Human Rights Commission Work Session   5/4/2023

That's fine.

I think that will be just fine.

To be honest, I think sometimes they create all these rules and nobody remembers that they've created them, and then I just follow them.

Because that's what I do.

But who will follow us?

In some ways it makes things more clear, right?

Just whatever.

Yeah, because they're all public meetings.

Whatever ones you think you'll be away for, just shoot me an email and I'll drop it in the folder so that I remember.

That is Jeanette's scene.

I thought you were looking late tonight.

I did, but it worked out.

You went so far up, how come?

Huh?

You drove up to park?

Oh.

Yeah, car dings.

Yeah.

I'm in too and I was like, I don't know if anybody wants to keep up with it.

I love when my property gets damaged and said no one ever.

There are, I said I wasn't going to bring food but I couldn't resist and I got a few snacks so they're out in the hall right now.

It's not much but it's something.

Sorry, I'm throwing my phone at you.

Can we join any meetings remotely?

Yeah, I said maybe take a look at the email.

I think I sent it to everybody, not just one of them.

Okay, okay.

But there's a city policy and then there's a state bill about it too.

Okay.

But it's basically there's like four, four, maybe five reasons that you can

I wouldn't call in anyway to be honest with you, like just in terms of where we're going to be inside of us, but these were already planned, so I'm trying to do what I can to not miss meetings, but lives exist.

I'm not sleeping.

You have a laugh.

Oh, yeah, congratulations.

Yeah, thank you.

Yes, I've seen really good.

He's picking everything up really fast I'm scheming now because I

I think there's some hesitation about just outright hiring another human for investigations.

And so, especially until we get the FAP thing sorted out, which has turned out to be more valuable.

But I knew it wouldn't be.

So I'm thinking about...

But I think what I would do is train the whole team in investigation and intake strategies, because then I could actually get the broadening investigation work now, and it would just be me, which would be really nice.

Pathway toward advancement.

I know that Lyndele is not going to join us.

Yeah, I just saw that.

I was giving her a chance to try to say to join virtually.

I'll just move this chair over.

That way I'm not.

Okay.

I haven't heard anything from Andy.

We just do that.

Ernest?

Ernest.

That would be Kathryn.

Kathryn.

This is a very confusing thing to me.

Okay.

Kathryn said she wanted to be.

You've been delegated.

Okay.

Then we can really vote if people want to.

No, no, I'm fine to do it.

I just thought that was like a moment.

Thank you, Martha.

Welcome.

At 6.37 p.m., correct?

Would you please?

Wolfgang, here, Kathryn, here, Suzanne, here, Andy and not Lyndele.

And I will let members of the public participating virtually know that if you experience technical difficulties, you may call 434-970-3027 and a staff person will assist you.

Is that me?

Okay.

So we have no response to no one.

And now we are on our update.

So our first order of discussion is discussing our plan to attend meetings of groups focusing on housing issues.

So I believe it was my job to send out a list of when meetings were and I did my best and we should all have that list right now.

So do we want to kind of divvy it up and see if we can fill in just a little bit more information?

The one update I have is the Democratic Socialists Housing Committee meeting is, sorry, their next meeting is by Zoom on May 17th at 7 p.m.

And I don't know what their regular attendance is because that's what their regular schedule is.

Can I just ask a clarifying question?

Is our intention

What is, I mean I know we talked about this, but what is our intention?

Is it to first listen and just gather information about what is happening and bring it back versus I'm a member of the Human Rights Commission and I'm here, right?

So my understanding was I think both of the things that you're sort of suggesting and others can weigh in.

So my understanding was that we are doing two things.

One is that we are there to listen, to hear what the issues are and to bring that back to the commission for educational purposes and to

be able to quickly recognize areas where we should act.

And one thing that occurred to me is Elizabeth Stark and the housing group of DSA did a great job of advocating for additional funding for the Pathways Program.

And that's something that I think we could have reasonably jumped in and sent a letter to city council supporting that, right?

So that sort of thing.

And then also I think there was another purpose which is simply to be a consistent commission presence so that people know we're out there and we can help connect them to the office or let them, assist them in coming to make comments or whatever.

Is that a fair?

Okay.

And then the thought was we would each sort of pick a meeting, attend the meeting to be of the work.

Or do we wanna just take this list and send it out now to the larger commission for everyone to kind of weigh in, think about it and do that at the actual,

Oh, sorry.

I was just going to share, I already signed up to attend the CRHA resident services meetings on the second Tuesday, so I can figure it out.

Okay, so that's already done.

Just like livable Seville, I think, Andy and I both.

You're part of them.

That makes sense.

You'll be there.

I'll be there.

And all of these meetings are like Tuesday evenings.

I'm very available Tuesday evenings, so I could probably take planning commission.

Yeah, that's what I thought.

I could also attend CRHA safety meeting for Tuesdays too, but it would displace.

Does that seem like enough for the moment?

We can add those notes to this

Yeah, this is great.

Yeah, and I'm actually gonna go out this weekend with the DSA housing group, you know, actually goes to people's doors who are risking eviction, right?

I know we kind of looked it up on the city calendar and it appears in different ways, which makes it hard to find.

You know what, I didn't have that on the list and I forgot.

I think I wasn't dealing with the list that we updated.

So I can find that.

I can look on the city calendar just to find it.

Yeah, it was a little confusing.

Yeah, Housing Advisory Committee.

The other one I couldn't find is Cliff.

Of course I do.

I usually get their emails when they have them, but I think they're sporadic.

I think that's accurate.

I can see when the last email was from her.

I can ask Emily to put me on the list.

There is a form on their website that says if you want to join us, fill this out.

They've been interested for a while in having a representative from the commission be there.

