Immigrant group accepts $1.5 million from Venezuela

Citgo's donation will be spread over three years, beginning next year. It is the biggest corporate donation the immigrant advocacy group has ever received.

The Langley Park center will be run with about $500,000 a year, with $150,000 coming from the Citgo grant, said Jennifer Freedman, Casa's director of development. The center will provide ESOL training, financial literacy education, citizen preparation courses, help in developing minority-owned cooperatives and social services.

It will be the first day-laborer center to include an in-house "vocational training lab," a key to moving the mostly immigrant workers into more highly skilled jobs.

"The goal of this is that better and better jobs means more economical development for everyone," said Mario Quiroz, a Casa spokesman.

The center, which will reside in the basement of an office building at University Boulevard and New Hampshire Avenue, has been held up by renovation delays and permitting problems.

In the meantime, Montgomery County has been paying about $60,000 a year for a temporary Takoma Park center in a trailer across from the Langley Park site. On most mornings, the parking lots draw scores of workers — mostly Latino, many of them illegal immigrants.

Casa runs four other day-laborer centers in Maryland — in Silver Spring, Wheaton, Derwood and Baltimore city — largely with government grants.

About 45 percent of Casa's annual $6.3 million budget comes from government sources, Freedman said: Montgomery and Prince George's counties, the cities of Takoma Park and Baltimore, the state of Maryland and the federal government.

Many of those grants began to shrink last year, and Casa has put more emphasis on boosting private donations.

"Casa believes very strongly in leveraging public funding to attract private funding," Freedman said. "We can't do it without the public money and we can't do it without private funding."