Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority Work Session   8/8/2024

Sorry for the delay.

Commissioner Goldblatt or Commissioner Payne, will either one of you guys be running the meeting tonight?

I didn't realize, yeah, I didn't realize that I was not.

Commissioner Payne, you might know a little bit more about Robert's Rules of Order than I do.

but I think we need a couple more.

I know maybe Earl is in, is at West Haven.

I think Ms. Alice is on the way to getting on.

So I think you'll have enough to actually have a meeting.

And we're not taking any votes, right?

That's correct.

I'm here, John, I'm here.

and Joel K. McGatney.

Great, thank you.

Your audio went out, I couldn't hear what you said.

Do we want to just start?

Commissioner Goldblatt has reappeared.

So maybe her audio is back.

Yeah, I got booted.

I got booted from it.

I don't think Maria is able to talk, so I'll do the roll call.

Commissioner Payne?

Here.

Here.

Seems he's on the attendees list, but he is on.

He is here.

Can we please get Commissioner Raudales added as a panelist?

Commissioner Washington, he's not present yet.

Good evening, everyone.

Just a moment.

Great.

I just plugged into the projector over here and I wanted to make sure everything was showing up.

All right.

All right.

So I'm here tonight.

My name is Kathleen Glenn-Matthews.

I'm the Deputy Executive Director of the Housing Authority.

And I'm here with our Grants and Development Coordinator, Katrina Bytes to talk to you about proposed next steps on our nonprofit arm launch.

Katrina and I are both going to take turns with this presentation.

We just have a really brief agenda.

We'll try not to keep you too long because I know all the flooding has people worried.

Thanks, Kathleen.

We've been talking about this for a while, so as I'm sure you all know,

We want to get the ball really rolling in earnest on getting a 501c3 branch for CRHA.

Basically, it just gives us more funding opportunities.

What we have found a lot, especially as we've been pursuing grants for resident programs is there's a lot of restrictions around

trying to get money for like directly to our residents in the form of like stipends, barrier assistance, eviction diversion, things like that.

So by starting a 501c3, it one, opens up the door for some grants and other opportunities that we currently don't qualify for as a quasi-governmental entity.

It also allows us to diversify our funding streams, especially in election years, you know, it's always a little tense thinking about HUD funding and what the next years might look like.

So trying to find ways to make sure that all of these programs that we're building right now for our residents remain intact

regardless of what our federal government looks like.

It also gives us the opportunity to pursue in-kind donations from different organizations.

So for instance, Lowe's will do in-kind gifts.

Great.

Just some of the logistics that we have.

The first one is that we needed a board resolution.

Fortunately, we already did this.

We did this all the way back in May 24th of 2021.

Once we get the ball rolling, we'll also need to get city council approval, which will happen once we're a little bit further down.

Big piece that we need in order to make a nonprofit is a name for the nonprofit.

I'm a big fan of organizations that say what they do on the label as it were.

So I'm not a marketing person or anything.

So I just like threw some words on here for like potential names.

I know some people really like acronyms and some people don't, but at the end of the day, this is intended to be a nonprofit for our resident programs.

So if anyone has ideas for a name or really like has strong feelings about a name, please let us know.

We also might just take it directly to residents and ask them if they have opinions on a name.

Laura?

So I don't know that people are sure.

I like the acronym ICANN.

That's cool.

I also like Residence First Fund.

Yeah, I agree with that.

We have been talking for a couple of years now about the mission and vision.

So the time's coming now to start solidifying that.

What I had that we had originally put together was

you know, a nonprofit organization to support development of both physical so it can be part of redevelopment and parallel track as well as economic, social, cultural revitalization of low and moderate income residents in Charlottesville area.

We set it that way because our portfolio is growing and we want to be able to

just has some flexibility.

The main purpose of the organization is to identify and address needs of the individuals with a focus on education, job training and placement, housing stability, health and wellness and other community social services.

And a big part of this that we see initially is the need

for resources to staff our service programs as well as provide the supports for those programs.

To accomplish this mission, the organization has been granted the directive to secure and manage contributions, requests, grants, and other funding from individuals, organizations, and government agencies.

So this is something that we would be looking at the board to help us shape

So as far as oversight and administration, we had talked to Delphine about this too, and she might want to talk about it some more.

But we had talked about borrowing staff initially from the Housing Authority.

So the staff would still remain with the Housing Authority, and the new entity would not have any employees initially.

and it can be permanent, but initially they would not.

There are a lot of benefits for employees of our organization and we would not want to have employees who are at an organization that was not able to offer all of those benefits.

Regarding the board, initially we would have a mirror board with our board in many ways, but we would be looking at making some distinctions

with that, that these are two different entities.

They're not the same thing.

It would be a separate meeting that would happen for this.

It could be on the same night, but it would open and close separately.

There is, you know, hope in the future to look at creating a separate board for this.

I do not know what the timeline would be.

We have to really be careful that we separate the two entities so that we don't face any issues as far as separating funds or looking at our activities or services, because we're going to be, in many cases, hiring individuals to work on programs.

