Pee Dee
COMMUNITY ACTIONFor more than 60 years, Pee Dee Community Action Partnership has been reaching out to those in need with strategies that work—providing hope, creating opportunities, and building stronger communities across Florence, Marion, and Dillon Counties.
The mission of the Pee Dee Community Action Partnership is to advocate and implement human service programs to achieve self-sufficiency for vulnerable populations in collaboration with the community.
Strengthen community capabilities for planning and coordination to insure that available assistance related to the elimination of poverty can be more responsive to local needs and conditions.
Broaden the resource base of programs directed to the elimination of poverty so as to include all elements of the community able to influence the quality and quantity of services to the poor.
Develop better organization of services related to the needs of the poor.
Increase new types of services and innovative approaches in attacking causes of poverty, so as to develop increasingly effective methods of employing available resources.
Maximize feasible participation of the poor in the development and implementation of all programs and projects designed to serve the poor.
Maximize employment opportunities, including opportunities for further occupational training and career development, for residents of the area and members of the groups served.
Community Action Agencies were created with the enactment of the Economic Opportunity Act (EOA) of 1964, which established a national program to combat poverty in the United States.
The Act established a Federal Office of Economic Opportunity, former state Economic Opportunity offices, and created new community-based organizations called Community Action Agencies (CAAs).
CAAs were expected to act as laboratories for innovative methods of eliminating causes of poverty and to develop and deliver private efforts, public programs, and resources of all kinds to improve the lives of people in need.
CAAs became major delivery systems for federal programs including Head Start, Legal Services, the Community Food and Nutrition Program, Foster Grandparents, and Job Training.
Programs continue to evolve to meet changing community needs while CAAs remain committed to the core mission of helping people achieve self-sufficiency.
Today, Community Action Agencies operate under the oversight and support of the Community Services Block Grant (CSBG) to continue fighting poverty and building stronger communities.
From the start, CAAs were expected to act as laboratories for innovative methods of eliminating causes of poverty, causes that neither private efforts nor public employment, nor the public programs initiated before and after WWII have been able to eliminate...
There is no "typical" Community Action Agency. No two CAAs are exactly alike because each is governed by the leadership and specific needs of its local community...
Today, the Community Action Network is made up of approximately 1,000 local, private, nonprofit community action agencies that work to alleviate poverty and empower low-income families in communities throughout the United States.