The List that Kathryn made.

Oh, you're asking time.

Yes.

Because I know the answer's no.

Where?

I want you to know that I organized a meeting this week that had people everywhere from Auckland to London, right?

A single meeting, if you can imagine.

That was hard to do.

And when we got in this meeting,

We were like, how are we going to collaborate?

What's the best platform to use?

And someone said, what about Teams?

And the entire meeting, which represented the whole world, was like, no.

Not Teams.

So I had brought up the potential of using Teams as a place to store collaborative documents, but everybody kind of groaned because Teams is a little clumsy and hard to use.

So yeah, depending on where folks want to, we can drop it in some shared location.

I still have the Box account.

I didn't notice that anybody was really using it, so I think I just kind of emptied it.

As stressful as it is.

Yeah, it was emailed to you as well.

So it's in your email currently.

It might also be good to, once we tag people into all of these is to just, and I'm by the way happy to do this, I'm not asking for it, but just to have the name of each organization who's attending so that we just have that in our minds and every time we come together, any updates from anybody or if I'm like, oh,

I'm really curious about what happened at the resident services meeting this week, right?

And I'm happy to pop that into a table.

Let me know, Todd, if I can help on that.

I was just writing it down and I'm like...

It won't happen.

It will happen sometime next week.

I'll take care of that.

So good.

Thank you.

Well, if you want to do that, just share it then with everyone.

Everyone needs to see it.

Yeah, the hard part about Google Docs is they disappear.

Like, if you disappear from the commission, and we don't have it saved somewhere, it disappears.

And so for FOIA purposes, it's kind of nice to be able to access it.

How about I send everybody a link to a Human Rights Commission team which will have a section for files and then you can just drop things in there.

It's already created.

I don't know Teams, but I feel like I could, I mean.

Yeah, I'll figure it out.

I'll figure it out or I won't and then I'll call somebody who's smarter than I am.

Okay, so I'll take that as a next step and if I can't figure out how to load it all, send it to Utah.

Sounds good, not a problem, not a problem.

The only way I use Teams is my husband and I chat on Teams during the Workday since we're both in the same space but can't always talk to each other, like that's my, yeah.

All right, so we're good on this.

We should have another question.

We kind of said we're attending these meetings to check what they're saying, check what they're working on, offer our resources.

Okay.

Aren't those, do you mean the,

I'm the only one without a laptop.

I do, I came from work.

Mary sent a document that we talked about

but not at great length in our last meeting.

I don't think we made any actual decisions on this document.

But that we're working toward ensuring substantially more decent affordable housing, pushing city council to enact policies that preserve and increase racial diversity,

I remember Mary had said that if she were to re- she would have maybe rewritten it at a second attempt, but if we're comfortable with those the general- Yeah, I don't think her rewriting was

As I was saying, if we're comfortable with these are the things that we would say representing the commission.

I don't want to misrepresent the commission's position if I'm going at representing the commission.

It seems like they're generally agreed upon.

What we talked about last regular meeting was that Mary could put those into the resolution format, then you could vote on it, and then you resolve that those are your priorities.

Is that a potential item that we could call for?

I wasn't included in that email.

I'm sorry.

They're just making sure I get it.

I just didn't want to talk over you.

We had mentioned getting those priorities into a resolution.

Do we want to make that, could that be a potential agenda item, an action item to tackle between now and the next?

I've been talking a little bit on the side with her via email, so I think she's going to work on it.

But if not, yeah, I can help her with that as well.

She needs this from her personal email.

There it is.

I did go to the whole group, but let's get it back up.

Okay, so are we good there?

Then I think our next agenda item is talking about the draft resolution, which we disagree that Mary is handling.

Do we have any new business?

As far as I know we don't.

All right, our next work session will be

June 1st.

And our next regular meeting is here.

On the 18th of this month.

And everybody got, did you guys get the calendar invitations?

I think I saw a few folks respond to them.

See, I don't want to look sensitive to my

Currently no attendees.

Any commissioner updates?

My only update I sort of said earlier is I am gonna go actually out with the housing committee so I can report back about that.

There are 75 people in the area facing families, facing eviction this week.

And is that based on court records?

How do you all get the list?

We just met with Victoria Barak and Emily from Legal Aid Justice Center this morning.

They're going to start using our space, our conference room space on the

And then the third, Tuesdays of the month, which is typically when the Charlottesville General District Court does its docket for evictions, and so they're going to have people, they're going to use their conference room to have people do consultations in our office.

Because they do it sometimes by standing outside, but they're going to

What are they going to do on Thursdays for the county?

What's interesting about county courthouses is that they have a separate conference room and a lobby, so it's really easy.

Whereas here, you can stand in front of CPD, but you can't really stand in the little scanner room before you get into the courtroom and you can't stand around in the courtroom talking.

It's super tiny.

The School of Nursing had a dedication

of a bench.

I don't know if you're familiar with the story of the nurses who graduated from the Burley School that were UVA affiliated but not recognized under Jim Crow and so it was a really lovely event actually that was organized kind of jointly by the school and the community and graduates of the nursing school and family members representing graduates

So that is right in front of the common hall.

And if you go into the school

They're now the graduation photographs and names.

Of all the nurses, there's still some missing, like the archives were held by individuals in their homes.

They've been able to piece most of it back together.

And the other thing I think is just worth noting, there was an article today that Phoenix, I believe it's Phoenix, is using the Charlottesville model to remove SROs from its schools.

and adapt what Charlottesville did.

And I know I sat on that committee with the city schools and we had no real models.

Toronto was the model we used.

And there was a lot of, well, they're not the United States.

Anyway, so we are now apparently the model.

That's amazing.

Kind of amazing.

Any other updates?