Joint Work Session - City, County, UVA (2-4PM)   10/28/2020

Joe, this is Kathy Green.

You're one of the facilitators.

And I should have asked you this before.

My apologies for not doing it until now.

I wanted to clarify, because this is webinar format.

That's correct.

And we more than likely would not support that even in the meeting feature, only because

Since we do stream these, you know, we need to kind of keep the meeting as a whole for the public and the community.

But it's something to discuss if that's something that, you know, you would like to do in the future, we can certainly talk about that.

Okay, well, thank you for clarifying.

and I have not seen Ebony in a long time.

This is Joe Rice.

How are you?

Good to hear from you as well.

I am doing well.

Thank you.

I'm doing very, very well.

Thank you.

And the meeting timer is at zero, which means we are streaming on both the city Facebook and Twitter.

All right.

So I am Shayla Givens.

I've met

Almost all of you, but I just wanted to introduce Marsha Wild.

She is our newest member of the Measurements and Solutions Work Group.

She was just approved to be a new member by city council.

Hi.

Last couple of months.

Hi, Marsha.

Yeah.

Welcome.

Thank you.

I'm not sure if Walt Heineke is able to attend.

He sent me an email about that.

So he might pop in, but I'm not expecting him to.

So we can go ahead and get started.

Ebony Walden and Kathy

Trenier, our consultants from FloraCane, and they have been gracious enough to work with us kind of behind the scenes to figure out what the agenda will be and how we will kind of formulate this group.

Thank you all.

I'm excited to be back with you all and good to meet you, Marsha.

seven months since we have met the last time.

So most of our meeting today will just be like revamping and kind of going back to the beginning, talking about the purpose, making sure we've done a good amount of work with the values and kind of setting at least priorities and brainstorming.

So we're just gonna go through all of that to refresh your memory so that we're all back on the same page and this will be good for you.

as well, Marsha, to see where we were.

Because I'm sure everybody forgot, right?

I had to go back and look through all the materials myself.

So have no fear.

We won't work your brain out too much this evening.

But we'll focus our time on just kind of resetting.

I don't know what this is about.

I'm trying to present.

Here you go.

So this is where we are.

And so this is our agenda for tonight.

We'll do quick introductions.

We came up with some meeting norms.

Last time we met, or actually at our first meeting, which is a combination of ones we typically use and you all added your own additions.

We'll revisit the purpose and the task that city council set out to you all.

We'll review the items we previously brainstormed.

So we did some work on setting the vision and values of what are the values for this group?

and then some ideas on priority populations to engage as part of the process.

And then we'll do a little bit, we'll have to revamp it because we can't use breakout rooms here about deciding on or at least moving maybe one step closer to deciding on who we wanna engage, what we wanna ask them and what may be the mechanisms to do that in order to meet your purpose and goals.

So with that, let's do a quick round of intro.

So your name, what do you do with your time in the day?

And one sentence about what brought you here.

Quick example, my name is Ebony Walden.

I own a consulting firm.

In the daytime, I was brought here because I do a lot of facilitation and I used to live in Charlottesville for 11 years.

Ebony, I can go next and then why don't I call on folks by name based on my participant list here.

And then that way we are streamlined in how we move through the group.

So I am Kathy Greenyer and I am co-facilitator with Ebony.

I am the practice manager and one of the lead consultants at Flora Cane.

And excited to be here because I have a background in nonprofit work and so

Some of the work that this group is doing is near and dear to my heart.

Hello, I'm Shayla Gibbons.

I'm a human services planner with the City of Charlottesville's Department of Human Services.

I work mainly with, right now during the day, I work with a lot of COVID wraparound services for folks in the Thomas Jefferson Health District.

And I also do a lot of grant writing and data collection.

for community programming.

Fantastic.

Hi, I'm Marcia Wilds.

I am a retired economist with Fairfax County Government.

I moved to Charlottesville in 2018.

Fabulous.

Next up, you'll have to remind me.

I'm so sorry.

Is it Sena?

Fantastic.

I'm during the day.

Counseling, I mean, I'm on city council.

And so during the day, I'm lucky that I'm able to have that as my full-time job and not have to have a secondary job these days.

I'm also overseeing virtual learning at home and such.

Then some other things.

What brought me here is I've worked, I worked in mental health and nonprofits most of,

my career so this and wanting to have measurements and showing that it's actually, external measurements I think are very important to the whole nonprofit system that hasn't been well done in a lot of places and I think this is a chance to do it well so that we are actually helping nonprofits do what their mission is to actually do.

Yes.

And just to welcome Nikuyah, thanks for coming.

We're just going around and doing an intro.

Fantastic, thank you.

Hi, Kevin Healy.

I'm during the day president and CEO of Campbell Hill Aviation Group that specializes in a lot of areas, mostly around economic analysis and strategic planning in the airline industry for airports and such.

I'm here because over the years, I've

Fantastic.

Hi there.

I'm Matt Ellison.

I worked during the day as a data scientist for elder research in the town.

And I'm here because I was looking for a way to contribute something to this, the city that I really care about.

And I thought this would be a good overlap of my professional skills and somewhere I could maybe provide a more unique contribution.

Thank you.

Billy.

Hi, my name is Billy Hunt.

Pronouns are he, him.

And by day I'm a software engineer and am interested in data.

The reason I'm doing it is kind of a mixture of a lot of the reasons that other people have said, like I would like to see in most spaces decisions be a little bit more data driven.

I don't know.

I just think like having knowledge about what you're doing is a good idea.

And I also just wanted to help.

I try to do a lot of volunteering, but I haven't, this is my first major foray into like helping government

Fantastic.

Joe?

Hi, I'm Joe Sakus.

