Music I'm sorry. guitar solo Thank you. Thank you. Community meeting today, Tuesday, August 30th. If we can go ahead and get started. Looks like we have our council members recognized for quorum. We've got two right here. Lock the door. Councilman Stennett. Okay. Thank you. Commissioner, would you like to go ahead and introduce Mr. Craig to us? Yes, I'd be glad to. Thank you all. This is, I think, our second or third meeting on the partner agency process. I'd like to start out by saying that a lot of y'all understand social services. You either work with the populations we work with, you are social workers, so since you understand the process, this makes this an easier process for all of us. And I thank you all for all your time looking at this because it's got a lot of angles to it, and we're going to try to address all those today. The focus of the partner agency process now will be to meet social service needs. I think that's a shift because in the past, the way we've been funding has been to fund an agency. So now rather than funding an agency, we're looking at funding needs in our community. Craig's presentation is going to be two-part. The first part is what we're going to do in the next three to five years to maximize funds in our community and to address these needs as they change because that's just the nature of social services. The second part of his presentation today will be his application for next year's funding, FY13. We hope to have a meeting of all the partner agencies, a lot of whom are here today on October the 19th. So we're hoping to get your comments and suggestions and get this application process approved. If we don't have an application by November, it's going to put us back on deadline. So we're hoping that we can really hammer out this application today. This presentation has resulted from a lot of input. We had several meetings with Council Member Myers. We've met with the Bluegrass Foundation. We've met with the United Way. And we've tried to address everyone's concerns. And I want you to know that their suggestions were part of this process, but this presentation is a Department of Social Services presentation. So we're open to any comments and suggestions that you have. I want to applaud Craig Benz. He has worked very hard on this process. Another thing he did was he researched other municipalities that fund outside agencies. He looked at some of the things they were doing to format our new application, and I think he did an excellent job. There's a lot of material in here to analyze line by line. We don't want to try to do that today. Craig's going to do the PowerPoint presentation, and then you have the application process and instructions in total in front of you. What I would advise is if you have specific questions about that application process, you can feel free to ask Craig or I. And finally, quite a few of our partner agencies are here today, and they've also received these presentations in advance. So with the committee's permission, you may want to have comments from them today as well. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner. I would add one footnote to the Commissioner's comments. First, I'd like to say I want to thank the Commissioner for working with us together on this. As she said, Mr. Benz has done an outstanding job working together with all parties to put this presentation together. I would only ask that everybody here keep a broad view that this policy or this process change is going to affect all the partner agencies that the government funds, not just social services. In the first year, we're looking at focusing on the social services, but there's really going to be a much broader plan moving forward. So with that said, if any committee members have anything to say before, saying none, Mr. Benz. And please take all the time you need. Thank you. I know the agenda this afternoon has two separate items for the policy plan, the phase plan, as well as the agency application itself. I actually combined those into the PowerPoint with your permission. I'd like to present them in that manner. Absolutely. Okay, good. At the May committee meeting, we presented a preliminary plan for improvement of the partner agency funding process, which involved partnership with the Bluegrass Community Trust, or GoodGiving.net. Since that time, we've been working with staff, other communities, and our partners to develop process improvements, which I'd like to present to you today. Our objectives today are as follows. we're going to discuss the guiding principles we're working towards as they relate to the partner agency process. These principles are shaping the phased improvements. We're also going to be highlighting the new application review process for your approval, which we plan to implement next year in fiscal year 13. And finally, we'll be discussing the implementation timeline for all improvements encompassing the application and other improvements, which will essentially be phased over the next three fiscal years. This slide shows our guiding principles as we've worked through the process. The process to date has been driven by the funding we have available, rather than the resources that are needed to address problems. Our improvements were developed with an eye towards what we need rather than what we have currently, and a means by which to address those needs. Also, as we previously discussed, we're partnering with Bluegrass Community Foundation in order to avoid duplication of information and to ensure that the application process is paperless. We're also proposing teaming with other agencies to assist with leveraging funds. The general fund has been our source for partner agency funding, and we need to look to other sources to increase our ability to fund needs going forward. Finally, we're emphasizing the importance of outcome measurement and program evaluation in the process so that we can clearly understand how successful our partner agencies are with both running their programs as well as addressing the overarching needs that the programs are addressing. A social services needs assessment report was completed back in April of 2008. That report used the community visioning approach to identify need. As an integral part of identifying our current needs, we proposed updating this study in 2012, and we're estimating that that will begin in the fall semester of August, which begins August 2012, with assistance from U.K. students and professors in the College of Social Work, as well as the Martin School of Public Policy. There was discussion of engaging in this process earlier, and we'd like your input on that today. The study will be more comprehensive than the first, and it will use community analytics to identify needs by priority, which will become priority funding areas for future partner agency application cycles. Excuse me? Yes, ma'am. Could you speak into the microphone? I can't hear you. Sorry about that. Thank you. So in other words, we're going to be using data to identify the needs rather than staff input or the applications that are coming in the door. The study will also include comparisons over the last 10-plus years so we can develop a snapshot of trends in the community. Controlling for population growth and other factors, increases and decreases in need give us a basic idea of whether what we've been doing over that same time period, that 10 years or so, has been working. This needs study should continue to be updated at least every five to seven years in order to track changes in the community and to regularly recheck our priorities. Funding our partner agencies has generally fluctuated between the $15 million and $18 million mark for the past eight years, and economic conditions are likely to keep funding from significantly increasing for the foreseeable future. As a result, we need to look for alternative sources of funding to truly address need, which will likely come from grant sources and other outside funding. In addition to allowing our partner agencies to use LFUCG funding as grant matches, we'd like your input on partnership with one or more outside agencies to identify, apply for, and advocate for additional funding to address needs. In the long term, this strategy will allow us to grow the dollars we have available for partner agency funding and will reduce reliance on general fund growth for program funding as well. As I stated earlier, this is a fundamental shift from focusing on what we have to what we need and identifying resources to truly make a difference. Alternatively, we're also considering other opportunities for leveraging funds, including setting aside a new fund, new government funding, for mini-grants, cash matches for agency grant applications, and other initiatives. And really what's driving that is most of the agencies that are applying right now are applying for large amounts of money, and there's a need out there for a smaller mini-grant with a funding cap of something like $5,000 to meet immediate emergency needs. Each of these items are, of course, at Council's discretion. Outcome measurements critical to the success of the partner agency programs. The new application adds significant detail to the outcome measurement process, which results in the identification of big-picture issues with a comprehensive logic model to define how the program will be successful. The current application requires a listing of intended outcomes, performance targets, and verification. The new application goes a few steps further than this and asks applicants to think about the resources they'll be putting into the program, what activities they'll be engaging participants in, what the results of those services will be, in other words, what their outputs are, and what the measurable benefits will be for the participants in the programs, and those are our indicators and our outcomes that are listed in the table. We've already implemented reporting tools for the current fiscal year that require our partner agencies to tell us how successful their program is on a quarterly basis. We're testing and improving these reporting tools this year for use with the new application. Program evaluation has an expanded role in the new process as well. Review committees are being established to objectively review applications, which we'll discuss in a few minutes. Applicants will be given the opportunity to provide oral presentations and to respond to committee questions. Staff liaisons will continue to contact each agency at least quarterly, but are now being provided with a template to ensure that all liaisons are asking the important questions questions to make sure our partner agencies are experiencing success in funded programs. Again, the quarterly and annual reports our partner agencies are responsible for have also been revised in a more useful manner. And the new reports place very strong emphasis on outcome measurement and agency changes that may affect programs. So items like changes in leadership, changes in funding, and changes of programming within the agencies are now listed right on the quarterly reports, so we stay up to date on those items. This slide starts the highlights of the new application that's included in your packet. We've tried to create a new application document that's streamlined and asks only the important questions. We have a brief but specific rule book at the beginning of the package that's provided with the application, which provides information regarding the purpose of funding, the pre-application workshop, which is mandatory, submission instructions, and funding priorities. The application will have very general agency information requirements and will grant permission to LFUCG to access agency information on goodgiving.net to obtain the specifics. To be clear, applicants must have profiles on goodgiving.net to apply for this process. The remainder of the application is tied directly to program information, financials, personnel, and outcomes. We discussed in a past meeting that the new application will identify priority funding areas. For next year's application, we've identified the following priority areas. Services for senior citizens, mental health and substance abuse services, positive youth development, violence prevention, and public health. And those priorities are listed in the backup, the instructions as well as the application itself that went to this committee as well as our partner agencies before the meeting. In addition to that, we've had input from our partner agencies over the last couple of days to add a category for those agencies that are funded either by state statute requirement or by local ordinance requirement. So what we'd like to do is make an amendment to the package that you have today to add that sixth category in addition to the five funding priorities for those agencies that are funded either by state statute or local ordinance requirement. And those agencies, there's three of them. It's Hope