills will have a difficult time getting through the city’s telephone system”. Portuguese voters can obtain ballots in Portuguese practically all government interaction can be translated into Portuguese or is Portuguese applications I do not see any problems other than the fact that English by executive order is the official language of the United States but that’s an executive order.