Seattle City Council Governance and Education Committee 3/9/21

Good afternoon, everyone.

Welcome to this afternoon's meeting.

The March 9, 2021 Governance and Education Committee meeting will now come to order.

I'm Lorena Gonzalez, chair of the committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Juarez?

Here.

Mosqueda?

Here.

Zawant?

Strauss?

Present.

Chair Gonzalez?

Present.

We're present, Madam Chair.

Thank you so much, Madam Clerk.

Approval of the agenda.

If there's no objection, the agenda will be adopted.

Hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

Next up is public comments.

Colleagues, this is the period of time where we ordinarily do public comments.

So at this point, I'll open up remote public comment period.

I understand that we do not have anyone signed up on our public comment signup sheets and just looking to our IT folks to confirm that nobody is in the queue.

Affirmative.

There are no public comment registrants.

All right.

Given that there are no public comment registrants, we're going to go ahead and quickly close out the remote public comment period and begin on items of business on our agenda.

First, two items.

Will the clerk please read items one and two into the record?

Agenda items one and two, appointments 01826 and 01825, the appointment of Baochum Do as member, Seattle Immigrant and Refugee Commission for a term to January 31st, 2023, and the appointment of Amanda Sandoval as member, Seattle Immigrant and Refugee Commission for a term to July 31st, 2022, for a briefing, discussion, and vote.

Thank you so much, Vy, for reading those into the record.

So I'm going to hand it over to Director Ku Hu from our Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs to kick off introductions and walk us through these two appointments.

Welcome.

Thank you, Council President.

It's my honor and pleasure to introduce two nominees for our Immigrant and Refugee Commission, Baucham Do and Amanda Sandoval.

I'm going to start with Baucham, or to those of us who know her in the community, we affectionately refer to her as BT.

And I'm just so pleased that the city will be able to have her in this important leadership role.

BT is somebody who I've known personally to be thoughtful, just tenacious, incredibly organized, smart, strategic, and so committed to our immigrant refugee communities.

She knows the community that I'm a part of, the Vietnamese immigrant community, but through her role in the Seattle Foundation, has such expansive knowledge of the constituents that we serve in Seattle and our immigrant refugee neighbors.

Over the last year, everybody has really endured a stressful year with the pandemic, and VALTRANS certainly has been busy administering Seattle Foundation's $22 million in grants for community-based organizations in her current roles, the program officer there.

But she's also has extensive experience with health policy coming from the Gates Foundation.

And I think that that blend of both philanthropy policy and community leadership is going to be such a great asset to the city and her role on the Immigrant Refugee Commission.

So I'm just really, really happy to see that Baoteng is stepping into this leadership role.

Amanda Sandoval is somebody I'm really looking forward to getting to know.

She's currently with the Mockingbird Society, also somebody who has lived experience, but also a strong policy background, which I know will be a huge asset to the commission As you know, there's a lot happening in the world of immigration policy, certainly in the recent past, but also upcoming with a lot of federal opportunities, but also issues that we're dealing with locally and at the state level.

Having Amanda's keen policy insight and experience will be also another huge contribution to the city and the commission.

So welcome to our two esteemed nominees.

I'm really looking forward to working with them and urge the council to approve their nomination.

Thank you so much, Director Vu, for those remarks and introducing the two nominees.

Colleagues, I do want to afford everyone an opportunity to ask any questions of BT and Amanda, and you will have an opportunity to do that.

I'll just kick it off by sort of handing it over to our nominees.

Maybe we can start with BT and then head over to Amanda.

If you could tell us your name and introduce yourself to us in your own words.

And then tell us a little bit about why you want to serve on the commission.

So why don't we start with BT?

Thank you.

Hi, everyone.

I'm Batram.

I go by BT.

I'm a program officer at Seattle Foundation, and I've been a resident of Seattle since 1993, since my family immigrated here as refugees.

My dad is a political prisoner of war.

He was a prisoner of war for about eight years.

And so today I work in the democracy field, particularly nonpartisan with voter education and leadership development.

And I had the fortune to grow up in South Seattle with a lot of our immigrant refugee communities.

and living among diverse communities from the Latinx community to East African community and been able to have had a lot of relationships, personal, professional, and in the community through that capacity.

And I am interested in joining the commission knowing that it's an opportunity to bring a voice to the table around public health advocacy, helping our city and community navigate the pandemic, knowing that our BIPOC communities are disproportionately impacted, wanting to bring that perspective as well as the perspective of philanthropy and being able to develop cross-sector partnerships and supporting our community in that capacity.