Center, Bluegrass MHMR, and Community Action Council. The format and content of the application is meant to level the playing field. New partner agencies have the ability to apply alongside established partners. and not lose points due to lack of experience with LFUCG funding or the process. As long as applicants are able to clearly demonstrate the need and articulate how the program addresses need in a meaningful way, there's a solid chance at funding. And again, Bluegrass Community Foundation will be a partner in both information sharing as well as providing committee members. They have provided funding and review for their own programs for quite some time, and their expertise will be of benefit to our process. And Barbara Fisher with Bluegrass Community Foundation is here today if you have any questions. There were numerous questions over the past six months or so about agency financials. The new application format clearly requests each of these items in a format that will be easy for committee members to review. And council members will be getting copies of the completed applications up front along with staff so that you're not waiting on staff reports to find out what's been submitted. Finally, the programmatic information read request in the application is much more thorough than in the past, and requests proof of past success as applicable, level of service information, and wait list information, which we've never really asked for in the past, including measures being taken to reduce wait lists so that we can have some assurance that the dollars that are being requested are providing direct service. Staff reports for social service partner agency funding requests are currently narrative-based, and they do not use a scoring system for objective evaluation of the requests. We propose the use of three scoring committees made up of six members per committee, which may include council members, social services advisory board members, and goodgiving.net and other allied agency staff. Each committee member will be expected to sign a non-conflict of interest statement, which is the second to last page in your packet. There's a draft of that document. And they're providing that to ensure that committee members don't participate in the review process for any application that they have any personal or professional interest in. Each of the three committees will review six to eight applications on a 90-point scale and will be provided with objective scoring sheets to guide their review. Applicants will be given the opportunity for a brief oral presentation as well, where they'll have a chance to respond to any questions that the committees may have. At the end of those oral presentations, committee members can adjust their scores up to 10 points, as long as they don't go over that 90-point threshold. So with that, this is the proposed committee scoring rubric, and this is really we're looking for your feedback on this rubric this afternoon. Just very briefly, we're proposing 10 points for organizational capacity, 25 points for the program approach, up to 25 points for outcome measurement, 20 points for budget, and 10 points for diversity of funding. And really, that last one, what that means is we're just looking for a measure of sustainability in their funding to ensure that the agency's funding stream is strong enough to ensure against program interruptions. So we'd be looking at things like reserves of a certain amount to ensure that the agency and the program can continue if one of their funding sources does fall through. The remaining 10 points would be allocated to the council or allocated by the council and mayor, providing a maximum of 100 points per application. And after scoring, applications will be organized by rank for funding consideration, similar to most other grant processes. Reporting to this committee and the council is also an important consideration in the new process. Staff will provide two updates to the Social Services Committee during the year with summaries of agency reporting and the status of each funded program. An annual update document will also be provided to the Urban County Council to demonstrate program success. So with all of that said, this is very similar to what you saw at the last meeting that we presented proposed process improvements. There are three things here that are different than the current process. First, in September, or next month, we're proposing advertising the funding process, and that will happen on GTV3 as well as newspapers as well as any listservs that we have available to us for social services and so on so we can truly get the word out to the existing partner agencies as well as other agencies in the community. We're also proposing as a follow-up to advertising to hold an annual kickoff meeting to introduce new applicants to the process and discuss changes to the process for existing partner agencies and also, of course, to answer questions. So that's a mandatory meeting that we're proposing in October of 2011 in the second box down on the slide. And finally, the committee review process we're anticipating would occur in February and March of next year. The application deadline would remain unchanged, and we would still be using the purchase of service agreement and funding awards process. So this is the implementation timeline that staff is proposing. We're proposing that as phase one with your approval, we would implement the revised application and review process for social services agencies only. Right now there's 15 of those. It would depend on how many applications come in next year, but we would like to implement this for a year just with social service agencies, make sure we work out all the bugs before it applies to all of the rest of our partner agencies. Right now there's more than 30 in the urban county government. Phase two, which would be fiscal year 14, would bring the completion of the needs study and application refinement, and it would also bring the implementation of the funding leveraging with outside agencies. The reason we put those together is because right now the needs that we've identified are staff-driven. We asked our internal staff about perceived need, and we've developed the list accordingly. The needs study we're doing is going to take that a step further, and we felt that that would be a good tool to use for bringing in a third party to actually use that information to leverage additional funding. And then finally, in Phase 3, in fiscal year 15, we would be rolling out this process to all of our partner agencies. I had some input from the budget office earlier this week that they would like to do that sooner. So it's possible that this timeline could collapse a bit and become a two-year process, but this is the preliminary staff presentation. And with that, I'd be glad to answer any questions. Thank you, Mr. Benz. Are there any questions from committee members? Council Member Henson. Thank you, Chair. Craig, you did a great job on this. Thank you. And I do have a few questions. When you talk about leveraging funding, and I may have missed this part. I apologize. That's okay. Is that something our social service agency would be responsible for, or we would use another agency? The discussion we've had internally on it is that we would consider bringing in a third party for that that has experience with successful grant writing. It could certainly be a combination of that and using our resources with community development as well. We do have experience internally as well. But for the purposes of this proposal, we're looking at bringing in a third party agency. Okay. Another thing I wanted to be clear with on the leveraging dollars, another option would be a mini-grant option, which is what we've done with Partners for Youth. The Isaac Murphy bike thing is a great example. They got $1,000 maybe from Partners for Youth, but they got Dick's Sporting Good, PNC Bank. I'm going to leave some of the sponsors off. Council Member Ford probably knows that program, but they got three or four other sponsors, and the bike program became very big over the $1,000 they got from Partners for Youth. So that's another option we could do with leveraging funds is ideas for mini-grants or match for large grants that folks get either way. I think that's a great idea. Also, I guess when it comes to measuring outcomes, it would be individualized based upon the services offered, correct? because one agency may provide a totally different service from the other. That's correct, and the agencies will be proposing those outcomes that they would be measuring at time of application, and staff will be working with the agencies up until the time of approval to ensure that what they're proposing is going to work. It's going to be something that's realistic and measurable and can be implemented. Yeah. And, you know, I think many times in the past we have, I like this entire concept because we really, really need to buckle down and help folks and give them, have more successes. I'm not naive and I know that we can't help everybody, but I think this would help with that process. Helping us, you know, successful outcomes would be a good thing. Now, on the application, how would you go about verifying information that the agencies provided? Well, some of the information is already vetted by goodgiving.net. So a lot of the basic information we're not asking for in here, like the makeup of their board and what their mission statement is and a number of other items, probably a list of about 30 things, goodgiving.net has already taken a look at all that and making sure that it's true and accurate. So we're going to be able to pull that. But the rest of it, as we go through the process, well, there's a couple things that are going to happen. We're going to go through, of course, staff will do a review on it, but these also go to committee review process, and there's going to be oral presentations as well, so there will be a number of questions by the committee members as well to ensure accuracy. And so you would define success or outcome, and then somehow through interviews or that information would be verified. Like if I said we... Oh, I think I understand. Are you saying how would we follow up to make sure they're doing what they said they would do? Correct. There's going to be quarterly reports from the agencies. There's a couple of things happening there. The agencies are going to be responsible for quarterly reports, where they're reporting on those outcomes, how they're doing with each one of those outcomes, and what their success is towards achieving each one of those outcomes. We also have liaisons assigned to each one of the agencies that does get chosen for funding, and those liaisons will be talking with those partner agencies on that same basis, quarterly basis. I'd also like to mention we've been discussing this process with our IT department, and they are working with us to make sure that as the outcomes come in, we're going to have a database set up completely digital online where their outcomes are going to go into there for analysis. So it should be easier than it has been in the past to analyze data and make sure things are happening as they're supposed to be. And one last question. is I think as the applications come in, would there be a way to determine if there's an overlap in services? That's one of our questions in the application. That's one of the things that was an item in the last application that we did like, and we kept that to make sure that there's discussion of overlap, and if there is overlap, if the overlap's necessary. Correct. Because a lot of times you still need the service even if there's overlap. If we need to serve approximately 75 people and one agency can serve 50, even though they provide the same services, then okay. Thank you, sir. House Member Stennett. Thank you, Chair. Just a couple of follow-up questions. When you're doing the scoring system, you break down into committees, what do you do? So are you going to specifically use those outcomes from the scores to choose which agencies we fund? Well, the outcomes will be part of it. We're also going to be developing an objective scoring sheet with questions that all of the members of those committees will be using. So, for example, if I can go back to that scoring rubric, we're going to have, say, five questions on organizational capacity. Sure. They'll rate that organization on a one-to-five scale or something like that in order to come up with an objective score at the end of the day. So at the end of the day, once again, are you going to use those objective scores to determine ultimately who gets funded and who doesn't? That's the goal is that at the end of the day, once all of the agencies are scored objectively by our scoring committees, they would be ranked by score. And then how do you allocate funding? How do you choose how much funding each one gets once you select your agencies, the amount of funding, based