I work with Virginia Organizing, which is a statewide social justice group, and have worked with them since 1995.

A little over five years ago, I was involved in a national project with the Alliance for Justice about this very question of how do we measure success in nonprofits.

And so hopefully I can share some of the things that we learned in that process.

Great.

Hi, I'm Ryan.

So during the day, I'm a policy analyst with the state.

And I'm a recent graduate of the Batten School at UVA.

Fantastic.

Hey, I'm not going to show my face just because I just got in the house from work, but my name's Deshad Cooper.

I work for the Department of Social Service.

This would be my first major committee.

Wonderful.

Thank you so much.

My interest here in getting the city to appoint all of you was to attempt to, we give away millions of dollars, not seeing the success from those millions of dollars for a lot of years.

It's an annual investment.

And it extends beyond nonprofits, but the nonprofit world is a great start.

And we don't have a way to measure

Whether the money that we're allocating to programs, initiatives, nonprofits, internally and externally, whether it's making any, you know, difference, what the, you know, outputs are, are we actually serving people?

So I've talked a lot about

Just ensuring that the people that we say that we are intending to help their lives improve with these investments, that that actually occurs.

So we're great at giving the money away.

We're just not great at ensuring that something is actually changing as a result of giving the money away.

And so I'm hoping that

I was advocating for an Office of Measurements and Solutions and I got a group, but it's a stop.

So thank you all for still being here.

We have only met before the pandemic and the fact that you all are still interested is, that's promising.

Thank you so much.

Hi, Kathy.

I'm sorry I missed that.

OK, great.

Cool.

So I'm just going to go over the meeting norms so we can set the norms for how we operate.

And then we're going to jump into Nikuyah.

I just went over the agenda.

Obviously, the introductions were first.

Then we're going to go over some meeting norms.

We're going to review, because we haven't met in seven months, why we're here and the things that we kind of brainstormed at our first two meetings.

And then we have a short period, probably not a whole lot, where we can kind of dig deeper

and getting some information to you all.

So I will share my screen again.

So we had during our first meeting, we talked about how we wanted to engage with one another.

So the first five or six are ones that Kathy and I just use at meetings are good practice and the rest are ones you're added and I will

And so I like to subscribe to the Aretha Franklin School of Respect, R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me.

And so that is just an understanding that we all come from different perspectives and different places in our lives and so we want to provide

room for difference in our different perspectives.

So just paying attention, being an active listener, asking questions, and just engaging people where they are and providing that space for difference and paying attention.

The second is assume good intent.

Because we have different perspectives, we come from different walks of life.

If somebody says something that steps on your toes or causes you to twitch a little bit, we're going to assume good intent that everybody came here today trying to get something done and their intent wasn't to rub you the wrong way.

But if somebody has something that does rub you the wrong way, we're challenging you to own that with the ouch then educate.

Speak it out.

What's your particular perspective?

What hit you the wrong way?

Ask questions, clarify.

So we want to have space to bring that as part of the conversation.

We are open.

The point of having a group like this is so we can share different perspectives and educate us on where you're coming from.

So this isn't a really apply here because it's a public meeting so you actually might not want to ever share anything that's personal and you wouldn't want anybody else to know but in our previous meeting when we're in a room just if somebody's sharing something personal we're gonna have you know Vegas rule it's the Vegas rule which is what happens here stays here but what happens here actually is stream live on Facebook so

Just be aware of that, and anything you put in the chat is FOIAable, which is Freedom of Information Act, so it's public information.

We are live, so do with that information as you please, as they say when I went to church, govern yourself accordingly.

Be upfront about your values, so as we come from different perspectives, state where you're coming from, what you're advocating for, and just be clear about that.

We just wanted to have the reality to balance the numbers and the technical aspects with focus on people.

So we know a number of you came to this because you're data wonks, right?

You like the data and you like the hard facts, but we also want to balance that, just the need for information that's concrete with qualitative information, which also valuing people and lived experience.

And so just to acknowledge that we need to balance that.

We wanted to uncover and agree on a shared language and that is a process.

So if somebody says something that you don't understand, please ask them to clarify whether it's a term.

Most folks live in the world of acronyms or acronyms or something that we're using that is not clear.

Please point that out.

Please let us know whether Shayla or you know if you're going to be late or if you have to miss or if you need to leave you check that into chat just so we know who's participating.

and not offended if, you know, there's so many things that happen.

So if you need to step away for a second, you can put yourself on mute and take your video off.

Let us know.

You'll be right back.

Somebody just rang my door because I got a package.

Things happen when you're sitting at home on Zoom as well.

So just keep us posted.

And then we want to synchronize what we're doing here with hopefully talking to the community, which is part of your task as a committee.

and so we're balancing both the knowledge here with the knowledge and information and expertise that exists out in the community.

So there also might be, and I remember that in just being cognizant of voices and demographics that are not a part of this group that we need to be thinking about perspectives we might have to go out and get just because of the limitations of the demographics of this group.

So does any of that, all of that makes sense to you all?

That's, you can agree with that.

Give me a thumbs up.

All right, perfect.

Now I'm gonna turn it up.

You can share your screen if you want, just so you don't have to click next slide, Kathy, or you can, I can do it for you.

What do you wanna do?

Mute, so Kathy.

If you wanna keep sharing.

So Kathy is gonna quickly go to like, why are we here?

What's the council call?

Just so we're on the same,

Page with your specific task.

Yes.

So you might recall, and then for our new member, this is first time information that when we last met, we talked about the charge of this group and the purpose is multifaceted.

And so

The group purpose is to deliver to city council your best recommendations for how to conduct the receipt, measurement, and assessment of consumer feedback on funded nonprofits,

and then also relatedly the programs or services that the community wants more or less of from funded nonprofits.