And I'm super excited.

This is really cool.

I think this is the highlight for me in terms of the pandemic.

It's really neat to have this opportunity to be able to provide my insight, learn from fellow commission members, and I'll work with you on how we're gonna weather this pandemic and ensure that our communities will be able to recover and yeah, just have, get through this together.

That's great.

Thank you so much, BT, for being with us and for being willing to be considered to serve in this capacity.

And I love to hear that this is a highlight for you because we aren't finding enough highlights these days.

And so it's important for us to remind ourselves, particularly right now, that highlights are still very much possible and still very much do occur.

So thanks for being with us.

Amanda, welcome.

Hi, thank you, Amanda Sandoval.

I live down here in South Seattle, in like Skylary Renton area, and super excited to be considered a nominee.

My family came to Washington, just in Washington specifically, from the immigrant here from Mexico, and I was born and raised here.

Love love the community, especially down here in the South.

And it's so diverse and rich and just really finding a family down here.

I'm excited to serve on the commission because I'm passionate about all things policy and specifically immigration and refugee policy.

You know, I've seen how my family has struggled and seen their journey coming to the U.S. and I think people with lived experience, whatever that is, really have the means to influence change, specifically policy change.

And I've seen it happen in my day job and also with different things that we've done on the commission.

This will be my second year.

I served last year as the Get Engaged commissioner and it was a huge opportunity for me and I was so excited.

And I'm excited to hopefully be able to continue it.

And I love getting to talk to community and share opportunities for them to share their voice.

I don't think there's enough people involved in politics and in their community and what's going on.

And I think this is one of the best ways for anyone interested.

And I look forward to continuing to serve my community and influence change.

So thank you.

Thank you so much, Amanda, for those remarks and that introduction.

I appreciate you both answering my question.

Colleagues, any other questions for either BT or Amanda?

I'm gonna look for any raised hands.

Okay, looks like there's no questions.

Director Vu, anything else you'd like to add for the record?

Oh, you're on mute.

Nothing further.

Thank you.

Great.

All right, folks.

Well, with that being said, I do want to again thank BT and Amanda, not just for their willingness to serve on the commission, but for all of their service to community Seattle Foundation and Mockingbird Society are.

organizations that I'm really familiar with and that I have a tremendous amount of respect for the work that they do within our community.

So looking forward to having you both be official members of the commission.

So I'm gonna go ahead and call these up for a vote at this time.

So council members, I move that the committee recommends confirmation of appointments 1826 and 1825. Is there a second?

second, Council President.

Thank you so much, Council Member Juarez.

It's been moved and seconded by Council Member Juarez to recommend confirmation of the appointments.

Are there any additional comments?

Hearing no additional comments, will the clerk please call the roll on the committee recommendation that the appointments be confirmed?

Juarez?

Aye.

Mosqueda?

Aye.

Strauss?

Yes.

Chair Gonzalez?

Aye.

That's four in favor, none opposed.

Excellent, the motion carries and the committee recommendation that the appointments be confirmed will be sent to the March 15th city council meeting scheduled for two o'clock p.m.

BT and Amanda, you are not required to be at the full council meeting on March 15th.

You're of course welcome to tune in and you're welcome to watch, but you're not required to be there as a participant.

I am sure that it'll be a unanimous vote in support of your nomination.

So for now, I just wanna say thanks again for making time to be with us in committee today, and you are welcome to exit the Zoom room whenever you feel like it's best for you.

So thanks again for being with us.

All right, okay, so we're gonna head into our next item of business, which is item three.

Will the clerk please read item three into the record?

Agenda item number three, COVID-19 responses and positive community outcomes for briefing and discussion.

Thank you so much.

We do have members of our Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs with us today to walk us through this really in-depth detailed presentation.

So I wanna welcome everyone from the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs who are with us today.

I am really glad to have you all here to share with us and the viewing public A little bit about the work the Office of Immigrant Refugee Affairs has been leading on and the work that you have, the additional work that you undertook in 2020 around rapid response to emerging community needs.

I think it's fair to say that when I first championed this funding in the city's 2019 budget process, the 2020 we were all envisioning was very different from what 2020 ended up actually So for that, I want to thank each of you and your team for all of the hard work that you've done and for all the times that your team has run towards the crisis to help manage the COVID-19 impacts on our community and to helping us ensure that our immigrant refugee communities were not left out of being informed.

and staying safe.

