Margaux is the Assistant Director of Community Development for the City of Muncie. Her role largely revolves around grants management for two different federal grants through the U.S. Housing and Urban Development. Whether offering special financing to first-time home buyers, developing programs for the homeless, or finding ways to end domestic violence, Margaux is connecting with the city’s partner organizations to assess community needs and allocate the federal funs.
Transcript
Um, my name is Margaux Dever. I am the Assistant Director of Community Development for the city of Muncie. The main part of the job is grants management. That's really the everyday part of what I do. We manage two different grants, for the city, they're both federal grants through the Department of Housing and Urban Development so HUD and that's the community development Block Grant and the Home Investment Partnership Program Grant. And so, the idea behind what we do is we bring these federal dollars into the community and try and make sure that our local community is getting the best benefit out of them. And so we do all kinds of different projects. Public service projects, housing projects, all kinds of different things. The first part of the process is connecting with our partner organizations. So we have oh we have many partner organizations. Muncie has tons of 501C(3) nonprofit organizations here that are doing wonderful work and it's really on us to go out into the community and to see what people are doing and to learn about what their goals are and to hear from them and sort of pick up on what's going on so that we can reach out and say here's what we have here are what the goals of our grant is from HUD and here's what you can apply to do. Some of them are helping people struggling with homelessness, some are helping people who are dealing with domestic violence. We have a lot of programs that are doing things for kids that are really, really great. And so we have all these organizations will put in an application with us as the grantor and then we go through the whole process and we score things and we make sure that they align with the HUD regulations and with those national priorities and then we rank them and put them we try to fund as much as we can, obviously we don't get a whole lot, we're not a huge city like Chicago or something that gets these humongous grants so we do what we can and we try to make sure that we can fund as many projects as possible even if it's only a little bit but every little bit helps.
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