READING, Pa.\u00a0\u2013 At Safe Berks, officials are breathing a sigh of relief. It’s been months without state funding.<\/p>\n
“It’s been 130 days since Safe Berks and other organizations like ours have been without funding, that is crucial funding to victims and their children,” said Dimitri Aletras, director of development at Safe Berks.<\/p>\n
With the budget now approved, staff can begin rebuilding programs that were scaled back.<\/p>\n
“It still is a trickle-down effect until the money reaches us,” Aletras said. “We’ve had to cut staff. We’ve lost a lot of resources, and the community has been victim to those cuts.”<\/p>\n
At the Berks Community Action Program, staff say the funding delay left families struggling to afford essentials.<\/p>\n
“People live paycheck to paycheck, and that’s for moderately and low-income individuals. They need supplements,” said Executive Director Lawrence A. Berringer. “Without these programs, there was pain in our community. There was suffering.”<\/p>\n
Now, they\u2019re getting ready to bring employees back.<\/p>\n
“Everybody won’t come back at the same time,” Berringer said. “So if you’re in Pre-K Counts, you’ll come back when that money gets here.”<\/p>\n
Easterseals also shared relief tonight, saying the new budget means services for people with disabilities can continue without long-term impact.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"READING, Pa.\u00a0\u2013 At Safe Berks, officials are breathing a sigh of relief. It’s been months without state funding.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":32800,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[20654,20653,128,130,129,20652],"class_list":["post-32799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-dimitri-aletras","tag-lawrence-a-berringer","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news","tag-safe-berks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32799"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32799\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}