The storied partnership between Notre Dame and Catholic Relief Services (CRS) began 25 years ago, but the landscape has changed recently. CRS has lost 62% of their funding, according to an article from the National Catholic Reporter.
The loss of funding has impacted the organization in several ways, according to Michael Sweikar, the liaison between CRS and Notre Dame. Sweikar is also the executive director for the Pulte Institute, formerly known as the Notre Dame Global Development Institute (NDIGD). The Institute was established with the goal to connect Notre Dame research and impact evaluation to organizations that were doing work out in the field, like CRS.
At the start, the partnership between Notre Dame and CRS was mostly focused on guest speakers, but it has been transformed over the past decade.
"We started doing more rigorous research with them, and really being a strong university partner to them in their work with USAID," Sweikar said.
He added that CRS does a tremendous amount of work with emergency responses, and that they address food security in countries around the world. Notre Dame provided evidence to help CRS determine which of these programs were most effective, making the large scale budget cuts challenging. According to the CRS website, their programs reach over 210 million people in 121 countries.
"One of the challenges with just dismantling USAID is cutting almost 90 percent of the grants," Sweikar said. "It's basically just taking a hatchet to global development funding, as opposed to saying 'We're actually pretty good at figuring out what's working, so why don't we fund what's working and effective, as opposed to just cutting everything.'"
Organizations like CRS received stop work orders which place grants under review. Around 30 days after the stop work order, they likely received a termination letter for many grants. According to a report by The Associated Press, the Trump administration has cut 90% of USAID's foreign aid contracts.
The cut to foreign aid contracts will impact foreign humanitarian aid heavily, and Sweikar said that global health organizations may be unable to administer second or third doses of vaccines.
"Part of the challenge for organizations like CRS is that there has been very little time to adapt for them … which makes it really hard when you're actively trying to ship food to a country, and you get stop work orders as the ship's going to that country," he said.
The substantial cuts to USAID's foreign aid contracts has disrupted CRS in several ways, impacting their international programs and their staff.
"Not only are the food aid and the programs that Catholic Relief Services are doing no longer being distributed," he said. "It's significantly reducing the staff size of CRS and its ability to partner with organizations that help them prove what is actually being used most effectively."
Sweiker said the two organizations came together initially for a partnership because of their shared values. One of the shared values between Notre Dame and CRS is the idea of integral human development, which Sweikar says is about looking at the dignity of the whole person.
"When we're doing work to help those in poverty or others around the world, not just looking at it in an economic lens, but also looking at it with this idea,"
he said. "[That] if you want to help people, it's really about looking at the dignity of the whole person, and not just sending materials or building schools."
The percentage of the federal budget is smaller than people realize, and the budget cuts will impact U.S jobs.
"People often don't realize that less than 1 percent of our federal budget goes to these programs, and people often feel that it's a lot more," Sweikar said. "It's actually a very minor portion of the US government's budget that provides food security for people, which helps lead to our long-term security as a country."
The long-standing partnership between Notre Dame and CRS reached greater heights when the Pulte Institute became the official home of the CRS student ambassador program at Notre Dame.
Anne Kelly, who is one of the current leaders for the CRS ambassador program, said she was taught how the CRS program works in the broader South Bend community by Sweikar. Kelly said that while the current chapter is small, it's a very tight knit group of people who are very passionate about the cause.
Sweikar said the partnership between Notre Dame and CRS will continue, but that it will be difficult since both groups have lost their funding from USAID. He said future funds will have to come from an alternative source, from the private sector or through individual donations.
"We had a $75 million grant that we were partnered on to do long term research on the impact and cost-effectiveness of programs that was completely cut," Sweikar said. "So we have very little funding and no funding from those grants to collaborate anymore."
The student ambassador program consists of a few small fundraising events, including the CRS rice bowl fundraiser, which takes place every year during Lent.
"Most of what we've done from a fundraising perspective has been with the rice bowl," Kelly said. "That's the main way of outreach, and many people remember it from their childhood."
The program has also participated in congressional meetings alongside other local CRS chapters. The usual conversations surrounding funding for CRS programs have recently shifted, according to Kelly. She noted that the CRS student ambassador program was not impacted by the budget cuts, since they mostly do fundraising.
"It used to be about raising the bar from where they were already funding," Kelly said. "Now that everything's been cut, what can we possibly salvage and who can we get on our side? It's been a total shift in everyone that I've spoken to who works at CRS."
She thinks that moving forward raising awareness about what CRS actually does will be really important, even if you can't see the people it's helping.
"Maybe there is government spending happening, but it's government spending for a purpose, to this really inspiring organization that does life saving work," Kelly said.