on their application? It would be based on the application, yes. Because ultimately we only have a certain pot of money, three point whatever million. So are you going to allocate it based on their ranking? Absolutely. Are we going to allocate it based on need? It would be based on the need, but it would also, I mean, The way I would envision this moving forward is that whatever the total ask is that we award for the awarded agencies, we would then look at what we have available and split it based on need. Because obviously this is something very new to our government. Absolutely. In the past, it's just been the mayor delivering it in the budget, the council having two months to make a decision, yay or nay, and usually it's yay, and moving it on. So we've never been through this type of objective scoring process. Right. And especially with the involvement of this council committee, and I think it's taken leaps forward that will take some of the politics out of it, but ultimately it's still the mayor's decision on what to put in the budget as well as council, but this will give a little bit better credibility to what decisions we make and the administration makes on who they put in the budget and who they don't for that matter. So I look forward to it, Commissioner, and if we can make this work. I would add one maybe possible amendment to this plan. And I think ultimately once you get your final scoring completed, once you get who you want to fund, I think it really should come back to this committee for a final stamp of approval ultimately because I think that puts our skin in the game, so to speak, and lets us be involved in the process. And then once that's done prior to April and the budget is delivered to the entire council, everyone almost knows who's going to be funded and who's not based on credible criteria and based on a scoring analysis that we've all participated in. And so, Chair, I won't make that motion yet. I'll listen to the comments, but I think ultimately it should be this committee that makes that final decision because we do ultimately make the final decision on the budget when it comes to be said. So having involvement during the process would be a lot more beneficial to all of us. Thank you. Thank you. I think that's a great idea, too. Council Member Wallace. Thank you, Mr. Chair. coming from a social service background and dealing with both city and United Way funding since the late 70s. I have a lot of questions. And the committee scoring, first of all, Well, this seems very subjective to me, although in my other life when I was in business, it would look very objective. For social services, it looks very subjective to me. For instance, program approach, 25 points. what does that mean? Who decides what program approach? Sure. I think some of the elements that go into program approach is how many people are you serving for the dollars? Is it addressing one of the basic needs we have? And there will be like five or specific questions, each worth five points. Council Member Lawless. And so the committee would rank that program on, well, gee, they're only serving 10 people for $10,000 as opposed to 100 people for $10,000 just as a random sort of thing. So it would be evaluating that application. The reason we didn't bring a scoring tool today is we wanted to see how you all reacted to this scoring generally. and then as we get ready to move forward with this, when the committee sits down to read the six or eight presentations, it will be real specific. You know, program approach does look real subjective, but if you have in there, under budget, if you had, you know, we're funding 50% of the agency. They would lose points for that. You know, if it's an agency that looks like they're going to use our money to leverage a great big grant, they may gain points for that. So we're going to try to make specific things under each one of those five categories. I advise Craig not to do that for today's presentation because we wanted to see first if you all like this format, and then we'll get more specific. The applications will be in before we even need a scoring tool. So we have some more time to work on that and maybe send it to the committee members for comment. Well, for instance, I mean, to me, program approach, 25 points, you know. The other thing is outcome measurement, and I'm a big fan of outcome measurement. And, in fact, our agency started doing outcome measures on our educational programs years before any funding source was asking for it. Good. Yeah, how do you prove this? Because I said, you know, if we educate 20,000 people and none of them change their attitudes, awareness, or behavior, then what's the point? Right. So we did pre- and post-tests on a certain percentage and did longevity studies. Does it make a difference if we talk to the same class for three years in a row, et cetera? But there are some things that outcome measures are really hard to capture. For instance, women or men who have been sexually assaulted, they may come in. They may call one time. They may come in three times and then choose not to come back. And it's not psychologically sound in that case to try to follow up with them because they may have gone into a place of denial, which we used to think was a dirty word, and now I know a day without denial is like a day without sunshine. So you don't want to pull them back into they may be healing and they may come back six months later or a year later. I agree that that is subjective. One way to get at that may be make sure that we have people with expertise on the committees that deal with those particular agencies. Because of your background, it might be better for you to serve on a committee that dealt with violence or sexual assault as opposed to dealing with a committee that deals with youth. Maybe we can get at some of that. This is not perfect, and the scoring tool may even change from year one to year two. I guess it's something we're just going to have to look at. It somewhat concerns me because outcome measurement, I mean, again, is so subjective. If it's dealing with substance abuse, is it how many people stay sober for how long? or if it's dealing with homelessness, oh, now they have three jobs and two houses. Is that the success or is it, you know, so I think I would want to know more about how you're going to measure those. And I know for many agencies, the money they receive from, say, the urban county government is used for administrative funds, which many of the grants you only can use on programs. So it's match money, but if you don't have an administrator. That's how this would be different, I think, because this process is not for overall funding. It's for a specific program within your agency. If you have to pay a person or you have to pay some administrative costs to get to that outcome, it would be included. But our funding won't be just for utilities or our funding won't be just for rent. They're going to have to produce outcomes for anything we give them money for because we're funding to a need, not to an agency now. Okay, so if they have, say, four or five different services they provide, they're going to have to apply for five different... If they're going to use our money for five services, we need five outcomes from them. And that will be the agency's choice. And it will have to be used... The amounts we give them are sometimes, you know, the amounts we give them are not a large percentage of their budgets, by and large. So they usually target what they're going to use our money for. For example, I know the Hope Center does a recovery program in the jail, and we fund that. Community action, we fund senior transportation. Programs are real specific on what we fund with because, in reality, the amount that we give is usually not a very large portion of their budget. So for agencies that are using these dollars as match, and it is primarily used to, say, pay the salary of an administrative staff person, they no longer will be able to do that? No. That would need to be matched for a grant that they've got, and that grant is probably going to have outcomes to it. It will have outcomes. That's what they would need to use our money for. Is for what? For that program, implementing that particular program. Now, that may involve paying a staff person or an administrator because in human services it's people that are our tools. Or you may have to have a space in order to do the therapy sessions. But that can come out as long as there's an outcome for what you're spending the money that we give you for. You just need to be clear. Yeah. I guess, and again, I see and have seen many agencies over the years that I remember saying about an agency that's no longer with us, but a better one came through. For years, it was like social services was just the opposite of business. The better you did your job, the less money you got. The people that didn't do their job and managed their money well would get more money because we can't do without that service. So I think it's extremely important that a good business model is used for nonprofits and for social services. But I have some really big concerns about this process and how it's going to impact a lot of different agencies. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Kaye. Thank you, Chair. A couple of questions for Craig and then a couple of comments. or maybe I'll start with a comment. First of all, I understand how hard this kind of work is to do, and it looks like you've done a really good job. I appreciate that. When you were going through the presentation and the highlights section, there's a piece that I wasn't sure I got, and I didn't interrupt you, but you said something about three agencies that were in a special category. I got Hope Center. Yes, we have. Can you say more about that? And we heard from those agencies. We have three agencies that are funded either by state statute or by local ordinance that the agency itself is supported. So what we'd like to do is, in addition to those five categories of services for senior citizens and so on that we would have as priorities, we would have a sixth priority category for those agencies that were required to fund, either through state statute or local ordinance as well. We would still ask those agencies to submit their application with programmatic information, and they would still be emphasizing outcomes and so on, but all three of those agencies are already doing that with their programs, so there shouldn't be an issue. And those three agencies, again, are Hope Center, Bluegrass MHMR, and Community Action Council. All three of those are either required by state statute or local ordinance or both. So they would submit an application, but essentially we are required to fund them at a specified level, or just we are required to fund them at some level? I don't know that we're required to fund them at a specified level. There's a requirement for support, but I don't believe that there's a required level established. Okay, that's helpful. Second question, also in the highlights, you talked about the partnership with the Bluegrass Community Foundation for information sharing. Could you explain a little more about how that might work? Sure. Bluegrass Community Foundation, that's goodgiving.net. Right now they have, I don't know if everybody's had a chance to visit goodgiving.net, but essentially what happens with that website is that nonprofit agencies, 501c3s, go on there and they upload what they call a profile with all of their agency information. It has their financials and their board information, what their mission is, and what sort of successes they've had over the past several years, and what their major programs are, and so on. So we've been in discussion with Bluegrass Community Foundation to share that information. The way that's going to work, it looks like what we're probably going to do is have our committee members be able to directly access that information because anybody can go to the website and see that information, and it's already been vetted by the staff over there. Alternatively, they've agreed to share all of the information that they have digitally with us because there's certain information that they collect that they just put a checkbox on their website. I can't even think off the top of my head, like personnel policies or something like that. It might just say, yes, they have those. If we need those, they've agreed to share those digitally with us, and we can put all of that on our new system if we choose to go that route. So how would that integrate with the specific application that an agency would submit? Is that background information? It's background information, but in the past it's been the lion's share of the work for our agencies trying to put together the last year of board minutes, and we end up with an application that's about this thick, and three-quarters of that's all the background information that we ask for that we can just get