And so the reason for those recommendations, Mayor Walker and I think a few others touched on this in their introductions, but the main reason is that these recommendations are going to help the city prioritize and narrow the broad categories for which funding is currently slated

and will help assess the impact of the organizations that receive funding.

So there are five priority areas that the City Council put together in one of the memos related to the formation of this group.

And if that's not a document that you've already seen, Shayla, I think maybe it might be OK to ask you to provide that to folks.

But the five priority areas to focus on are jobs and wages, affordable housing, public health care, education, and equity.

Going back to our two bullets around the purpose and charge of this group.

So that first purpose around conducting the receipt measurement and assessment of consumer feedback on funded nonprofits, this group should tailor their suggestions of methods to what the city can deploy to measure impact and nonprofit performance based on consumer feedback.

So another way of saying that is to share kind of in the negative that it's not the role of this work group to itself take on measuring impact, but it is their role to recommend a community engagement process or mechanisms that the city will use to assess impact moving forward.

And then that brings us to the second recommendation, the second charge of this group.

So the second recommendation that this group has brought together to make are recommendations around the programs or services that the community wants more or less of from funded nonprofits.

So that requires this work group to serve as instruments of community engagement and facilitators of community engagement.

So it's not your charge to define for the community what they want more or less of from funded nonprofits, but it is your role to seek community feedback on what the community desires and lacks.

I will turn it over to Ebony in a minute to review the prior brainstorming that this group did.

I also wanna say that we had a defined, I mean, more short timeline before, but just from our perspective of when we're gonna meet so we can, per city council and public meetings, we can meet once a month in up to three hours.

So that's kind of our timeframe.

I'm not sure when our meeting's gonna end, but that's kind of our timeframe.

We'll talk about that later in the meeting and sort of logistically, but just kind of wanted to put that in there.

But any thoughts or clarifications, give me a thumbs up if you understand fundamentally why we're here.

And we can sort of move forward with what we've talked about.

Got it.

Perfect.

So I'm going to

Let's see if I can share my screen.

I'm actually going to put it in chat and we can look at it together and then maybe I'll share my screen.

Ebony, I'll pop that in there for you so you can just focus on one thing at a time.

Do I have it open?

I can actually share my screen.

Perfect.

Can y'all see my screen too?

Yes, perfect.

So when we met last time, we came up with, I guess we met twice, we came up with a number of documents.

I just want to remind you all of where we are, where we were, and this will be good for Marsha as well.

And so we were like,

Who do we want to engage?

And more important, how do we want to engage just in this process in our thinking?

And so who to engage just as part of measurement and solutions.

The priority was to those who are traditionally not heard, those impacted by the services and the providers that the city is offering funding to.

And open up to have an open, inclusive process or recommend one to engage.

So what's the values that we created?

The top three were equity in the process, being as inclusive as possible, giving the parameters of this group and the task at hand, and obviously diversity.

So hearing

as many voices that we can as part of that process.

You all kind of named what are those different voices that were priority to you, but, you know, qualities like fairness, openness, participation, empathy, and that's just in understanding where people are, if you're gonna engage them in recognizing how to get their opinions in ways that honor their humanity, and making sure people are safe enough to offer their opinion.

We wanted to approach the engagement process.

I already talked about empathy with patients, with trust and understanding that lots of people that are impacted by these services don't necessarily have a good relationship with local government.

So that's just kind of the reality of it.

What we wanted the outcomes to be was effectiveness solutions that will have impacts to recognize, sorry,

Wanted to see the likelihood of a person's referring a friend or relative to the services, looking at satisfaction, looking at healing, assessing providers on an opportunity for improved services that community members move from a full life of pain into healing, making people feel that they deserve good services.

and that they complain and understand the quality of service.

So really effectiveness around what's the best impact?

How do people have a voice in the process?

Who would they refer folks to?

What nonprofits are really doing good and effective work from the community's perspective?

Does that make any sense or did anybody remember anything they wanted to add?

Is that representative or any just kind of thoughts on those?

Pretty comprehensive, ready to rock and roll.

Y'all ready to get to work?

Perfect.

And so we started to answer who was the priority in this process.

So as Kathy said, you know, one of the points was to recommend a community engagement process.

And so when you're when you're talking about that, you have to answer the question of

who you're actually going to engage.

And so the priority, and we actually did these activities in sticker.

So the little asterisks represent

How many people have said that?

So I tried the best to order them by how many folks have said that.

So program alumni, so recipients of the services in the five priority areas, so obviously people have gone through those services, people that are currently receiving services in those programs,

Those who have a part of the target audience, but not that's reserved, received services.

And that was, if I remember correctly, the conversation around that was we really wanted to understand the barriers to services.

So what were their particular barriers?

Why are they not going to these particular nonprofits?

So we can assess of, is there something they're missing or they're discriminatory or otherwise practices or what's the barrier from that group?

And are there opportunities, obviously, for change and growth?

People in the community under 30% AMI, and AMI is area of medium income, which is pretty much a national assessment of income in the community.

So if you're under a certain amount of AMI, that would make you

on the scale or the spectrum of lower income.

So that would be considered, I think, extremely low income.

People working directly with assistants, kids, parents, black residents, you can see some of the other ones, folks living in public housing sites, low income residents.

So the top priorities were alum, people currently in programs, people not receiving services, and then in those categories, prioritizing

black residents and lower income residents.

The second group, and that's kind of services.

The second group was current and past providers and organizations that are supporting these communities.

So engaging the people that have actually offered those services.

And then it's a question of, do we have a list that is our representative?

So there are four categories and I think

Equity is probably an overarching theme for all of them or goal for city council.