So with that, I'm going to hand it over to Director Vu to introduce herself and to introduce the team with us today to who is going to be here to make this presentation.

Great.

Thank you, Council President.

I'm thrilled to be able to share with you the work that we accomplished in 2020 and thanks immeasurably to your leadership and the leadership of other council members.

We've been able to, you've provided us an opportunity to step up and provide critical services and supports for communities during a time that was incredibly turbulent and when we were witness to many levels of inequities.

I just want to start first with also congratulating our team members And so I'm just in a position to be able to talk about it.

But this is what you will see in this presentation is a big credit to the incredible talent and commitment that we have among our staff.

And as you know, we're small, but we're a mighty crew and we do a lot with just a little bit.

So with that, we'll get started with the presentation.

V is going to pull it up.

Here we go.

Thanks, V. And so we are the Seattle Office of Immigrant Refugee Affairs, and I'm Kubu, the director of OIRA.

We can go to the next slide.

So we, our, going to talk about the COVID-19 work that we did last year.

And first we want to kick it off with an overview about one of the most important things that we were able to deliver last year, which is the Seattle Disaster Relief Fund, providing direct cash assistance to our most vulnerable low-income immigrant and refugee residents.

And so here we have one of our staff to kick us off.

Oksana?

Kuhn, would we be able to go back to the beginning of the presentation, slide number one?

I think we're starting it off in the middle.

The presentation, as I see it.

Yeah.

If we can go to slide number one.

That slide says COVID-19 responses and positive community outcomes.

There we go.

So then, Kou, you've got the first two slides.

OK.

Great.

Let's go to the next slide.

And so what we saw in 2020 were actually three crises for our immigrant and refugee communities, obviously immigration.

We were still trying to fight an unprecedented attacks against our communities during the Trump administration years, the last of it in hindsight.

We are also responding to the pandemic as others have noted, which was disproportionately impacted Latinx and other immigrant communities and racism through what we saw during the summer with the death of George Floyd and many of the race issues that have emerged as a result of many conversations and a reckoning on those issues.

And so our orientation during the entire time and across these crises was equity, equity, equity.

And those are values that we talk about, but trying to translate them beyond just values and operationalize them.

And during the time that I've spent in the city, sometimes this is where the gap is between what we say and what we can accomplish.

And the way that we begin with our commitment to equity is always centering community.

And much of what you'll hear throughout this slide begins with community and engages community and the solutions that we develop are community centered.

And therefore from that, we're able to achieve also equity centered solutions.

So we are small, we're only nine and a half staff.

And because of that small size, we actually have a very matrix structure.

And so community outreach and engagement, for example, doesn't sit with one person or two people.

It is something that is shared by the entire team.

Contracts is also not, doesn't sit with one person.

It is shared across and our program managers have a metric body of work that only includes community outreach and engagement, but contracts management and policy.

And that matrix approach allows us to be collaborative and nimble and responsive, and most importantly, as we saw last year, and that you'll see, particularly from our work on the Seattle Disaster Relief Fund, innovative.

Next slide, please.

And we really want to thank you, Council President Gonzalez, other council members, Mosqueda, Morales, et cetera, for providing some of the budget supports there that allowed us to do the work that we will share today.

In the Rapid Response Fund, for example, It was to engage and rapidly respond to emergent threats facing Seattle immigrants, and that was $375,000 that Councilmember Gonzalez, you initiated.

And then former Councilmember Pacheco included another $50,000, which was used for DACA fee assistance.

And we saw a $25,000 match from Facebook.

And then with the joint COVID-19 relief package, approximately $9 million from that body of funding and 8.3 million which went to direct cash assistance and 700,000 to support ongoing language access work.

And so with that, I'd like to turn it over first to Oksana.

And we're moving to the next slide.

Hi, my name is Oksana Bilobran, and I am a Legal Defense Policy and Program Specialist at the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs.

And I'm here today, I'm honored to talk to you about two of the programs that I worked on together with the rest of our team in 2020. And one of them, we call it Rapid Response.

As Kul mentioned earlier, The program was designed in anticipation of various court decision and rule changes that would have a huge impact on immigrant and refugee communities in 2020. And the city of Seattle has appropriated $375,000 in one time rapid response fund in order to help community navigate these issues.

As hard as 2020 was for everybody in Seattle, it was extremely hard for our immigrant and refugee neighbors, because in addition to the pandemic and economic crisis, they had to deal with the onslaught of immigration policies that were targeting them.