off of Bluegrass Community Foundation's GoodGiving.net site. So would you modify your application form to include a way for agencies to do that? Well, what I've done is in the new application form, they're giving us permission to access their profile on GoodGiving.net, and they're required to have a profile on GoodGiving.net. So once they apply, they've given us permission to access that information, and there's no other work that they would need to do as an agency. Okay. Well, that actually leads to my next question or comment. It seems to me that you have a scoring rubric and an application process that are somewhat parallel, but that for the use of a committee trying to evaluate a proposal, if they were in fact parallel, it would be very useful. and as an agency, if I were submitting, I would know what the scoring rubric is and what part of the application would be applied to that scoring rubric. So if you kind of move in that direction or if you think that makes sense, it raises the question of what other kinds of information is the committee really considering and can that be information that simply can be taken off of goodgiving.net and plugged in to save the agency the time and energy of duplicating it, or is it in fact not going to be relevant if it's not included in the scoring rubric? So one way or the other. I think it would be useful to have more alignment. Section 3. Okay. I think that's a really good point. We could pull items off of the good giving profile and put them in the scoring rubric. And if you'll look at the program summary under Section 3 on the application, we've limited these to 250 words or less because if we're really going to evaluate these things and we get things this big, we're going to be so overwhelmed. That's been part of the problem in the past. We get an entire agency's program. So we're limiting these responses to 250 words. we would take these responses as part of that scoring, probably some things from the good giving as part of the scoring. If you'll look at the financials and payrolls under Section 5, under Exhibits D and D1, this has to do with the budgets, the salary increases, the positions. There would be a way that we would include that in the scoring profile. So it's kind of looking at all of this application in addition to what's on good giving and coming up with point totals for the scoring rubric. And we wanted input from you all, and that's why we didn't go ahead and do that because it's really getting in the weeds there. And we may find after year one that we scored this thing, and it really didn't make any difference. So it's going to be a fluid process until we get a tool that seems to work the best. Okay, that's helpful. I had a couple other comments. On the scoring rubric, right now you've got the council and mayor having 10 points. I would take that out. I don't see that we ought to get a double dip or a second lick. We're going to get our chance to look at it. I'd be interested in having that come directly from the committee that's working on it and have that be their score, and then we can evaluate that. The mayor can evaluate that when he's looking at the budget. we could evaluate it when we do. I don't see the point of, and I'm not sure how we would have that input. Other council members may disagree with that. And then I thought I heard that. And then finally. Another alternative might be that this committee could have that 10 points. Since y'all are going to review it, but that's up to you all. Yes, so Council Member Sennett suggested that you might run the whole process by the conclusion of the process before it goes into budget by this committee. It seems to me that would be a way to do that without getting us in the business of scoring. So just a thought. Then the last comment is the question of, I think at some point it may be a question of how you compare the various applications. So you may say yes or no to a particular proposal, and now you've gone through the whole process and you've got ten proposals that you've said yes to, you have X amount of money. How then do you determine the relative value of one program against another instead of just a value? After we have a good needs assessment, the value will be are they addressing the most critical problems. In the first year, that won't be a very easy process to do. But parallel to this, we're going to do a needs assessment that's hopefully going to drill down into the most critical things. There are a zillion problems. We all know that. And they're all problems we want to solve. But as we do a needs assessment, for example, if you talk to people about health care in this community, everybody in this room will tell you that there's not enough dentists. And that continues to rise to the top. So if you were a program that was offering dental health as opposed to health immunizations for school kids, you're going to be of more value because we've identified that as a community need. So it is going to be subjective to some degree. There's no way to make this perfect. I think Council Member Lawless made a good point, but we're going to try to get a needs assessment and see where are the real needs, and they will be prioritized. Okay, so the results of the needs assessment would be prioritized, and an application would be given more or less weight depending on how well they met the top priorities? Yes, and we can't fund everything. And then at some point we might want to say we're not going to give 100% away. We're going to save 20% for this leveraging thing we're talking about. So there are a lot of decisions still to be made in this process. This is just a framework to get started. Okay, thank you. It's very helpful. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Council Member Ford? Thank you, Chair. I have just a few comments, and I'm going to echo on some of the points that have been raised earlier. I do want to start by thanking the Division, Beth and Craig, and everybody for your work. But I guess I'll just start with the scoring rubric. I share Council Member Kaye's concern in regards to the Council and the Mayor having 10 points. I would reconsider that under the premise that we're going to have a lot of worthy organizations that are going to apply. So the margin of error, so to speak, is going to be relatively thin between those that we fund and those that we don't fund. It could very well be less than 10 points or not. So I share in that concern. I think that there may be a better way to do the scoring rubric. I have a follow-up question about the partnership with Bluegrass Community Foundation and GoodGiving.net. And I know we've talked about it, but I don't recall a lot of the specifics. the requirement would be for an agency applying to be subscribed, I guess to say, to Goodgiving.net. Is that correct? That's correct. They would have an active profile on Goodgiving.net, which would have other benefits to them as well. Is there a direct administrative cost to respective agencies to participate in Goodgiving.net? Goodgiving.net, the Bluegrass Community Foundation, has estimated that it takes about four hours to complete this. Many agencies have already done it because there's a mechanism right on that page for people to donate funds. And it's just another tool to get the word out about the agency. So I would expect that those four hours that it takes them to fill that out, fill out all their information and upload it on goodgiving.net, wouldn't be too much longer than what it would take them to compile all the information for our application, and they would only have to do it once, hopefully. Okay, so it was just a matter of becoming familiar with the process. There's no direct administrative costs to the respective agencies, just the indirect application of time. Again, only for the staff time to get it done. Okay. Very good. We're discussing general fund allocations for social service agencies, is that correct? Most of which are quasi-governmental or non-profit in tax status. I have a concern that we're shifting, I guess, totally towards programmatic. I understand that we are trying and I applaud the committee's efforts with Councilman Myers' leadership to help us better analyze our needs and fund those needs properly with the scarce resources we have. However, I don't want us to, at the expense of doing that, bear additional burden to our nonprofit social service agencies. Because the reality is that programs don't administer themselves. They do not have on street level, so to speak. There is a required overhead, and there is some administrative support that is needed. And I think our job would be to ensure that the administration and overhead that's required is efficient. For example, I'm certain that many of the social service agencies who have in the past been fortunate to receive social service general fund dollars, and I think they're called general fund for a reason. General fund dollars also apply and receive other sources of funding, whether they be grant sources or whether they be specific programmatic service fees and such. But I want us to take that into account as well, is that administrative dollars are needed and often, from my experience, my agency personally does not receive general fund partner agency dollars. at this time. But often, the general fund allocation at Urban County Government is one of the few scarce funding sources to support some of the administrative dollars. So I just want you to put that in consideration, and hopefully the committee will keep that in mind. And overhead will be allowed, but it will be within the framework of programs. So in other words, if there's a certain amount of overhead to run a specific program and to make that program successful, that would be allowed still within the application. The only thing we're excluding here is just general agency overhead that we can't really quantify, that we can't point to what exactly that's for and what benefit it provides with LFUCG funds. Well, Craig, let me ask you to push back on that just a little bit. How would you quantify that? How would you evaluate what is the sufficient overhead related to program? Well, in the application, we're asking the agencies to provide that budget and to let us know what portion of their overhead is being applied to the program to run it directly. So we would rely on them to give us that information. Okay. Well, again, I appreciate you guys getting this work started, and we look forward on the committee kind of hashing these things out. Thanks, Craig. Thank you. If we can skip down to Council Member McCord, since he hasn't spoken yet, and then I'd like to get in, and then we'll do second rounds. Sure. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And, again, Craig and Commissioner, thank you for all your hard work on this. And I think that from where I sit, the bottom line is it's a brand-new landscape, and I applaud you for shifting because if we keep doing it the same way, we're going to get the same results, and those results are diminishing because of the scarcity of resources, as we've talked about. But I think one of the key things that all of us in this room need to understand and everyone watching is is that we need to make sure that we understand these are taxpayer dollars that we're talking about, not agency dollars. And what bothers me a lot of times is to hear our funding, our funding, our funding. No. And the taxpayers have given money into a number of pots, federal, state, and local, and we all are trying to find the best use of those and get them to agencies that do the best job possible. And so going forward, I would ask that we all keep in mind whose money this really is, and we get away from the notion of agency money or government money and so forth, that it's taxpayer money that's been entrusted to us to get to the right places. And, Commissioner, I want to applaud you because we, Council Member Myers and I, a few years ago when Katrina hit, started using that as the example of what was the coming Katrina in our community. What are the things that we really need to understand our community has needs for? And, of course, they're pretty vast, many, many, many things. But I do think it's important for us to understand that this is unique to Lexington, as you mentioned, the dentist issue. And so because you can't, we can't do it all. We can't keep doing it all. And to that end, you know, over the time that I've been on council, I've watched us go from funding about $5 million in outside agencies to just north of $3 million. And it just kind of keeps diminishing and diminishing and diminishing. And so if we keep doing it the same old way, you're going to get the same results, and nobody's going to be happy, and all we're doing is dividing a pie into smaller and smaller pieces that only upset everyone else. And during the budget debate over the funding of this, what I found disturbing was somewhat of the feeding frenzy that we got into in here of people screaming, well, I