So that could be quite a broad list in the question of how do we either get a list or get a list that, or engage people that are representative from that list.

And I think the third one was captured in the first.

I just want to share one thing.

When we had, I convened a group that took this process from the former ABRT process to the Vibrant Community Fund, which is now what the program is called that allocates money to nonprofit.

During the meetings that we had then, and it was a, you know,

variety of individuals on that group from staff members and community members and people who were severely serious about numbers like Sally Hudson was one of the group members at that time.

But when and human service director, myself, counselor Hill, you know, several community members.

But one thing that came up was how do you what standard questions would apply to all nonprofits?

And then what questions are specific to individual nonprofits and how do we come up with what questions that or how to guide them into creating their questions if there isn't a standard question.

So that was

something that we kind of got, one of the questions we kind of got stuck on and never answered.

Oh, absolutely.

Particularly since you have four priority areas, right?

And so the questions you may ask about housing are different than the questions you would ask around jobs and wages.

So we'll try to

Be a pick on that iceberg tonight, but thanks for bringing up that point and bringing up that consideration again.

Any other thoughts, questions?

Does this remember ringing a bell seven months is a long time ago?

All right, so I will keep going and then kind of give us a time to brainstorm a little bit deeper.

Where did I end up?

Okay, so then we went into the how, which today we're gonna get into the how a little bit, but the how is really like, what are the mechanisms that you wanna recommend for engaging people?

We just kind of brainstormed what we thought, but essentially these hows are wonderful how to engage people, but we really, you know, going forward want to engage people,

I mean, the strategy should be around what group you're trying to engage, right?

So the way that you engage people that are already involved in services may be completely different than the folks that haven't been a part of services because they may be either a different demographic or not have contact information.

So I just kind of want y'all to keep these.

These are just a list that we brainstorm, but going forward, we want to

to create an engagement strategy recommendation that is tailored to the actual priorities of the groups that we want to serve.

So these were surveys.

So there was paper surveys and utility bills, which is what the city can do.

There are web surveys, surveys in backpacks for kids.

I'm not sure how they're getting things now that school is virtual.

Administer surveys through service providers, recipient surveys.

So surveys, I think that that's the number of people got focus groups, meetings, conferences with service providers, interviews, direct contacts with the person from the provider and conversations, town hall style meetings, door-to-door meetings within the community, and then other ideas.

So looking

How can you market through the communication department using social media events in the community?

This actually came up again right at my previous meeting of like, is there a web-based app that can rate nonprofits like you do Yelp or restaurants or something, which is an interesting idea.

and then working through local organizations.

So that's what we had.

Would it be worth going back and just

sort of setting the expectations again that you know originally we were charged with having a report to the city council by June and that was based on the current fiscal year community vibrant fund allocation recommendation so and the priority areas in the slide are a little bit different than what was in that report from the city

but just to understand, are we still charged with creating a report and when is it due?

Great question.

So yes, you have the same charge.

Now, when is it due?

I can't answer.

Shayla or one of the city councilors may better understand the process, right?

Right, that was a question I had for city council as well.

Like Kevin said, we were charged with coming up with a report that was supposed to be used ideally for the next fiscal year vibrant community fund process, which is currently underway.

Applications are due in November.

So this process might have to be guiding fiscal year 23 processes.

But Mayor Walker or Vice Mayor McGill, if either of you have

Any opinions about that or could weigh in about when you think this report should be due to council?

Personally, since we're getting applications now without the measurement tool,

to be there before the applications going out isn't really fair to nonprofits, I know, to be like, to be critiqued against a measurement tool that they don't know exists yet.

So, I mean, I'm thinking six months of work, maybe.

I mean, I'm not really, again, I came in on January, so,

and then we started this and then we had COVID.

So I honestly, I forgot about the report.

Correct.

I think the questions still stand of, there's two questions that you all are to answer.

So it's a matter of how much time do we have to answer?

And since I don't necessarily think we're pressed for time at the moment, the question of what are the services in the community?

I mean, what are the services that folks in the community want that they're not necessarily getting or are getting?

And what is a good engagement strategy for the city to employ

in order to measure the impact of the nonprofits that they're offering funds to, right?

And so it's not saying we're gonna shift around, but how can the city get the information it needs either from the community or from nonprofits in order to adequately measure success and impact?

So, but maybe Mayor Walker has some thoughts on timeline.

And so I had to stop away, and I noticed I didn't send it to all of you.

I just sent it to Kathy.

But I did attempt to send it to everyone in the chat.

So our original goal was to have it to influence this budget cycle, which is starting next month.

So we normally get to

This part of the process, probably March, April, where we're talking about nonprofits and their funding.

So I would say if we had something at least from the charge question one, it would maybe be a little bit more challenging, especially during COVID, to get the feedback community.

level feedback, which we were expecting to have some of that.

But I would say if we had something in place by March, it may be able to influence this budget cycle.

Okay, so let's say we have at least six months and March is our new deadline, which I think is a good amount of time because initially we had around about that time, but then we got started late and then obviously COVID happened.

So we have six months and you're right, like the community, which is a question we don't necessarily have to answer right now, but the engagement piece, obviously that you all would have been involved in,

obviously will be impacted by the reality of COVID.

But there may be some things that are accessible.

I guess I could just share one thing.

Our staff is already working on their part of what is presented to us by March.

So I guess I should say that.

And so the information that nonprofits receive about what are our priorities, what we'll be looking for, what we'll be expecting from them as client level surveys, we wouldn't be able to implement that this year.

I think the decisions that we make today would make in the next six months could only influence how council decides to allocate the dollars for the budget cycle that begins July 2021.

