Assistance program
Community Services Block Grant
$7.4 Billion committed in FY2018–FY2026
- Agency
- Administration for Children and Families, Health and Human Services, Department of
- Assistance
- Formula Grants
- CFDA number
- 93.569
- What it does
- The objectives of the Community Services Block Grant (CSBG) are to provide assistance to states and local communities, working through a network of community action agencies (CAAs) and other neighborhood-based organizations, for the reduction of poverty, the revitalization of low-income communities, and the empowerment of low-income families and individuals in rural and urban areas to become fully self-sufficient (particularly families who are attempting to transition off a State program carried out under part A of title IV of the Social Security Act) and (1) to provide services and activities having a measurable and potential major impact on causes of poverty in the community or those areas of the community where poverty is a particularly acute problem; (2) to provide activities designed to assist low-income participants, including the elderly poor, to: (a) secure and retain meaningful employment; (b) attain an adequate education; (c) make better use of available income; (d) obtain and maintain adequate housing and a suitable living environment; (e) obtain emergency assistance through loans or grants to meet immediate and urgent individual and family needs, including health services, nutritious food, housing, and employment-related assistance; (f) remove obstacles and solve problems which block the achievement of self-sufficiency; (g) achieve greater participation in the affairs of the community; and (h) make more effective use of other related programs; (3) to provide on an emergency basis for the provision of such supplies and services, nutritious food, and related services, as may be necessary to counteract conditions of starvation and malnutrition among the poor; and (4) to coordinate and establish linkages between governmental and other social services programs to assure the effective delivery of such services to low-income individuals. In addition to the CSBG funding to states, the Office of Community Services (OCS) funds additional discretionary projects for training and technical (T/TA) assistance. All CSBG funding opportunities are posted on https://www.grants.gov/.
Committed by fiscal year
* FY2026 is year-to-date — the fiscal year is still in progress, so its total is still filling in. The striped band and dashed line mark that provisional stretch.
How the money flows
Committed dollars by how this program's money is paid out.
Direct payments
$2.3M
<1%
Grants
$7.4B
100%
Top recipients
By dollars committed.
Administering agencies
By dollars committed.
How to read these numbers
- Committed through this program
Money committed under this assistance listing (its CFDA program), counted in the year each action happened.
- How it's paid
Most programs pay out one way — a grant, or a direct payment to individuals; the flow bar only appears when a program genuinely mixes types.
- Some recipients aren't itemized
For entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, the government reports one aggregate instead of naming tens of millions of people, so the recipient roster isn't part of the public record.
- Awards, counted once
An award count is the number of distinct awards with at least one action that year — each counted once, however many times it was amended.
- The colored bars
Every bar on this page splits by how the money moves:
Direct payments
