|
Identifying a Minimum Budget for Centers
Results of an ILRU Research Project
Summary
Center administrators, SILC members, IL advocates, and others have
been asking for years what constitutes adequate start-up funding
for centers for independent living. In 1999, ILRU asked me
to help conduct a nationwide survey of urban and rural centers to
determine what would be the minimum budget for a center.
For the purposes of comparison, our typical start-up CIL had five
staff members: a director, bookkeeper, secretary, and two IL specialists.
We realized that many centers started with fewer staff--and that,
under ideal circumstances, a new center would have more. Based
on our conversations with CIL directors, however, we believed that
five reasonably well-trained and productive staff members could
provide the core services, conduct community outreach, and provide
the administrative support necessary for a center to operate and
grow. (In other words, it would have sufficient staff to be
able to meet Title VII, Part C requirements.)
Using financial information gathered by RSA and ILRU and, with
the assistance of APRIL, we identified ten centers serving urban
communities and ten centers serving rural areas and asked them to
complete a line item budget which would reflect true annual costs
for operating a center in that community. In return
for their effort, we paid them a stipend of $100 each.
Some of our findings are as follows:
1) The annual cost for operating a center in a rural community
ranged from approximately $152,000 to $275,000.
2) The average annual cost for operating the centers in rural communities
was $227,991.
3) The annual cost for operating a center in an urban community
ranged from approximately $234,000 to $382,000.
4) The average annual cost for operating the centers in urban communities
was $272,231.
5) The nationwide average annual cost for operating a center was
$250,111
|