I just thought about that after I stopped talking.

And then influencing a full budget cycle, nonprofits being aware ahead of time,

So what we wanted to do is quick brainstorm.

So we were going to break out in the groups, which we cannot do.

But to begin to get at the questions of who would be engaged, right?

So who's the who?

You all noted some priorities, but there may be other groups.

What might you even want to ask them, which gets us your question?

I think you're absolutely right, Micaiah.

There are questions that you want to ask everybody.

and then questions for specific groups or individuals based on the priority area.

And then what may be the ways to engage.

But for the first two rounds, we actually just want to get y'all's idea on, so there's what are the assumptions we're making about demographically who these folks are or even particular organizations or whatever.

and then what might we want to ask them?

So I created a quick spreadsheet.

It may or may not be helpful, but I just wanted y'all to take, I don't know, first round of three minutes, cause I like to get the ideas out and then have them up for us to discuss them.

So for the first who y'all have, there's four priorities that are heard as part of our conversation, past and current providers,

I mean, yeah, passing current providers, those receiving services now, program alone, and then those in the target audience for services but are actually not receiving.

And so I actually want us to write down who demographically or organizationally we think those folks are.

or what are their race or income or where are they living or what are some organizations that we have in mind?

You don't have to get the script, but I think it's helpful to conceptualize who folks are and then help us think about what do we wanna know?

What do we even ask?

What will we ask them as our first two questions?

So I'm gonna share this and then in like quick three minutes, this is just brainstorming so you don't have to have

your thoughts, but y'all are data wonks.

And then we'll just take a couple minutes and try to do the first two columns of the first two rows, right?

So, which is from past and previous providers, from your understanding, who is that?

and we may or may not know, you can create a note, maybe we need a list of that, that would be really helpful.

But if you have any ideas, well, we ask them.

And remember the focus area are jobs and wages, affordable housing, public healthcare, education and equity.

And then from the second, those receiving services.

So who is that?

If you know or don't know, you may not know, but what might we want to ask them?

I just wanna take maybe three minutes.

You can, if you finish early, you can keep going.

But to brainstorm, and then we're going to kind of look at it and walk through together to kind of narrow some things down.

And you can start now.

So everybody should be able to write in there.

You click on the link in the chat.

So go to check, click the link, should open up for you.

And if you can't get it, you can put your responses in chat or just write them down and hold them.

And then when we come back together, I will dictate your responses.

So just three minutes.

So for past and current providers and for those receiving services, who are they demographically and what might we wanna ask them?

And I'm gonna give us three minutes to write down as much as you can and play some music

So another two minutes.

So finish up with your writing and I can share my screen and we'll just kind of walk through them and maybe have some more solo time.

Share screen.

Y'all can continue writing.

If you haven't done, we'll just see that you're writing.

OK, so we're just going to go line by line across.

I'm just going to read it.

Kathy, you feel free to ask any probing questions that we haven't missed.

And then definitely ask folks what they think, what is missing.

And Kathy and I will be also, well, Kathy will be taking notes.

So we have both record of the conversation, but anything we need.

Passed in current providers.

So we have here 64 current operational grant applications and 16 building requests.

Well, for the current period, the number of applicants for grants and the recommendation for, you know, for each priority area

both number of grant applications, number of targeted recipients, and it's broken down into how much funding was requested versus approved.

Okay, got you.

The 64 operational funding requests, there was just over about 36,000

Yeah, so there's a list somewhere of all the organizations that applied.

Yes, we can get that for the group.

Kayla just shared something actually.

I've done a breakdown of this already, and it summarizes it by area and the organization and number of targets.

Thank you.

So we have a current list, so that's good.

Previous, we would have to get access from for Kathy.

There's several that apply twice, but it might be worth looking to see the consistency from over the past several years

Yes, and it was just changed last year to kind of open it up so that organizations, that's where the capacity building grants came from.

Okay, so we know who those folks are.

Let's move over to what do we either want to know or would want to ask them.

So how you found out about the program, how you measured success in the past, how many clients typically participate in your surveys,

And what information do you include in your surveys?

Is there anything else, again, that we wanna know, wanna ask, or wanna ask them as part of this process?

How far out follow up surveys?

I mean, I'd be very interested in checking with people.

And I mean, this is mostly been something I've been thinking about with the housing stuff, but it could also apply other things as well about

Six months down the road, a year down the road, is there more follow-up to make sure that there's a customer satisfaction survey?

And also, how is it written?

Is it an empowering survey?

Or is it just kind of like, we gave you what we said you were going to get?

Yes, and also in engaging the satisfaction of the recipients, but that also then leads into

is the mission being accomplished that the city is funding?

Are they separate metrics though?

This is Kathy jumping in here with a possible answer and then maybe a question that we could turn back to Shayla, Kathy, Mayor Walker, and Sena.

But my understanding of the group purpose is that you are focused on consumer feedback.

And so that's

I think maybe a way of more narrowly tailoring how to conduct the receipt measurement and assessment piece here, that it's really focused on nonprofit performance based on consumer feedback.

And I think one of the, you know, what we hope to figure out is how do we get a holistic view of what's actually happening?

Something, you know, that Kevin just said about the 36,000

people, one of the things that has concerned me is that nonprofits just throw out a number sometimes based on how many people they could possibly reach.

I don't think that we ever fully understand or I don't fully understand 100% of the time whether it's there are, you know, 500 fifth grade students versus 25 of those fifth grade students we actually serve.

And so I think

that while we do want some information from the nonprofit, the conversation has been centered around how do we get that kind of unfiltered feedback from the individuals receiving the service.