should have that money or I should have this money, to the exclusion of other folks. And obviously it puts us into a very difficult position, and that's why I say we need to remember whose money it is first and then work from there. So what I would tell you going forward from where I sit, I applaud all your work, and I want to work directly with you and make sure that this is as tight as possible and we understand what's going on. But I think that the most critical thing that we can do is use all of our resources to look outside of just Lexington and what we bring in and look more creatively at how do we leverage our partnerships to bring things in. And I applaud the Bluegrass Community Foundation for their resource, goodgiving.net. But I also look at the discussion we had with United Way and some other folks that are very good at other things that maybe we aren't good at or don't have the ability or resource to do. I know we cut your division, you know, a number of staff folks. And so being able to leverage some of these taxpayer dollars to go towards folks that are good at certain things I think is a wise decision. The question that I have after all those comments is have we looked at also CDBG and how it fits into this rubric? Because I do believe that it's all the same thing. There's a question in here that says what other funds do you get from LFUCG? And we're asking in this application do you get CDBG in home? Good. And would this money help you leverage more? That money is a good thing. The other thing we're looking for here is collaborations on grants, and we've already done that in a small way. If there's a grant that's available in the community, we would like to bring everybody to the table that might benefit from that grant and talk about it. If you've got two applicants for the same grant from your community, which recently happened, neither one of them is going to have a very good shot. Why weren't they talking to each other? So that leveraging also is the idea. and some of the folks in this room have participated in that up in my conference room. We've done a couple of these. You get everybody together and you say, okay, who's going to be the person to apply? Some of the larger agencies can help some of the smaller agencies, right? In a time of diminished resources, there's going to have to be a whole lot more. That's why we've asked a whole lot about your community partners, who's doing what you're doing, and where else are you getting money because we're going to have to start sharing. Well, I applaud that, and I would like to see more of that because I don't think we do a good job of talking to one another, and there's a whole lot of silos in this community. And, again, we saw that during the budget process, which was pretty disturbing to watch sitting up here, I'll just tell you, of how folks reacted and acted. And I think that it's really critical that we all know what other funding folks have and where it's coming from. And one of the things I would like to see, and I know you had mentioned something about it, But as we evolve this program, I think part of our role is to put aside resources for those matching dollars, to have a pool to draw from, that if there is a grant that multiple organizations could benefit from, if LFUCG had the resource to meet the match and we could get that in, how much more effective as a community we might be. So I would like to work with you on how do we best do that. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you. If I could ask a few questions now. Excellent presentation. Thank you so much again for working together with all of us. Mr. Deitch, could you come up for a second? On page two, when we talk about the partner with UK in developing a comprehensive needs study for the community, we didn't hear a lot about, we talked before in a previous meeting about graduate interns and how they might be used to help us with that needs assessment and also working on the analytics. I kind of envision more of a robust role for the graduate interns to play in this. And maybe it's there, it's just not kind of fleshed out yet. I think you talked a little bit about the needs assessment being re-evaluated every five to seven years. That's correct. What if we made that a little more fluid and those graduate interns kind of stayed on top of that process and continue to look at new things. Because the ministry returns, the money is going to continue to diminish. I heard some things from the CAO earlier in the meeting that are going to affect our budget negatively next year in a pretty serious way. That's probably going to be the outcome of the landscape for a long time to come. So in one of those previous meetings, I talked about an opportunity where the fire department gives us, as council members, a breakdown by district of all the EMS runs that they have and what type of run it was and those kinds of things. So there's all kinds of things that we could bring into, not just the needs assessment, but really when we look at what we're funding as a city and what outcomes we look to have as a result of that funding. It seems like if we did this more than just every five to six, five to seven years, we could stay on top of things and be out in front of them rather than react. Could you talk a little bit about how you plan to use the students in this process? Sure. The use of students, we're considering discussing with the U.K. College of Social Work as well as the Martin School of Public Policy how we can integrate them as well as some of their professors that have expertise in this for that needs study. We have not talked about making it a more fluid process. I'm not sure exactly how we could implement that, but as we move forward in discussions, we can certainly bring that up. Okay, if I could maybe add a couple of ideas in here. You know on page 6 where you have the 10 points that a lot of people have talked about for the council and the mayor? I'm not suggesting that we give the 10 points to the students, but as you take that piece out for the council and mayor, I think you've got consensus for that. I wrote down, students provide a third-party objective program review. So in here somewhere, is there a place where, and I also wrote down students' kind of third-party verification. Some different people asked questions about how do you verify the information that you're given, whether it's given orally or whether it's given in a report quarterly or at the end of the year. I think we talked before about the students actually going in and doing some program evaluation and having that third-party objective look at what's really happening so that we can quantify through analytics what's really happening. So that different members have talked about subjectivity of things. So we can eliminate some of that subjectivity and really rely on analytics at the end of the day as a huge foundation for how we make future funding decisions. On page seven, while we're here, I know you talked about the administration is looking to do some things with those other agencies that are outside of social service focus sooner rather than later. I know we talked about this in our planning meetings. If we look at the page seven, the second slide, phase one, I know you have a – I think they're going to put – there you go. I think the commissioner said there are 15 social service type agencies right now that we funded this year. And I know the needs assessment is slated to start in 2014, but it was completed in 2014. It seems if we started that immediately and we brought the students in to start to do that work now, and then we also brought the leveraging to funds from 2014 to 2013, we could already start to leverage funds based on those agencies that we're already going to fund this year. So I would like to see us do that. So we move the leverage of the funds from 2014 to 2013 and also start the needs assessment at that same time. And then, as you said, the administration wants to bring that new process to the rest of the partner agencies in 2014 instead of 2015. That's correct, right. So that would be what I'd like to see happen is to move basically Phase 2 into Phase 1? The problem with students is you've got students changing every three months in a semester. This semester's already started. We have an MSW student with us today, as a matter of fact, who's working in my office. But all the students are already placed. The classes have already started. So you've got to have some planning time. You're going to have to meet with professors to either build a template for doing this in their syllabus, or you're going to have to have students selected. And if you don't have a template, you're going to have to retain students every three months. The pool of students is also small in the summer. It's fall and spring semesters you're working with. So I think part of the challenges with getting it done earlier rather than later is the U.K. system. You know, you've got students for three months, then they're gone. You've got a month break, and then you've got students for three months. But you're going to have to do your homework on the front end. Sure. The better way to do it may be to build it into a course so that there's a template and it's in the professor's syllabus so that every year when you've got new students, they're all working at a class project and they've got the same parameters and the same marching orders, and then you could build on what's collected by the previous semester. But in order to plan it with professors and to find students, it's even ambitious to try to get it up by January of this year. So when the application process is next fall, I can't see really getting students in place until next fall semester, so that's what pushes the timeline. Okay. Well, can we do this? Can we, after this meeting, engage the university and those two deans and those two programs? Sure. To see how we can get that ball rolling? I just think you've got to do some front-end work before you can start putting students to it. I understand. I fully understand and appreciate that because I was thinking more of the needs assessment, but when I added in there program review and all those other things, you're absolutely right. So I guess let's start that conversation then on what that all will look like and how we can do that. Do you have any concerns about bringing the leverage of the funds into 2013 with those partner agencies that are social service focused? The only reason we wanted to wait on leveraging, and this would be at the committee's pleasure, of course, was it's really hard to figure out until we have the needs assessment and we kind of know where we're going. I'm real big on measuring three times and cutting once, and I feel like we need to just implement what we've got in 2013, and we're going to have bugs in it. And that's another reason we don't want to offer this to other partner agencies in urban county government. So that's why we're trying to do this in a phased sort of way, because we figure that we can work out the problems as we go. And maybe the leveraging money needs to wait and come in until we know what we're going to leverage it for. But that's up to this committee. If you all decide the first year to set aside money for mini-grants or for grant match, I mean, that's something we could do. We won't be leveraging it according to needs assessments, though, next year because we won't have one. Right, right. I just think, and whether we set aside money this first year, I'm not sure, but I just believe that because we're not going to have more money next year probably than we had this year. There's no rainbow out there waiting on us. The sooner we get started with that process. These are going to be difficult. Are you going to fund more agencies with less money or fewer agencies with more? and there's going to be no pretty way for this to end up and make everybody happy. Well, you know, that makes my point why I think we ought to bring the leveraging in on the front end as soon as we can bring that in. And secondly, I'll say that I think just from my personal viewpoint that the statement you just made about do you fund more agencies with less money or fewer agencies with more money, I think that as we get that needs assessment done and an understanding of what this community needs to have happen, or needs to address, that part of what we ought to look at as the criteria for funding is, are there opportunities to eradicate some of the ills that we have? So I think you asked a great question the other day in terms of one of the agencies, should $600,000 go to that agency? And let me, without naming that agency, say it this way, we can continue to put money at reacting to what's out there. Well, we may take that same $600,000 and say $400,000 goes to reacting and responding to the need that's presented, and $200,000 of that goes to getting out in front of that need and trying to do some preventative work so that