QC urged to take a seat at One Table, oppose federal funding cuts

As GOP lawmakers rush to meet a July 4 deadline set by President Trump to pass his “big, beautiful bill,” Quad Cities nonprofit leaders issued a call to action Monday, June 30, aimed at protecting the Quad Cities’ safety net. The first-ever Nonprofit Legislative Roundtable at the River Bend Food Bank in west Davenport  was […]

As GOP lawmakers rush to meet a July 4 deadline set by President Trump to pass his “big, beautiful bill,” Quad Cities nonprofit leaders issued a call to action Monday, June 30, aimed at protecting the Quad Cities’ safety net. The first-ever Nonprofit Legislative Roundtable at the River Bend Food Bank in west Davenport  was hosted by the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) Quad Cities Chapter and Wastyn & Associates. Its President Linda Wastyn shared the results of a survey by her Davenport company which helps nonprofits capture grant dollars and improve their fundraising efforts. It showed the “alarming” consequences to Quad Citians in need and the working poor if the federal changes under consideration become law. Four leaders of key Quad Cities nonprofits also shared the dramatic impact of the cuts contained in the budget reconciliation bill now in the U.S. House with local legislative leaders and their representatives who were at the meeting. Elected officials who attended the roundtable included Iowa Representatives Mike Vondran and Gary Mohr, and Moline Mayor Sangeetha Rayapati. “Today's roundtable is just the first course,” promised Jenny Colvin, vice president of the River Bend Food Bank and president of the AFP Quad Cities. "We're serving notice that the work continues through One Table QC.”  That six month, nonpartisan initiative is aimed at focusing on confronting those big cuts, big changes and having a larger conversation surrounding awareness, advocacy and action. “One Table QC invites every Quad Citizen to pull up a chair and see the facts on the table, so that people from these two states can share stories across one table and decide together how to understand how recent changes in federal funding will impact our local nonprofit sector,” Ms. Colvin said.

Catalyst for One Table

A catalyst for One Table’s work is the results of a March 2025 survey by Wastyn & Associates to ask their nonprofit clients how they were being hurt by changes in the federal funding as well as the even more troubling updated survey by that same firm conducted in early June.  “The results were alarming,” Ms. Colvin said. “What we saw confirmed what many of us were already feeling. Our nonprofits are facing serious challenges, and their voices need to be heard.” Ms. Wastyn told the large crowd that included nonprofit leaders from across the bistate “A lot has happened since March.” In fact, regarding that June update, she said “we were astonished, horrified to find that things had gotten much worse” than they had expected. Some 62 nonprofits responded to the June survey update and half said they had already experienced or expected to experience significant funding challenges. “But what really astonished us was that between March and June, 98% of nonprofits now say they expect some kind of impact, whether that is a significant impact or a minor impact,” she added. “No nonprofit said we don't expect to be touched by this. “ Additional results showed that about half are likely to cut programs, and one-third said they’ll probably see higher client demands. “You've got higher demand, you've got fewer services; that's going to create a perfect storm,” Ms. Wastyn said. “Equally frightening, one in three (nonprofits) thinks they may have to lay off or furlough staff. Our nonprofit sector employs about 40,000 people,” Ms. Wastyn said. “If one-third of nonprofits lay off staff the unemployed workers also will need food assistance, housing assistance and medical assistance.”

Nonprofits could close

Especially troubling is that nearly one in 10 of those nonprofits surveyed said they may have to close their doors. “We have 4,000 nonprofits in our community. Imagine the Quad Cities with 400 fewer nonprofits to help feed our residents, to help clothe our people, help educate them, to help them find housing,” Ms. Wastyn added. Then there are the downstream effects as funders shift their dollars to provide basic needs in order to keep people fed, clothed and housed.  “Nonprofits provide about 5% of the national GDP,” Ms. Wastyn said. “When we do the math and we look at the Quad Cities, it says that the Quad Cities could lose about $1.8 billion of GDP when you hurt the nonprofit community. So that's dire,” she added. At River Bend Food Bank, President & CEO Chris Ford told the crowd 47,000 people would lose access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly referred to as food stamps if the reconciliation bill under review eliminates SNAP entirely. Meanwhile, 136,400 people in River Bend’s 23-county service area already are considered food insecure. Going forward, as River Bend works to carry out its mission to feed the hungry, Mr. Ford said, “We're not sure where all of our meals for our guests will come from next year.” About half of the organizations that River Bend serves “right now have already indicated to us, before any of this reconciliation, that they are struggling financially,” he said. “I would estimate we would lose between 40% to 50% of our partners. What that would do would create food deserts throughout both Iowa and Illinois.”