And I put in one of my comments, one of the things that I threw out there is what if we were able to create something like a Yelp for nonprofits, it was like, you know, for individuals in the community to be able to just give feedback, even, you know, there was concern

just like it's in the, one thing could upset someone and it's just based on one incident and it's not, you know, but if nonprofits had to understood that, you know, their funders were watching this platform and that people were able to give in that moment, this is the treatment that I just received.

And so the conversation has always been geared towards the individual receiving the service.

I think that's an important point when you talk about target recipients and how many are they actually reaching as a metric for the service providers.

Yeah, so that's one of, you know, one of the four groups, right?

So I think that you all are thinking about, so as part of this, as part of assessing their impact in their user experience, now,

Part of that is looking at past and present clients and those who are the target area but not accessing the services.

But if you're going to engage at some level to get some type of information from the actual service providers, what about that will help you better understand or measure the impact or use experience, what is the information or questions or what do you want to know from them, right?

What are the questions you need to ask from that sector, right?

So that's one.

And then, obviously, Mayor Walker is talking about what are the mechanisms to actually engage users, which is the second part of our question, but we haven't gotten there yet.

So what would we want to know

and or require the nonprofits to either report or measure and offer to the city as part of this process, right?

Because that's what you can control, what you're actually asking them for to report on and or what do you want to ask them for by way of how do they measure impact and how are they engaging clients so you can also see the user experience, if you want to do that.

Okay.

Going through the providers to get to the recipients gives you the dual benefit of ensuring, you know, how are they reaching and how are they tracking who is receiving the aids for assistance or support versus, you know, how many they said we're going to.

So you are suggesting, Kevin, that

This is about getting the folks that get grant funding to both report on not just what they're proposed.

So the follow-up of, y'all proposed to serve this amount of people.

How many did you actually serve, right?

So I hear accountability.

And the second part of that is, what is your mechanism?

And you could ask them, or you could tell them, what's your mechanism for getting user feedback?

Right, and in part is that they're communicating with those who are within their program.

And that may or may not be the best way to reach current and alumni, but it would be a good place to start.

It doesn't address

You know, that part of the community that's not aware that there is aid out there.

And, you know, that's a separate issue.

So the nonprofits, they provide an update usually, previous year.

of what they did with the money that they received the year before, and then what they plan to do with the money that they hope to receive this upcoming year.

One of the other points, am I losing it?

I think so, no.

Oh, whether we allow this information, there's a confidentiality conversation.

Whether we allow the information to go through the nonprofits or whether the city is able to build a system that the nonprofits can direct the clients to.

And how do we do that, especially, let's say, if you're dealing with someone, you know, Region 10.

which, you know, so the confidentiality conversation came up there where like a computer for kids, they may be more open to coming through the city and not, you know, and filling out surveys if that avenue is there and how do we provide, I guess, a level of comfort and

So in that question, hold off on the second part because we're about to jump into that.

Do you think that there is any additional either information or engagement that either the city needs to do with those nonprofits or require of them, right?

So if they're already offering the information kind of on their impact,

Is there any other questions or inquiry we have for them in particular, or it's all about the user experience?

I think there has to be a better way to get more accurate information.

A good example is with CARES Fund dollars, we just allocated $183,000

to two nonprofits each, $183,000 each.

One of the nonprofits said that they would meet the needs of 160 or so students, but that is more than the capacity for the location that would serve city students only, right?

And so there has to be a way for them not to just throw that number out, but for us to be able to, you know, for them to have questions

that let them know that we're gonna get around to like specifically how many city of Charlottesville youth are you serving, which wasn't captured in this example that I'm giving you.

And so it's something that I keep having questions about since we didn't get that information.

That's just one example.

It happens all the time.

The other thing is the duplication of services.

You'll have,

you know, several organizations saying that they're all, let's say it's after school mentorship.

Well, those kids are the same kids that they are saying, you know, pulling from the numbers that they can reach, but everybody's, though the kids can only be at one place at one time, but we usually just trust the process and say, okay, you know,

Thank you for this great work because our kids need somewhere to go after school.

And we do that in a lot of areas.

And so I think the accountability piece, which I hope that we are getting to, means that if we are able to do this well, we can serve more people.

and we can actually make sure that those allocations are having an impact.

For the data walk folks, do y'all have ideas on how that may be done?

or even Nikuyah, other ways that you can really get that.

Yeah, I think that that's what we need guidance on because we can never get to the place.

Another example that just came to mind was that after a lot of questions to one organization last budget cycle, it came,

that the dollars that we were giving them for child care scholarships was going to families whose income was above $70,000.

And our child care scholarships are geared towards people in that lower AMI or that's what we traditionally do.

And so how

and we are giving one organization, usually the United Way, money to disperse like those childcare scholarships, but this was outside of that cycle.

So part of that is how many kids was being served at this other organization.

We don't have the tools in place to compare whether we're paying

you know $220.

at one organization or $150 at another organization.

And if the one organization did all of it, how many people we could serve, we are not able, those kind of dots haven't been connected in the past.

And this is not my area of expertise.

I just know what is missing and what is frustrating when I'm trying to do what I'm supposed to do and make sure that we are spending money responsibly.

Can I ask then, are you now asking specific questions of those nonprofits when they reapply the following year?

Are there certain

Data that they need to give you about how many people were served, how many were in Charlottesville, and what are their incomes?

Additionally, people have been, there are questions that we ask them, but I don't think there's a way that, the two examples that I just gave you are two things that just recently came up.

And I think I'm sharing those to let you know how big the problem still is, even though we have this group together and that we acknowledge that it's a problem.

I think I'm sharing so that you all know what we don't know.

And I would like to say in some cases it can't just be numerical.

So when I worked at the homeless shelter,

Um, there was some people who were in the shelter for a very short period of time.

