Community and Economic Development Association of Cook County, Incorporated
CEDA Mission Statement:
To work in partnership with communities to empower families and individuals to achieve self-sufficiency and improve their quality of life.
Community Action Promise:
Community Action changes people’s lives, embodies the spirit of hope, improves communities, and makes America a better place to live.
We care about the entire community, and we are dedicated to helping people help themselves and each other.
Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, several programs that CEDA currently operates, including Weatherization, Workforce and Economic Development (WED) and Head Start will receive billions of dollars in additional federal funding. For CEDA, this means that exciting, yet challenging opportunities are ahead of us. With the allocation of increased funding of this scale, we are in the planning process of program expansion, assessing new employment and job training opportunities, setting new benchmarks for success and adapting the Administration’s initiative of complete transparency.
CEDA in partnership with AKT Peerless
Environmental and Energy Services will
be completing a series of energy audits
for residential, commercial and industrial
facilities located in Cook County.
Additionally, CEDA and AKT Peerless will
provide implementation assistance.
Energy Audits will be at no charge for
those owners selected in the program.
CEDA Head Start and Early Head Start serves nearly 3,000 pre-school children, infants, pregnant women and families through 30 Head Start centers throughout Cook County. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act support a broad range of Head Start and Early Head Start initiatives to ensure that more families and children from underserved communities have access to quality education.
ARRA Improves Head Start & Early Head Start Programming and Operational Capacity
Funding from ARRA expands Head Start and Early Head Start services to reach an additional 192 income-eligible families. These funds also support three areas of CEDA Head Start, which enables comprehensive improvements to programming and operational output. These areas of support are outlined below:
Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) Equips Staff with Financial Security
All staff and delegate agencies of Head Start will receive a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) increase in FY 2009.
COLA is used to increase pay to help manage higher operating costs and increase staff salaries and fringe benefits
Competitive pay allows CEDA to retain and recruit qualified teachers and other educational personnel
Quality Improvement Closes Educational Gap for Underserved Families
Funds from ARRA will be allocated for Quality Improvement (QI), for the purposes of employee training, compensation and professional development. Head Start uses QI to attract and retain qualified staff to maintain results driven programs;
provide education and professional development that enable teachers to meet established professional standards;
train teachers to become certified and/or licensed bilingual educators;
improve the qualifications and skills of educational personnel to teach and provide services to children with disabilities;
employing additional qualified classroom staff to reduce the child-to-teacher ratio in the classroom and additional qualified family service workers to reduce the family-to-staff ratio for those workers ensuring that Head Start programs have qualified staff that promote the language skills and literacy growth of children