It was the year, at the beginning of the year, we of course didn't know it was going to be the final year of the Trump administration, but we knew it was going to be the year in which many of these programs will be introduced and rolled out, and it would be potentially very harmful to our immigrant and refugee communities.

Next slide, yes.

So three major issues that were identified in consultation with our community partners and community-based organizations that we knew we had to pay attention to were public charge, DACA, and immigrant fee increases.

So public charge, in brief, just to kind of lay the information out there, is the set of rules in which prospective immigrant can be denied entry or residency in the United States.

if they are likely to become primarily dependent on the government for support.

And these rules were expanded in February 2020. So they have been in effect for about a year.

And once they changed, they went to in fact, they created a huge confusion and fear, especially due to the added layer of the pandemic.

So new immigrants and those who were living for a while here didn't know they were able to access and benefit from various programs designed to support and provide social safety net.

Next issue with DACA, known in the community short DACA, but it stands for Obama Air Immigration Program that was designed to protect DREAMers from deportation.

And it was on track to be potentially terminated in 2020. The Supreme Court decision that was expected on the case, it was anticipated that it was going to terminate the program and there would be millions of people across the country left in limbo if that were to come true.

And the last issue we were ready to work on was immigration fee increases.

There was an initiative coming from the Trump administration that would significantly increase certain immigration and neutralization benefit fees and eliminate fee waivers for those who were eligible.

Next slide, please.

So on the first issue of public charge, we decided to have a multiple layer approach.

And first of them was sort of a train the trainer approach.

We knew that people work with community-based organization that would be calling case managers asking if they are still safe to apply for and receive SNAP, so food benefits and medical care.

And we knew that we had to equip those case managers on the ground with the correct information on the program because it was just so complex and had multiple layers to it.

So we first organized a training for service providers It took place in late February when we were still getting together in person.

It was that day when the public charge actually went into effect, and we had over 90 participants there, and the presentation was conducted by our experts at the Northwest Immigrants' Rights Project, and the presentation was also viewed live and on Facebook and had over 9,000 views.

We also knew that we needed to provide a reference guide and frequently asked questions and we developed a pretty sophisticated reference guide that listed every available social safety net program in Washington State and analyzed whether or not receipt of that benefit would impact prospective immigrants and current immigrants living in the United States and how that would impact depending on your immigration status.

So that reference guide was widely shared, and we've heard that it was extremely useful in the community for people answering questions from the public about whether or not they should continue receiving benefits.

Next slide, please.

We also decided to work directly with communities and partner with our community-based organization.

At the beginning of the year, we asked who wanted to host public charge workshops and had a pretty elaborate schedule of these in-person events.

And right as we started doing them in-person at the end of February, we had to switch to a virtual model as our county and the state and the country went into a first lockdown.

But nevertheless, we were successful in organizing 10 of these workshops, both in-person and virtual, and they reached over 1,300 community members.

We also provided resources for our legal partners to do these presentations, not just for general public, but for community-based organization, legal practitioners.

They even did several presentations for Washington Attorney General team.

Because as I mentioned, this policy is still extremely complicated.

Not only public was confused, but even legal experts in the field who don't work in immigration law day to day.

had to be presented with that information, and we were ready to support those efforts.

Next slide, please.

On the second issue of DACA, as I mentioned, in 2017, Trump administration rescinded the program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, and then that case was making its way to the Supreme Court.

There were wide speculations that the Supreme Court would potentially terminate the program and there would be anxiety and fear in the community.

So in preparation for that Supreme Court decision, we decided to do one-on-one legal consultations and partnered with three of our legal service providers, Northwest Immigrants Rights Project, Colectivo Legal de Pueblo, and also Catholic Immigration Legal Services.

And together, these three organizations provided almost 100 free legal consultation to Seattle residents, workers, and students.

And once we knew that the Supreme Court was not going to terminate DACA, they also assisted people with both renewals, DACA renewals, and also first-time applications for the program.

Next slide, please.

In addition to having these three partner organizations providing legal consultations, we anticipated demand for legal services was going to be higher than these three organizations could manage.

We also knew that due to federal administration policies, all of our pro bono legal assistance resources were pretty much depleted.

It was really hard for us to recruit pro bono attorneys to provide these consultations.

And therefore, we came up with a pretty innovative model in the model in which we partnered with our colleagues at the King County Bar Association and also American Immigration Lawyer Association.