Many will go hungry

In all, 9.5 billion meals are provided by SNAP nationwide each year and the average cost of a meal “that’s probably not a great meal” is $3 in the Midwest. “So you're roughly talking away $27 million across the entire network,” he said. “I can tell you, as an organization, we are very good at raising funds, but we are not that good at raising those kinds of funds.” Humility Homes & Services, which is led by CEO Ashley Velez, would lose $150,000 of homeless prevention funding and $1 million in HOME funding if that funding is eliminated in the final bill. That will mean all permanent supportive housing funded from Housing and Urban Development (HUD) would be gone, 20 units of permanent support housing would be closed and the two staff positions that support the program would be eliminated. Community Health Care CEO Bowman used his time to focus on the potential impact of slashing Medicaid, which he said “make up a huge portion of the cost savings that are being considered in the reconciliation bill” under consideration. Under the current cuts, he said, at CHC between 5,000 and 10,000 people will lose coverage. “That's a $5 million to $10 million hole in our budget that would have otherwise gone to nurses, doctors and dentists and pharmacists and vendors that supply supplies for health care that is no longer going to be circulating into our economy here in the Quad Cities,” he said. “How are we going to offset that?”

Medicaid users work

The cuts also focus on work requirements without taking into account that the “vast majority of people” on Medicaid already are working as many hours as they can instead of “sitting at home collecting a check coming from the federal government for Medicaid,” Mr. Bowman said. The cuts also are likely to increase the numbers of uninsured when the federal subsidies that keep the Affordable Care Act (ACA) policies affordable expire. That is because the working poor will not be able to pay the higher costs that the market-rate policies will require.  Prior to the ACA, Mr. Bowman said CHC’s rate was 35% uninsured. “We expect to climb back close to that,” if the current plan goes through, he said. Slashing Medicaid also will create critical challenges for hospitals especially in rural areas or disproportionately low income areas. And don’t forget, he added, these patients do not go away. “If the coverage changes, the patient still needs medication to treat their diabetes, or they need to get their kid an annual physical to go to school, or they need to have a physical for their employer,” Mr. Bowman said. “Many will simply decline to get any care and eventually die a painful death in a hospital bed,” he said. “That's unacceptable to me. I hope that it's unacceptable to everybody in this room.” “I would encourage everybody to make a phone call to your senators as you exit this room today and ask them to look for provisions to maintain access in some way, because we are going to have to fix this issue as a community and come together, and we do a great job of that in the Quad Cities,” he said.

Cuts hit small business

Project NOW’s Rev. Dwight Ford said nonprofits are serving nearly 18,000 in this region who are impoverished or below the federal poverty level. Consider, he said, that one-third of the population makes $15 or less an hour, 105 million people nationally don't have access to paid family leave, 87 million are uninsured or underinsured, and one in five can’t afford their light bill. In addition, he said, Scott County leads the State of Iowa in evictions and across the river in Illinois every eight seconds someone is being evicted.  “We saw homelessness grow in our state 116% last year in our particular service area,” Rev. Ford said. “That resulted in a more than 44% increase in homelessness. What are we getting ready to do?”  He also pointed to the impact the cuts would have on the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) administered by Project NOW. It served 5,812 individuals last year with an average benefit of $841. “Many people don't calculate the infrastructure devastation as well, because the contracted services that we use are small businesses,” Rev. Ford said. “And so those millions that we bring back to this area go right out the door to the small business that installs our furnaces and (does) the weatherization for our weatherization grant.” Quad Citians can help join the fight against these deep and painful cuts “before it’s too late,” Ms. Colvin said. She urged Quad Citians to join One Table QC’s mailing list, download resources and follow it everywhere they can find it on social media “because the bigger conversation starts now, and it only works if everyone is at the table. Every seat matters.”