And we really have to make sure that if we're getting federal funds for an employee that we make it really clear and track the hours on payroll that all of that is stated.

The mission and funding sources would, as I was saying, be completely separate so that we would, you know, be letting HUD know that we kept everything.

Our annual plan would also not include this.

It would be on a separate document.

HUD is really specific that they only want to know about the items they fund in that document.

Okay, so this is kind of a denser part of the presentation.

So I'll try to move through this relatively quickly and we'll be sure to send slides out to folks afterwards.

But some of the things that we're looking at as we start to really envision this and set it up is what percentage of time will we devote to each different activity that is conducted by the nonprofit?

How is that activity funded?

What is the overall percentage of the budget that goes to that activity?

How does it promote our mission and vision?

how the programs design benefits individuals, especially if we have specific qualifications needed for people to receive the benefits and how we determine that.

So these are the activities we've identified as just the core of what the nonprofit will do on a day-to-day basis.

So a lot of it is going to be grant writing and research, especially in the first years.

We want to start small and grow and really be intentional with how we're doing this.

So grant writing research, especially Charlottesville, has a lot of wealthy folks and a lot of opportunities for us to start building relationships with people.

to help sustain some of the programs we want to do.

So donor stewardship is another big part of this.

And this is also something that the nonprofit board will take on as part of its responsibilities.

Nonprofit boards generally assist with creating relationships and also connecting

the nonprofit with contacts that might have either fiscal means or be able to put us in front of people who have those means.

Outreach and marketing, there are a lot of nonprofits in Charlottesville.

We're gonna be another one in that box.

And so trying to build awareness, create a community presence, make sure our residents know what we're doing and making sure our

Everyone in the greater community knows we exist.

Financial management, we'll talk about this a little later, but that's general finance stuff.

For the time being, finances will be managed by our current finance team with the Housing Authority.

Database management, this is a very necessary part.

This will have to get a database with addresses, contract information, a place where we can track donations so that we can send appropriate tax letters, all of the things that make the IRS happy.

And then the smallest part of this, which is also tends to be the most exciting part is event planning.

You know, we host the annual fundraising events is a great benefit to a lot of nonprofit programs.

But for especially the first few years, we're not sure that event planning will be at the top of the list necessarily.

So programs, there's a lot here.

So I apologize if I kind of go through this quickly.

But first of all,

We kind of like went through about what our priorities are for funding as an organization for the first year.

It's generally good practice amongst nonprofits to have this kind of ratio where like 65 to 70% of the annual budget be devoted to programming.

So with that in mind,

We've made some rough projections.

I emphasize the word rough here based upon a budget of $450,000 and a budget of $275,000.

So the funding goal that you'll see in the column there, that is what that range looks like monetarily.

The biggest piece that we will want funds for is the barrier assistance.

So this will help fund some of our service coordinators.

It'll help us to get residents past some of the barriers that we see really frequently.

So the cost of transportation, the cost of childcare, food security, things that keep folks from having a high quality of life.

Next we have resident scholarships.

It's pretty straightforward.

We want to give some of our high school grads some cash to help pursue higher education.

This may also be used for adult learners who are returning to school.

and then the Housing Stability Fund is the next one.

And this is specifically for folks facing eviction.

So this can look like eviction diversion funds.

It can also look like assistance with chronic issues, such as like hoarding or bed bugs and getting people money to manage that situation, get whatever assistance they need to just, yeah, have a happy and healthy home.

Here we go.

All right.

So the next big one is resident stipends.

We want to pay

Everyone for their time.

We lean on our residents more and more as we become a more resident-centered organization.

We want to make sure that everyone is being compensated for participating in a meeting, participating on a board, helping us like do planning.

So having funds for stipends which are

It's very hard to get those funds from grantors usually so we just want to make sure that if someone is devoting some of their time to us that we're paying them for that time.

Next piece is on-site events and celebrations.

So this is more envisioned as money for like resident like opportunities and for community celebrations as opposed to like big fundraising

things that'll come out of a different piece of budget.

And then onsite education.

This is again, part of some of the programs we've been growing with economic opportunity.

So finding funds for paying for external educators to come in for class materials and supplies for snacks, for meals for residents when they attend to training, especially if it's during meal time.

Yeah.

And this is the last slide of programs.

For resident-led activities, so this will be a very small fund, but we want to include it.

So essentially, this is a fund where if residents want to like start a book club or a garden club, like they can ask the nonprofit to help support that.

Then home ownership, this again is a thing that

will be growing as we get the home ownership program up and running.

And so this will look like down payment assistance or home renovation or improvement funding.

We have some other avenues for that kind of assistance, but with the price of housing in Charlottesville, we just want to make it as easy as possible for our families to be able to get a home.

And then youth and family programming.

So this will,

This part of the budget will definitely grow with time.

For this first year, we're keeping it pretty minimal as we're just starting to build youth and family programs.

Kathleen, you are muted, I think.

I apologize.

So I'm going to stop sharing for a moment and refer us to attachment A, just to make sure everyone has that.

That is referring to, I'll pull it up on the screen and share it as well.

