The Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention (Maine CDC) is paying a Portland-based nonprofit $90,000 to form a stakeholder group that will work on strategies to combat diabetes among the city’s immigrant and refugee populations.

According to a state contract document published Monday, the Maine CDC will be awarding $90,000 to Maine Access Immigrant Network (MAIN), a nonprofit organization originally founded in Maine in 2002 as the Somali Culture and Development Association.

MAIN states on their website that their mission is to “build a stronger multicultural community in Portland,” as well as “to address refugee health literacy, health care enrollment, and coordination of health care benefits and non-clinical care.”

The nonprofit’s focus is on providing services to “new Mainers” from Africa and the Middle East.

The $90,000 grant will represent a significant chunk of revenue for the organization, which brought in just $646,014 in 2023, according to publicly available Form 990 tax documents.

The Maine CDC grant will fund the creation of a stakeholder group made up of MAIN’s “team of multilingual Community Health Workers (CHWs),” who will work directly with Portland’s immigrants and refugees on “strategies to reduce and prevent and manage diabetes,” the contract reads.

While the grant was initially set to start in January 2023 and run until June 2024, it was delayed until now — a delay which the Maine CDC has used to allow for a higher contract dollar amount.

In justifying the no-bid noncompetitive grant to MAIN, the Maine CDC wrote that the nonprofit is “trusted in the refugee and immigrant communities,” and that their health workers speak the “target languages” of Arabic, Somali and Portuguese.

“The organization’s [MAIN’s] staff is composed of over 90% individuals who identify as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC),” the Maine CDC wrote. “All these factors make MAIN a unique provider when it comes to being successful in this work.”