Miami Valley Community Action Partnership (MVCAP) presented an overview of its 2025 annual report and programs to the Dayton City Commission during a work session. The presentation emphasized MVCAP's role as a regional agency with a 62-year history in Dayton, providing housing stability, utility assistance, weatherization, and workforce development. The discussion focused on increased community need, federal funding uncertainty, and opportunities for deeper collaboration with the city.
Good morning. So we're uh happy to have uh a truly valued partner here this morning uh to provide an update on all of the great work that Monami Valley Community Action Partnership is doing. And so I will uh turn it over to the president and uh CEO, Miss Aaron Jeffries to introduce her team and um lead us in the presentation. So welcome back. Yes, right. Thank you very much. It's an absolute pleasure to be here today. We're so excited to be able to share the work that Miami Valley Community Action Partnership is doing in the community and in partnership with the City of D. Again, my name is Aaron Jeffries. I'm pleased to serve the agency as the president and CEO, and I'm joined here by two of my colleagues who I'll introduce in a moment. Um, but we we are so excited to be here today. We reached out to the City Commission office to ask if we might be able to come and give a brief presentation on our 2025 annual report, and they did us one better and said, Why don't you come for a work session and talk to us about your programs and what you do in the community and how we can partner together? So we so appreciate this opportunity. We want you to see this presentation as a relationship builder, not an ask for funding, but just an info share on the on the services that we provide in the community and how we might be able to partner in the shared goals that we have for the city of Dayton. I'm joined here by two of my colleagues. Um, first I'll introduce Deb Donnelly. Deb has been with the agency for just over 10 years now. She is our vice president and chief financial officer, and you may have seen her because she was recently designated a 2026 CFO of the year by Dayton Business Journal. So we're so excited to have her on our team. And Katie's going to share more about our programs, our resident experiences, and our partnerships. We are part of the island. We were pleased to serve in that role. Our headquarters is here in the city of Dayton, and there's other ways that we are part of the community in investing besides just the presence. For those of you who might not be familiar with community action, ummunity action partnership is the designated community action agency serving Montgomery, Dark Green, and Prebel Counties. This is a statewide designation. Each county in the state of Ohio does have a designated agency that serves that role, and that gives that community access to specialized funding that is catered specifically to the needs of the community. And there's lots of different ways that we make sure that our programs are meeting community needs. Beyond that four county service area, we do provide some specialized services specifically in weatherization and the electric partnership program to help with energy efficiency. But I want to share with you that 98% of the counties across the United States are served by a community action agency. So it's very important work. As I said, we are so pleased to have our headquarters here in Dayton. In addition to our location at 719 South Main Street, our office location, we also have our Southwest Ohio Weatherization Training Center, which we'll hear more about later in our presentation. We are a regional agency, but that regional scale is an asset to residents in the city of Dayton. It allows our agency to bring infrastructure, specialized expertise, federal and state resources, and partnerships back to the city of Dayton. If we look back at our statistics specifically during COVID, many of the zip codes that were served the most through our COVID rental assistance program were in Dayton. Those are codes 45406, 07, 02, 03, and 17. This is evidence that when Dayton faced an extraordinary crisis, NVCAP already had the infrastructure and the relationships needed to respond. So that ability to respond did not happen overnight. It reflects decades of investment in the local infrastructure. Our presence in Dayton creates local economic value for the city of Dayton and for the region. In 2025, we employ 45 employees who worked in Dayton, and that combined payroll was about 2.13 million dollars, which led to about $53,000 in Dayton work tax. Additionally, MVCAP contributes to Dayton economically not only as an employer but also as a purchaser, as a trainer through that workforce development site, the Weatherization Training Center, and a source of outside investment. Our presence in Dayton creates value beyond the services we provide. It helps to support the employment, develop skills, and bring resources back into our local economy. We want to share that the work that MVCAP does naturally aligns with the mayor's flight plan. Much of the work identified in the flight plan is work that MVCAP is already doing alongside our Dayton residents. So for the first runway, people centered governance. We have programs that address housing stability and housing preservation. Something that's really important to know about our programming is through our weatherization program, we are able to improve tenant occupied structures. You'll know that federal funding, there's not a lot of federal funding around that can help minimal occupied structures.