Just a second.

But the board started working on an ethics policy in June of 2023.

And we were looking at this policy as possibly something that we weren't sure of where the board was with it, but we were hoping that this could also become something that we could build on to have our

conflict of interest policy as well for the nonprofit.

And we just made this an attachment tonight just in hopes to get some conversation going around that.

And it looks like a lot of work went into that last year.

So hopefully it can get picked back up and we're happy to help in any way that's needed with that.

We will need to attach that as we are compiling all the information for it.

Okay, so financial data and fundraising.

Another big piece of applying for 5013 status is

getting some projections of our income and expenses and just having a baseline of like kind of what we expect our budget to be and we can make that off of like educated guesses and kind of looking at the programs that we just went through kind of like how much we will be devoting to each of those programs

and also looking at our staffing costs.

With a lot of this, we think there'll be some overlap where we can save some money for operations costs, especially with like office space and things like business equipment and things like that, especially for the first year when CRHA staff is being borrowed by the nonprofit.

The biggest,

Expense that we're going to be looking at is like other than programming it's going to be personnel and then there will be some that will need to go to operations as well.

but a lot of our revenue projections will kind of depend on when we look at other nonprofits in the area, seeing kind of what their fundraising looks like and also on how confident the board feels about their own like their fundraising ability and what kind of grant opportunities we can apply for.

So it's very daunting to try and like make an educated guess about what our budget will be.

But you know, we can, yeah, we'll figure, we can do it.

And it's easier.

I put together a very rough spreadsheet when we were talking about this, Kathleen and I were talking about this, that kind of breaks it down a little bit more.

And I can share that with folks if they would like.

but most of it, like it'll be maybe 12,000 for operating we think for minimal costs.

Oh, here I'll share my screen.

So folks can see this.

Again, this is a very rough budget and I have not included any revenue items

But if we look at things like this is kind of a guesstimation of what staff will be devoted to the nonprofit entity, how much that will cost, the operating costs again are relatively minimal given that we do have some crossover.

And then the big piece is all of our programming.

The two columns here, one side is the higher end of budget and one is the lower end budget.

And the only thing, the things that don't change with either budget are those operating costs and also the staff expenses.

and then financial controls.

The plan is to mirror all of our financial controls and processes with CRHA.

Again, the CRHA accounting staff will be responsible for managing this.

So it will be pretty easy to keep the standards the same across the board.

The nonprofit will have its own bank account.

Again, really delineating this entity from the housing authority.

and the accounting staff will make sure that we have our books and our reporting and audit compliance all well and good.

And as I previously mentioned, fundraising becomes a major responsibility for a nonprofit board.

The board will also be responsible for governance, setting policies and determining the strategic direction of the organization, including approval of the strategic plan.

I know we just went through a strategic plan process for the housing authority.

There'll be a whole different one for the nonprofit entity.

but some things that we would like you all to think about is kind of like who oversees these fundraising efforts and how do we want to divide our kind of like fundraising efforts so are we primarily interested in pursuing grants are we primarily interested in pursuing donors whether that's individual donors or like larger family foundations or

Do we want to just go all in on events?

Sorry about that.

The final part of this initial phase will be filing our articles of organization.

And we'll be doing that with our council's office.

They have given us this amazing checklist that Katrina and I used to put together this presentation for tonight.

And as we said before, we're going to need that name when we do that.

If we're directed to start a process to work on that, we will begin that immediately.

And also just preparing the mission and vision and all the other items that are needed.

and Laura.

Hi, thanks.

This was so awesome.

Thank you so much.

So much work went into it.

It was really clear.

I really appreciate it.

So just along with some of the things that you wanted the board to be thinking about and focusing on, I have a couple of questions.

One is, have residents seen this yet?

There have been conversations about it with last year's annual plan.

Okay, and then the second question I had is when you were talking about Charlottesville already having being a crowded fundraising space, there's a lot of nonprofits.

One entity that I was thinking about is PHAR, and it seems like we wouldn't want to do anything as an entity that would divert any fundraising attention away from PHAR.

Is there any way that we could like, I don't know what this looks like legally, but would it be possible to try to partner with PHAR because it seems like so much

It might also be beneficial

Yeah, and echo what Laura said in terms of

Detail of the report tonight as well as the work that I know went into it.

Is there anyone else on the board who has any comments or questions about the presentation?

I know the conflict of interest and code of ethics was specifically called out.

Yeah, so I don't know if, I know we're not taking votes, but I would love to get this on the agenda for our August, I think that seems reasonable, our August meeting, so that we could provide feedback on it, finalize it, and then you would be able to use it and move.

I will say, likewise, I think it would be good to get it up on an upcoming agenda and just formalize it.

I think it's just always good to of course have.

Okay.

Thank you.

All right.

Well, you can move into the public comment portion.

Is there anyone in person who would like to make public comment?

Not seeing any.

Don't see anyone online either.

And is there a PHAR representative for PHAR comments tonight?

Nope.

All right.

Well, I will close public comment there.

And meeting is adjourned.

Thank you.