And that was very easy for them.

Not, not, it was comparatively easy for them to then go into housing, but somebody who had been out living outside, you know, for 20 years, it was much harder for them to go into housing.

So it took a lot more time, energy and finances to get them into housing than it would somebody who is

just become homeless.

So it's also how do we compare then, you know, the numbers piece, but then when we hit, then in just about every field there is, there in nonprofit, at least there's that section where to dig into here and really help the people who are here, it's gonna take a lot more resources, time, effort to make that dent

and that next stage.

Yeah, Sena, I think that's a good point that while we can be quantitative, we have to look that it is people we're talking about and qualitative issues are going to come in.

So, Billy, you had a question, and can you explain what you mean, Billy, put in the chat, I wonder if we could give a usability test to recipients to get the data on nonprofits.

Yeah, so like what Nikuyah and Sena were talking about, I feel like

You know, it's going to be hard probably, I'm guessing, not a huge budget to like police the people and creating an audit.

But like, if we can connect to the recipients of the thing, we could get quantitative and qualitative information.

Like there's like a SUS score, like this really standard test for, they do it for software products, but you can do it for services.

You can do it for all kinds of things, where you basically ask 10 questions.

It takes about like five or 10 minutes to answer.

And then you can kind of measure how usable the service is or how much the people like it, if that makes any sense.

So I think like in your example, Sena, like the one person coming in off of you kind of can do that, get some level of qualitative information from that just by the person who's been off the street for 20 years, if he went through a seamless or she went through a seamless process that worked really well.

you would kind of like see that and you could kind of compare if something is very arduous and hard to use and also it'd be hard to compare because certain things I think you'd get different response rates from different groups but if you were comparing apples to apples two different groups that are both kind of serving the same community you could see which one had a higher engagement by the level of like

responses that they got.

Maybe, maybe not, you know, depending on how well the non-profits were able to, like, get people engaged in that.

But it seems like we really just want to know, you know, are we really helping people and asking people?

Could the, just random, could the city create some, I don't know, some annual survey, whatever, that at least a portion of it, then the nonprofits administer in the sense of they're saying, these are our clients, we're offering this, but the information actually doesn't go through them, it goes to the city, and it's just connecting to

what of these providers did you get service from?

You know, what area is it like?

Okay, this is, I'm making some habitat humanity.

So we know it's housing and asking them, and that maybe that's a part of their expectation as grantees, obviously don't necessarily have control over the response rate, but you could say, hey, we have this annual survey, we do a recipients of our services, you know, that we ask all of our grantees

to send out in some way, shape, form, or fashion, whatever the different means that we're trying to collect, and then get that back.

So it's not you going through the nonprofits and using their networks, but it's not tainted by the questions they ask, the whatever.

You might actually have in the survey, I'm not a survey wonk of like, if you get services based on housing,

You have Sunakaya's point, some questions that are essentially the same because you want to know it from everybody, like, did you like your whatever?

And then some questions that may be particular to housing, like to what you were saying, Sena, about fundamentally, you know,

How long did it take you to be housed?

I'm just making this up.

But something specific to that.

The questions you asked for people that got housing services may be different than if I got some health care services or education.

I don't know.

It's a thought.

Probably not a whole lot expensive.

But if people did it by organization and category, then you can

I do think you need to tailor the questions and even how you go about gauging the information based on each group independently, although there'll be some commonality.

And while I do agree you need to go through the service providers for those who are currently getting it in alumni,

I think Sena made a good point earlier too, is they have to be able to feel free to answer honestly and not feel that they're putting, you know, if they're critical, they're risking getting additional benefits or future benefits from a program and don't want to offend.

You want to be able to draw out, you know, honest and give them the ability to express themselves without fear that there'll be any sort of reprisal.

But at the same time, and while I like the idea of a Yelp for, the important part is they have to be qualified users.

It has to be someone you know is an actual recipient and not simply expressing an opinion.

And you can do that in surveying by, even on a phone survey,

Right.

So what Billy said, how we do it is share a Google form that the nonprofits share, but the city gets the results, right?

And so you can ensure that as part of the survey.

Is it going to be anonymous?

It's going to go straight to the city, blah, blah, blase, but require the nonprofits to actually share it as part of

Either they're reporting or what they're required to do as grantees may be an option.

And if I could just share one more quick example that popped in when Sena and Kevin were talking.

I just asked for, and just out talking to different organizations,

if anyone would be interested in pulling together to mentor youth that even with all the services we currently have in place.

And it's a lot of money that goes out.

And one group responded with a request that came out to equal about $5,000 per student for the year.

And there were some questions during our discussion about how do we know

that it should be $5,000 even based on some of those individual issues like that Sena brought up like you know these are youth that the school system is not reaching yet that you know they don't they clearly are not coming in contact with some of the other already established nonprofits and

the pandemic and virtual learning isn't working out for them so I know that's individual factors that we would have to consider but even though I was the one asking you know people like are you interested you know in this like how can we make sure that these kids don't fail I did not have the tools to be able to say whether it should be two thousand dollars per kid for the year three thousand dollars five you know I just didn't you know

and we would compare it against, you know, there was some comparison against other organizations who does mentorships but it wasn't anything that helped us as a council make a good decision about whether we funded it or funded it with less money and what was the rationale behind

whether we gave them $3,000 per kid or $5,000 per kid.

So that's just something else to throw out for you all to think about for our next meeting.

Well, I think they did, but it didn't, you know, that leaves it to the individuals and then for us to versus us having I think something just

in place for us to kind of, even what Kevin said, knowing I couldn't tell you before he said it that it was 36,000 people that would have been receiving services from the money we allocated.

So that was new for me.

