Albany County is now accepting applications for a second round of ARPA funding.
The application process for the second round of more than $13 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds made available by Albany County has begun.
Albany County Executive Dan McCoy says the $8.3 million grant application program is focused on community development and non-profit support. "The nonprofits in Albany County are part of our backbone of our community," said McCoy. "They have so much to offer, and we want to make sure that they're there. So many services that people don't realize. And I always say to people, you know, just be fortunate enough you don't need that service. Be glad you don't even know that service is offered, because you know what that means. You're doing OK, but there's people that need that.”
The Democrat says $1.5 million in funding will go to financial recovery of non-profits that were negatively impacted by the COVID pandemic, with $6.8 million being directed to new community development initiatives.
“Nonprofits will receive somewhere between $25,000 and $50,000 so sharpen your pencils, make sure you do a good job putting everything together," McCoy said. "Depending on the organization size, there's going to be 6.8 million will be devoted to the projects focusing in areas of mental health, because we all know coming out of COVID-19, the pandemic, we you know, not only did we have an opioid epidemic, we had a mental health epidemic and it’s still continuing in the health disparities with the Black and brown community. So we need to address all this. We've seen focus on all this, and not just talking about it and moving on to the next thing. So these are things we continue to cross our T's, do the data analytics on to make sure that we continue to change the way we do things in certain communities.”
County Economic Development and Sustainability Coordinator Luke Rogers advises prospective applicants to check in at the Albany County ARPA web portal by January 5th… “…AlbanyCountyAPRA.org - there's an opportunity to ask questions that we will answer. There's information about information sessions where you can come and learn about this application. And just from a bigger picture, there are a lot of federal resources that came down and 2021, 2022 that have now dried up. So I think from the county executive and the whole executive committee, this is the perfect time to be injecting these resources into the community, meeting needs that we're seeing and that are, in some cases, unfortunately, on the rise."
Applications can be picked up at the County Office Building on State Street.