less people end up in the need situation, if that makes sense. Sure. So I think that should play a big role in how we fund going forward is are there opportunities to get out in front of something, like Councilman McCord talked about that Katrina this year or Irene now, so that if we get funding here up front, we have fewer people needing the back-end service. That's really just addressing the symptom rather than eliminating the issue. I do think this new process will allow agencies to use their creative powers. I think they'll be more creative in how to go about solving things. They already are, but sometimes a small amount of money that doesn't have a lot of strings attached to it can do as much good as a lot of money. And so my hope is that part of this process, I know on the front end of this first year, we're going to rely on the agencies to tell us what they want to do because we don't have a needs assessment and things in place. But I think going forward, it really ought to be the analytics and the outcomes that we're looking for as a community that drive what we fund rather than anything else. And the last thing I'll say is on the question of adding into your five categories those three agencies that are funded by ordinance or statute, I have a question about those three agencies. Do they provide any services or programs that fall outside the scope of what you proposed in terms of your other five categories for FY13? They may. And they have to do their own strategic planning, which they're required to do. And we're required to fund for some of these basic needs. So they could probably try to fit in one of the categories. But we don't want to subvert their own strategic planning process within their agency. And we do ask that question on the very first part of the application. You know, specifically cite what your ordinance or state statute is. if you look on the very, I think it's the second question under the executive summary, is this agency required to provide bail if you see your ordinance? We'll probably add in the word or state statute or contract. And then we want them to explain in detail. For example, if it's a poverty agency, poverty is not listed, and would you put poverty under violence prevention or under public health? So, you know, we may need to help fund a poverty program because we have to do that. So there may be some gray areas, and if we're statutorily required, we have told those agencies, though, that we still expect outcomes for what they get their money for. Could I ask you if you could provide the committee the information on those three agencies in terms of what the statute or what the ordinance requires? We're asking them to give us that, and, you know, I'd prefer for them to do the homework because they could probably tell you off the top of their head that question's in their application. They can cite for us their state statute. Is this agency required to provide? We haven't asked that question in the past. We could do some homework to do that, or those agencies are going to give that in their application. I think from my perspective as a committee member, what I would like to see, rather than what the agency interprets the state law or statute to say, if the state statute requires them to do certain things, that's one thing. What I'm interested in is what the state statute requires us to fund, because those agencies are doing a whole lot of things the state requires them to do. We could work in conjunction with the law department to find that out. I don't know the answers to those questions, you know. But we've asked them to give us specifically what the statute or the ordinance is. Then we could go look at it, and then we could get an opinion from the law department. Is this obligated to what specifically? And that could be part of the application process. That would be in the coming year because this year we've already made the awards. Right. And we're already cutting checks. But in 2013, you can do due diligence to see where urban county government fits in those statutes and ordinances. Here's where I'm going with that. There's a difference between what the state requires an agency to do and what the state requires LFECG to fund an agency to do. I'm not interested in what the state's requiring them to do. I'm only interested in what the state's requiring us. The state may say that the community has to have this, and if we don't fund an agency to do it, then we have to do it. And it may be too expensive for us to do internally, and that's why we fund an agency to do it. I understand. That's where the state statute comes in. And what I want to understand is what the state's requiring us to fund, because that agency is doing a whole lot of things, but the state's not telling us that we have to fund all those things. And we can do that research on the statutory agencies. Okay. Thank you. I guess we'll go down to Council Member Wallace. Thank you. First of all, the Human Rights Commission. We are HUD funding, and they are not a 501c3, and they are absolutely essential, and we are required to have them and fund them for us to get our CDBG and HUD funding, and they are in great peril. Also, there is a state statute that rape crisis. I would like to say that the Human Rights Commission is not in the Social Service Partner Agency group. Okay. So they would come into this later in the game. Also, there's a state statute that rape crisis centers' services have to be funded or have to be. And, you know, there may be more than the three we spoke to. I just don't know. So just moving on, the needs assessment. And first of all, I'm a social worker, did it for 158 years. I'm also a very staunch business person. and I voted against the council's proposal to increase the funding back to its original level that the mayor took out. I voted against the increase in funding. So I'll make it clear that just because I'm a social worker doesn't mean I like to throw money away or throw it around or believe that we can solve all the ills. Just giving myself some credentials there. Having said that, during the years that I was at a social service agency, needs assessments were done several times by the United Way. a huge CDC grant was given for needs assessment for the region. And at the end of the day, finally one day, and some of the people that I worked with are out there, had a little go to pieces, and I took about six binders this thick of needs assessments that I had participated in on community needs over the past 15 or 20 years and took them to the meeting, and every single one of them came out almost identical. So it's not that I don't think, but, and then the other, and I also want to say you all are talking about leveraging funds, and I think this is exactly what I was speaking about and Council Member Ford was speaking about, that is what a lot of the agencies do. They take the funds, minimal funds in many cases, that they get from the urban county government to be able to get federal and state grants and private foundation money that will only pay for the program and leverage that as matched so that they also can administer the program. And so all this talk of leveraging, I think many of the agencies are already, that is what they do with this money is they leverage it to get other grants, and it is a very small percentage of their total funding. And many of them, I know I helped write the HOPE 6 grant, Many of them collaborate and write grants and work with each other, provide services to urban county government agencies, to the school system. So I want to say that. And then the thought of a student going into an agency, a student with no experience, who's learning? And internships are supposed to be a learning experience where you gain some knowledge, that they're going to go in and be the ones that evaluate our existing social service agencies every quarter or twice a year is like saying, oh, well, we're going to hire med students to oversee and certify our surgeons. I mean, it just doesn't make sense. And while I really want to commend you all on doing this, there are a lot of pieces of this. It looks really simple, and simplicity is very, very appetizing, and it tastes really good. But when you put simple, very complex issues on the table and give simple dots and matrices and points to extremely complex issues, while it might make us feel good and make us feel comfortable, it's really pretty impossible to do and really come out with a meaningful outcome. So thank you very much, and I appreciate the time. Thank you. Council Member Stey. Kay? Thank you, Chair. Just a very quick comment, follow-up on Council Member McCord's comment. In addition to the CDBG funds, it would be useful, I believe, to include on the application whether an agency is in a facility that gets support from urban county government. We're in the process, as I understand it, of getting a complete list of who's where and whether they pay rent and how much or whether they get services at government cost. I think it would be useful to have that information as part of the application. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Council Member Ford. Thank you, Council Member Myers. I have a quick question, then I have a follow-up comment. the three agencies that have some statutory relationship with the government. We've mentioned those, but I didn't keep track of where they are in the slide. So, Craig, if you can help me there on your PowerPoint where there were adjustments. The names of those agencies, you mean? Well, where they fit on the criteria, and I believe they were the sixth addition to those, if you can help me. Right, and that's an addition. That's not in your backup this evening. It just came up yesterday as a question from one of those agencies. And it was the Hope Center, Bluegrass Mental, and Community Action. Is that right? That's correct. Thank you, Craig. The question I have is going back to page 7. And again, I'm grateful that we're starting this conversation. Councilmember Lawless kind of hit the nail on the head in her just recent comment in regards to the relationship of our university graduate students. I think she made a very valid point. So my question is, in regards to the implementation and the process of a needs assessment, what role do our existing social service providers and professionals, will they play in the immediate and also in the long-term creation of that needs assessment? it we had not envisioned using students for evaluation only for needs assessment when we were talking about it there was a comprehensive needs assessment that was done in the last administration a lot of community partners participated in that that could be a jumping off point to look at that and see how things have changed since that was done just look at the data it was gathered. You could use census data. You could use crime reports. You could use school reports. There's a variety of ways that you can collect all that stuff and come up with a needs assessment. Do focus groups with people in the community. It's real labor intensive. It's very expensive to do a really good needs assessment, and it's a point-in-time look. There's not a real good alternative to doing that perfectly. And because it's labor intensive, you could either hire somebody to do it at a great deal of money, or you You can find it, sit down with some professors to guide the students because you do need expertise. But what role, Commissioner, is there a role possibly for those with the expertise and the experience that are on the ground level? They're not in this room right now because they're either at work. Well, there's some of them. Some of them, but there are a few. I acknowledge the presence of a few. But the great majority are in the field. Right. They are perhaps watching us right now while they're putting out fires here and there and providing social services for the, as Council Member McCoy mentioned, the taxpayers that are helping support these services. But can we consider an avenue for our social service professionals to have greater involvement and impact as we unfold this thing? The one that was done in 2008, there were 300 social service providers that came together and met in committees around different issues, and they did come up with priority listings. You know, they are busy working. So it would be students going to those agencies and saying, what are the problems you see? You know, what waiting list do you have that gives you the most problems? Is there a gap in service you can't fill? Can we talk, you know, can you give this survey to clients? There's different ways to get at the needs assessment. and our department doesn't have enough people to do it and agencies don't either. So it's a hard thing to do and do well. And I guess the point is that I'm really encouraging this committee to consider how we can ensure that our social service professionals and providers have an active part and an engaged part. I think as I flip the other side