So just us knowing how many citizens are we seeing

that we're serving with the money that we're reaching out.

I have some questions, right?

And I think we're back to the overlapping of services because we have about 49,000 or so people in the community.

So those were two things that just popped up in my mind when he said that, but we're not getting data at that level.

You look like you had something to say, and I just wanted to hear what you had to say.

Earlier we were talking about, I do think that there's one of the things I was going to say a little earlier is having the survey go through the organization because I don't see them giving us emails or phone numbers.

for a lot of their clients because of privacy issues so that it almost has to go through the organization so that and then have it come back to the city so it doesn't go through the organization.

Right.

And then if it went through the city, then people and you wanted to do some follow up, right?

People can choose to say, yes, you can contact me.

Here's my email.

Based on, right, because you should always, hopefully, own your information and where it gets out to.

That seems like a more accurate way.

It's their choice whether they want to take it.

It's their choice what they share.

You can also have ownership over, I think to Sena's point, the

Right, and if it went to the city, there shouldn't.

That would be the necessary piece because, I mean, you've got to remember some of the nonprofits are also medical, like the Free Health Clinic, real, not CHIP.

Anyways, there's a number of HIPAA-oriented nonprofits that are supported through the Vibrant Communities grant and have much even more stringent

But that's the clinicians or the organization sharing the information versus creating a tool that people could voluntarily participate in.

Right.

Right.

Well, that's the thing.

It's like if they could participate in it and they could opt to not give their name and they could just click like there would be like a scroll down where someone could click which one they wanted.

But then again,

and I'm gonna, you know, just having worked in the nonprofit field, in the field where people aren't always as computer savvy.

A lot of the people I worked with at Pacham would not have, I mean, some of the younger ones, especially who were newly homeless, but some of the people who'd been on the streets for a number of years, they wouldn't have been able to do a computer survey on their own.

There's years on the streets, especially if there's any substances being used to help people get through living on the streets, does a lot of brain damage.

And making it really difficult for people to just to either have the initiation energy to do a survey like that

or I mean, and there were a number of cases, a number of people I worked with who were illiterate.

Then there's also language barriers.

So it's like, we're gonna have to come up with, I think, a tool that's able to be utilized in multiple different ways.

If it's a, you know, one option's the computer survey, but then another option is,

the staff work with the person to do the computer survey or they can do a written survey that they turn in to a box at City Hall or someplace really easy.

The key is it's gotta be really accessible and really easy for someone to take care of because one of the key components to a lot of the services that we see are

You're in a financial difficult, you're in a financially reduced state, usually when you're receiving services of some sort.

And usually that means you have less time than somebody who's making enough money to get by.

So adding a survey is just one more piece of time to someone's life.

The SUS score that I shared is like 10 questions and takes about five minutes.

The easiest one in the world is called a net promoter score, which is one question.

And it's how likely would you recommend this to a friend?

And like, that's a pretty valid measure and kind of works across different services and things like that.

And is, you know, that is like a really quick one.

Yeah, I think that all of these are right in the sense that whatever tool you use, you're going to have to think about what are the barriers to the people using that tool and what are the other tools that you might use to get those people to offer feedback.

So I think an online survey is one way, I think,

to answer both of y'all, you could have for people who's like, I want the short survey, I wanna answer one question, that's all I got.

And if you wanna take the short survey, which is gonna take about three minutes or the longer one that takes 10 minutes.

So there's always choice in what you do, I'm gonna take the one sentence one in regards to that.

And there was something else I was gonna say.

No, I think I was there.

I don't necessarily think it's an either or, but it could be both and, but I think if our goal is both empathy and inclusion, it's really helping the city think about what are the mechanisms that are within their capacity to get feedback about the impact of the organizations that they're funding, right?

It could be lots of different things, a survey in a myriad of forms would be one of them.

So just checking in on time.

Did we have this until 7 or 7.30?

OK, got you.

So we're at time.

We've taken copious notes, I hope, Kathy, of our conversation.

And we hope to pick back right off where we left about

How do we do this?

What are the metrics?

I think that obviously the idea that we were chewing on was about a survey.

And thank you, Billy, for the usability stuff.

And so that's one idea.

And when we get into, and remember, there's a number of different groups that we're trying to hit, the people that aren't

part of any of these processes that may be in the target audience that you want to capture information from.

So we're going to try to get there and then into what may be the questions in the 10 questions or less or the one sounds like great for anybody probably that's going to be participating in this process.

But I also hear about this data and accountability standpoint from the city.

How do we encourage that in

I just wanted to call out all of the resources for folks that we had shared earlier in the chat, put them all in one space together for ease of use.

So the slides with this meeting's agenda, the outlines for our group norms, the purpose and the priority areas.

There's the link for those slides there, the link for the prior brainstorming done in February, and then this meeting's brainstorming, the document that y'all were working in that we've been

And Shay, like you could probably send those just as an afterthought email to folks, just the links.

So the other thing is we need to figure out very quickly, what's the best time to meet?

Is it, what is today, Wednesday at 5.30?

Remember, we can only meet once a month up to three hours.

So does this general time framework or do we just wanna do

Does this time and this day generally work for everybody?

So maybe it's 5 to 7.30 instead of 5.30 or 5.30 to 8.30 or something so it's manageable.

5.30 to 8.

Is this general time and day work for people?

Yes?

Yes.

OK.

So then we'll send a Doodle poll with all of those.

Wednesday in that range for the next, I guess it'll be enough Wednesdays until March.

Does that make sense?

And we will just pick one, the one a month that works for everybody and send that out to you.

Does that work?

Perfect.

See you all next month.

Okay.

Thank you.

Bye.

Thank you, Joe.