of that coin is it can provide a great benefit to our students. I know there's a student that we have here, and I see Dean Adams in the back, but only with that teacher-student-mental-pupil relationship. And I think in social services, the reason we look to students in universities, if we go and pay a consultant, like we often do in government, $100,000 to do this, that $100,000 could be given to one of these agencies. So if we can get students and a university on board, if their studies have to do with looking at collaborations in a community and needs in a community, they can get course credit for it. The professors can kind of give them a template. It still won't be perfect. But it's an alternative to spending a lot of money to have it professionally done that could go to services. So it's a hard dilemma here. Well, let me ask you this, Commissioner. And Chair, I appreciate you leveraging me this time. we've had needs assessments in 08 so we know where we know what the needs are so things may have changed since then that that's correct but we know what we know what the needs are i would really encourage council and in our government working with your your department to find ways to help us fund the needs the best we can now i and i think it's kind of you know So, you know, somebody may say I can show you better than I can tell you. I think that many of our social service agencies can definitely show us where the needs are if we were to visit them. Let me throw this out as well, and I appreciate the conversation. You can tell I'm versed with the issues. Perhaps what better role could our students, graduate students, those who will soon have to replace or take the leadership from our veteran social service providers help us. You know, one of my earlier comments was about administration. And I do like the idea of the thought of the matching grant bucket of funds. I think that is a perhaps good idea. I'm just throwing this out there. It would be very, and I don't know what the dean would think, but it would be a good thing if we could somehow support our graduate students via internships or practicums or whatever financial incentives we can provide to get them the experience that they need, to get the social service providers the additional hands on the ground that we need to have a greater impact on social service delivery. I know I said a lot there, but I'm just throwing out some ideas for us to consider. So as I close, as we look at implementation of needs assessment, but let's not only look at needs assessment, let's look at enhanced service delivery. I will say I used to teach in the College of Social Work. All graduate students are required to do 600 or 900 hours in an agency in order to graduate. If they're in the long program, it's 900. If they're in the short program, it's 600. And they get course credit for it. So we use them to do social work in our agencies as well. And so they are used to do provision. I think a needs assessment thing might work better in a classroom setting. I would defer to Dean Adams. He might talk more about that. But if it was a classroom setting, a whole class could attack this. You could have a group of students attacking it because when they're working in agencies, They're kind of like we are in social work. We have specialties. There's a person that works with youth, a person that works with homeless or aging. So they intensively, or a person who works in therapy, they get to know a whole lot about that one area. It's not as global as what we're looking at. We're looking from the whole community of social needs. And I look forward, I know Dean Adams very well, and I look forward to working with him. He has some great faculty to see how the students can learn and we can benefit as well. It shouldn't be a one-way street. It needs to be something that helps them too. I think so. And I'll conclude just in turning my comments to the committee, if I can put a summation on those five minutes or so, is that we look at how our existing infrastructure of social service providers can have a role in this process. and then also how our students and university community can have a role in this process. Got to keep an attention on needs assessment, but we got to also recognize that reduced funding or major shifts in funding or lack of funding, not just to respective agencies, but overall social services is going to have a negative impact on service delivery. Got to keep all of that in context. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Myers. Thank you, Councilman Ford. I guess if I could put a wrap on this from my perspective, and I would say that when I first came on the council, I asked the then Vice Mayor, Scanlon, to reconstitute the Partner Agency Oversight Committee and asked if I could chair it. And that committee met up until last year, I guess, yeah, last November, when the council voted to restructure the council, and that committee went away. This committee was formed, and all of its work rolled into this committee. One of the underlying foundations of that committee as it was brought back to life was to find out how we could increase the funding to partner agencies so that we could increase our scope of work and we could actually begin to eradicate some of the ills that we have in our society. What I would say is that our current process lacks vision. And what we need right now is a common sense approach, a balanced approach, to how we move forward with partnership funding. And common sense, as Councilman McCord said earlier, we have diminishing funds. Everything is going to get tighter rather than loosen up. That's just where we are and where we're going to be moving forward for a very long time. I don't think anybody would argue with that. So common sense says that we have to do something different than what we've been doing in the past. A balanced approach to me says that we're looking at the old money that comes from those general fund dollars that the taxpayers give us to be stewards over to ensure that it's spent in the best way to help our community. The balance of that is looking for new monies to come outside of government, outside of the taxpayer. And so then we take that common sense balance approach and then try to get creative and innovative with it. And so that's what, when originally we brought a proposal to this committee and the United Way and the University of Kentucky were the presenters, that was our innovative, creative way of trying to pull this together. of trying to pull this together. It was a result of me asking the CEO of the United Way, of the Bluegrass, to help our committee understand how to do more outcome-based and analytic-based funding. And then it appeared to me that Common Sense would say instead of us reinventing the wheel, we would ask an organization who has done that for decades across this country to do it for us. And that's how we ended up with that first presentation. We got a lot of pushback from that. And so we stepped back from that and brought goodgiving.net in with the United Way, with UK, and the government to begin to have meetings on how we can put all the positive things from those meetings together and come up with something that's common sense, balanced, innovative, and creative. And that's where we are today. So moving forward, it's only going to get tougher, as everybody's saying. And I really appreciate the comments that Council Member Ford made in the end, and particularly when he talked about finding a way to pay our students. I have an undergrad degree in social work and a master's degree in social work. I appreciate social work. I appreciate social work students getting paid to do the work that they're doing. When I hear people talk about students not being qualified or capable of doing certain things when they're a semester or two away from graduation. The only thing I would say to that is, when I was at Washington University in St. Louis, they've got a program there, and they have a course that's a joint course with the Brown School of Social Work, and I forgot the business school's name, but the School of Business on their campus. And what we did was took undergrad business students, MBA students and then graduate level social work students and put them together and went into the program went into schools and the model was based on total quality management, we called it total quality schools and we went in as interns in these schools and looked at their processes and how they could change a certain process that the school wanted changed and worked with them and we did the focus groups with the students, with the parents, with the teachers, the faculty, all those different things we made substantial changes in programs in schools. Conversely, the business school at WashU, and I'm sure that every business school across the country has the same type of program where their interns would actually be paid $15,000 as an intern, as a student who hasn't graduated, doesn't know anything, to come into your business and review your business plan from top to bottom. And in a lot of cases, they actually, after that company paid them $15,000 to come in and do that review, their assessment was, you've got to go out of business because you don't have a viable business plan here. Other times they gave them changes they could make to the business plan to make them profitable. For people to argue that students who haven't graduated don't know enough to go into an agency and do a program review, that's what doesn't make sense. There are students all across this country and programs all across this country that are getting paid by people to come in and do that work. So I would encourage us not to lose the focus on what our students have to offer. And the other thing I would add to that is that, particularly Councilmember McCord, because he is the champion of this since I've been on the council, we're always talking in this community about bringing knowledge-based jobs to this community and keeping our brightest and best that are at Transy and at UK and our other colleges here in town here when they graduate. It's disheartening to hear people make assessments that these students, when they're close to graduation, these are graduate students also that have an undergraduate degree already, aren't ready to go in and go to work. But yet, as the commissioner knows, as all of us know during social services in these agencies, we have interns that are working with us now. We have undergrad and graduate interns. And they do a lot of good work. And they do work that's worthy of getting paid for. And whether or not we do pay them and we're able to pay them is another thing. We've got a student here right here. He will tell you the work that he does is quality work that's worthy of getting paid for. And in a few months, he'll graduate and be getting paid to do that same exact work. I hope that as a part of this innovative and creative process, we look at how we can fund the student piece of it and how we can fund an outside third party to begin leveraging dollars because there is no tree out back that the government has. And as you saw earlier, the council had an opportunity and the mayor had an opportunity to raise taxes. We chose not to. That's not the answer either. We're going to have to go out and find new non-tax revenue to help fund these agencies and the work that they do. I like the fact that the commissioners come forward with less fun programming or services instead of the agency. Because in that, what we're really saying is we want to fund solutions. And that's not to say that the people that are getting funding now aren't providing solutions. But what we're saying is we want to eradicate certain things. We don't want to just keep funding work. We want to do things in a way that we can systematically begin to alleviate some of the ills that plague our society. And as we start to do that, it's kind of like a debt snowball when we start paying off our personal debts. As we start to eradicate things and we have more money left in that pot to put towards other things. So, again, I want to commend the commissioner, commend Craig. You did a fantastic job on this thing. I guess I would ask my colleagues on the committee how you want to move forward. I know Council Member Stenet had a motion he'd like to make, if he still wants to make that. Yes, I'm sorry. I'm going to come back to you. I had a couple things I'd like to see happen in terms of that timeline. But I'm going to go back to Council Member Lawless. Will the committee be thinking about what do we do next? Do we try to move this thing forward today, or do we ask for more input and more pinpoint in some of the directions here? I'm looking for input from the committee. And I'll turn it over to Council Member Lawless. I just want to clarify that I didn't mean to say that no student was competent or capable. I've known a lot of brilliant students, and I've known people with a Ph.D. that are dumber than a box of rocks. But I do think that generally sending in a student to assess an established may be a bit premature. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Ford. Thanks, Council Member Myers. In response to kind of where we go next, I don't know what the committee decides. I think we threw out a couple of suggestions. and some of the comments we made, Commissioner and Craig were very receptive to. Perhaps is it appropriate to allow them to go back and kind of hash out some of the discussions that we've had today and maybe since we're going to go to a monthly committee schedule from here on out, maybe revisit some of the revisions that may come back forth at that time. Just my thoughts. Any other thoughts? Okay. Commissioner? We will be glad to bring those revisions. We just want you all to keep in mind that we want to publicly advertise this in September. And not the big picture thing, but we really need an application to bring forward at that October meeting, because if we don't, we're just going to have to use what we already have in place, and I think the committee doesn't like what we have in place. Commissioner, I'm not quite sure that's the case. Could I do this first? When we had our last planning meeting, the commissioner, we did understand and agree that the commissioner needs some approval on the application. We may not have to approve the application, but she's looking for us to kind of give her blessings to that application so they can run for this year. We can tweak next year. That's fine. But I think if the committee would give her a nod to at least go forward with what they have in terms of the application for the 2013 funding year, that would be fantastic. The application or the process? The application. I'll make a motion that we move forward with the application. Second. Can we have a motion and a second to move forward with the application? Craig, do you want to add anything first? Yes. The application you have does not have the amendment we discussed for the three partner agencies that are either state, funded by state statute or by local ordinance. If you could include in the motion that we would add that to the application and supporting materials. Is that okay with the motion or the second? Yes. Actually, I'd like to amend, if I can, without approving that amendment. My sense was that it was to go forward taking into consideration the comments that have been made today. So it might be slightly different from what we've seen, but it would reflect the conversation that you've had. But in principle, yes, move forward. So that's a modification of the... That's fine. Okay. If I could add one thing, there was also conversation about whether there are more agencies besides those three. There may be. So could we check on that so that we're not leaving those out if there's something else that fits that criteria? Okay. So is there any more discussion on the motion? Yes, sir. I'm sorry. I'm in support of the motion and the amendment. I just want to make sure that we'll still have a visit from Craig and Commissioner next committee meeting to follow up on this progress. Absolutely. There's two separate things here. We've got their application for 2013, and we've got the process. Okay. Very good. Thanks. Any other discussion? Those in favor, say aye. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. We've got Councilman Stennett. Is this on the motion? Yes, it is. Okay, I'm sorry. I was looking around instead of looking down. Commissioner, this motion, under your impression, does it also approve the partnership with Bluegrass Community Foundation? Is that what we're saying today? Because the application says they have to belong to goodgiving.net, and we're going to put that out to the agencies. I just want everyone to be clear because that's approving that partnership today and moving it forward to the full council for recommendation. And I'm not sure we're ready to do that yet, but you all vote how you want. Are you back up to speak, or is that from before? I'm back to speak. Okay. Councilman Ford. Just to the point that Council Member Stenet is raising not to delay the vote, is there a financial obligation to the government to enter into such a partnership? No, there is no financial obligation to us or to any of the partner agencies. Council Member Henson. I would just like to say that in light of government transparency, I think this is a really good step to take with our partner agencies because anyone, as my understanding, can go on goodgiving.net and see that agency's profile. That's correct. Ms. Fisher is here from Bluegrass. If you all have any questions of her. Okay. Thank you. I guess I have a question on that note. and Ms. Fisher is free to answer or the Commissioner or Craig, if anyone is able to go on goodgiving.net and look at that profile, will that profile include in it that LFUCG has funded this agency for this dollar amount to do this program or service with these outcomes, or is it just that they can see their profile as an agency? It wouldn't have any information about their application. If they're awarded dollars, then their updated profile next year would probably have that program information, that they've been awarded money and give details about the application, which would be public information at that point. Okay. I guess we still have a vote. Any other discussion? All those in favor? Yes, we're voting on the amendment. Yes, I'm sorry. I didn't hear you. I'm sorry. The amended motion was to include in the application the agencies that are funded by statute or ordinance. As a separate needs category. As a separate needs category. And I had added, and to reflect as appropriate, other comments that were made today about the application. I don't know. Okay. Does anybody know any offhand, any other comments that were application-specific? I don't recall any on the application. Some of those were that we were going to see how many lived in city agencies, that we take the 10-point award away from the council and mayor. Craig's been keeping a list of those. So we will take your comments today if it's the committee's pleasure and include those in the 2013 application. Okay, is everybody clear on that? So all those other things that we kind of discussed are going to go into the application as well. All those in favor of the amendment say aye. Aye. All those opposed? That carries unanimously. Okay, now we have the amendment itself, or the motion itself, and that is to approve the application for FY13. Any discussion? I have a discussion on Council Member Myers. I apologize, sir. It's okay. The issue of this funding being programmatic only as opposed to a combination of program and support, have we decided that just now or hopefully? Let me rephrase that. I want to ensure that that conversation carries over until the next meeting. I don't think that we have clarity or consensus on that just yet. Correct me if I'm wrong. I think that goes to process, which we still have in committee. They've already determined what they're going to fund in awarding the funding that you've already awarded. For this year. Okay. So that does take into account next year then. So what we're saying is this next funding round that you're going to do, you're still going to base it on programs and services rather than agencies. So that's a little bit different than... Yeah, so by voting yes, then you're agreeing that that's what they're going to do moving forward in 2013. Yes. I think that's still worthy of being in the discussion at our next meeting. I don't want to hinder the development of the application process, but I still don't know if we want. I think that is a part of a procedural question as opposed to just the application itself. I would agree. So I would like to, I don't know if I need to amend the motion or how do we make sure that that is the case. that I would amend the motion that the Department of Social Services proceed on with this application without reference to the utilization of funds, be it programmatic and or administrative. So moved. We've got a motion? Second. And a second. If I could ask, my guess is that's going to mean you're going to have to completely rewrite your application because it's based on that. That would really change the application back to its current form because it's program-based. The new application as it's derived is written around the assumption that everything is program-based. understanding that there can be overhead costs associated with programs. There can still be administrative fees associated with programs, specific programs, but we're just not looking to fund overall agency administration as part of the application process, if that makes sense. So if my agency was writing an application and we really wanted funding that was going to provide for administrative costs, and then I'm looking at writing the grant, like you said before, for programmatic need, then I'm pretty much eliminated. I'm not sure we're eliminating administrative costs. The funds are not restricted, that you can't spend them on RIT or personnel. They are restricted in that you have to give us an outcome. So if we give you $20,000 to do a therapy group, you've got $20,000 to do that therapy group if you can show me that therapy is effective. But to do that, if you have to pay a secretary to enroll the people who are doing the therapy group, or you have to rent a space in order to conduct the therapy group, that's okay. Those funds are not restricted on the specific expenditures. That's part of your budget for that program. but you're still going to have to give me an outcome. So in that sense, it is programmatic, but I'm not saying you can't spend it on administrative costs. Does that make sense? It's clear as mud. Yeah, okay. With that being said, if that is the case, I will still want assurance when we meet again to clarify that. And by that time, we'll have the application in hand, and we'll be able to analyze if the guy next to me was a social service agency applying. Again, it takes admin to administer a program. Mr. Chair, I will withdraw my amendment and ask the second to do likewise. Okay, there's a second. Okay, thank you. Okay. Okay. So the motion on the table then is to move to, I guess, the full council with our recommendation to approve the application for funding for FY13. Any more discussion? All those in favor, say aye. Those opposed? That passes. Thank you very much, Commissioner. For next, we just have a couple minutes left. for the next committee meeting then could committee members as well as anybody out there in the social service world if you'd like to send me an email with questions input regarding the process that we have then we'd like to get together and try to incorporate those things so that when we come back to the next meeting we've got something we're working off of rather than just discussing what we want to put in there or take out is that understanding? I wanted to leave time for partner agencies to talk today. We've got four minutes left. I'll stick around and listen if anybody has anything to say. We have a sign-up sheet back there. Has anybody signed it? No? Okay. Does anybody want to come up? I didn't announce we had a sign-up sheet back there, so maybe that's why nobody signed it. Does anybody want to say anything briefly? Okay. Council Member Henson, did you have something? I just had a suggestion or comment, Commissioner. I would think one of the most important things would be to do the needs assessment. And so are we planning on having more discussion about how to go about that needs assessment? But I really think that needs to be done. before we could actually have a real good picture of what needs to be done in Lexington? That goes to the process. Can you come? Yes, I'm sorry. Please. Yes, I think you're correct. And that's part of the conversation in the process, which is separate from the application for this year. So we'll be glad to talk about the needs assessment and ideas that you all have about a good way to do that. Could, well, maybe have someone from the university, a professor or, you know, I'm not sure, you know, if they could bring us a process of how they would administer a need success. But, okay. We'll see if we can do that. Thank you. Okay. So for the next meeting, we'll take any input that we get from the community as well as from committee members, and we'll schedule another meeting, and we'll meet and try to make some adjustments. And maybe this time we can get it out earlier. I don't know if that circumvents open meetings or anything like that, though. I was going to say if we can get it out earlier and allow folks to take a look at it, maybe we'll do that anyway. And we won't make any changes based on feedback, but we'll have that feedback ready for the meeting. Does that make sense? I don't want to do anything that circumvents open meeting law. So do I have a motion? Motion and a second? All those in favor? We're adjourned. Thank you. Thank you.