And so three of us, three partners got together and we decided that the best way to proceed would be to use a stipend model in which legal service providers, immigration attorneys, would be able to choose and either accept a modest stipend or ask for a continuing legal education, CLE credits, or simply donate their time to provide these consultations.

And so as a result, we successfully organized and offered five virtual DACA clinics between July and November 2020. And through those five legal clinics, we were able to assist over 200 clients who signed up for them.

Our wonderful American Immigration Lawyers Association attorneys provided 77 three-hour shifts for the community.

Next slide, please.

And this slide makes me most happy probably because it shows some of the results of what our services meant to those who seek and receive them.

So this slide provides sort of a background on what the people who requested consultation with immigration attorneys are eligible to apply for in the future.

Studies has shown consistently that between 25% and 30% of undocumented immigrants who live in the United States have a path to some sort of legal status but don't know about it.

And after meeting with immigration attorneys, these are the results.

It looked like roughly 30% of folks who received consultation and screening were eligible for initial DACA.

about 30% were eligible for renewing their DACA status, but almost 40% of people were eligible for a family-based petition, which is huge because it ultimately results in a green card, unlike DACA, which is a temporary program.

Also, 23% were eligible for a U visa, and only about 20% of people who requested consultation had no relief available at that time.

So that is incredible news, and we hope that people who heard that they might be eligible for further relief will be able to seek assistance in the future and actually get their status and documents in the United States.

Next slide, please.

And the last issue that I identified earlier is the immigration fee increases.

So in November 2019, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services submitted a new proposal that would drastically increase application fees and eliminate fee waivers.

Under the new proposal, fee for citizenship would increase more than 80% from $640 to $1,170.

The cost of DACA renewal would increase from 495 to 765, an increase of 55%.

And also for the first time ever in United States, there was a proposed fee to request asylum, which was sort of unheard of.

And when we talked about what to do and how to address that issue, in addition to all of our advocacy and submitting rules, comments opposing that rule, we decided to provide tangible relief for immigrants who needed assistance paying these immigration fees.

And we decided to allocate $150,000 from the funding that we received to provide direct immigration fees, scholarships to eligible Seattle residents, workers and students.

And so for To date, $134,000 of that money has been allocated.

And as you can see, most of that money has been given for DACA fee scholarships, which almost 190 people were able to receive.

Also, we awarded 36 naturalization fee scholarships and seven green card related scholarships.

It was extremely important to the community.

And we heard it very clearly that it was a very tangible help.

Because in the middle of the year, with the economic downturn, it meant that people could actually use this money directly to obtain immigration documents.

And those immigration documents were often a green card that allows you to work.

So had they not been able to receive this scholarship, they'd potentially be able to even lose ability to work.

in United States if the green card or work authorization were to expire or the DACA status.

We also knew that many of these beneficiaries of these scholarships were excluded from the stimulus checks that were sent out earlier in 2020 because they did not have social security numbers.

So for example, first time DACA applicants, they don't have social security number and therefore when they needed to apply for the status, This was very beneficial because, as I said earlier, they were excluded from the federal assistance earlier in the year.

So we partnered with El Centro de la Raza, who administered this scholarship fund, and also legal service providers who screened and referred their clients to receive these funds.

Next slide, please.

And I just wanted to highlight a couple of key things that made this program extremely successful and positive the way it was.

First of all, we are very thankful for city leadership, in particularly Council President Gonzalez for their leadership and providing this one-time funding and allowing us, giving us the space to respond quickly to the needs as they were emerging and be flexible enough to go the way the community needed us to go.

We also worked collaboratively with our partners and came up with innovative models.

As I said, that legal clinic with King County Bar Association was something that is now being used as an example across the country.

There are various publications talking about that model and trying to adopt it across the country.

We also had to pivot from working in person to providing services virtually, and that required creativity from our partners.

And we had to be very creative in delivering information about all of these emerging changes in immigration policy and make sure that our communities were able to stay informed and on track with everything that was going on.

There was a lot of ups and downs surrounding policies as they were developing in 2020. And actually today, one of those issues, public charge that I was talking about earlier, it looks like it might be the beginning of the end of that policy with Supreme Court dismissing the case and that was before them.

So we will have to continue our communication and making sure our communities stay informed of these issues beyond 2020. Even though the funding is no longer there, our office will work tirelessly to make sure we continue both advocacy and information that our communities rely on.

Next slide, please.

And with that, I am ready to move to talk about one more program that our office was able to stand up very quickly, and that program was Seattle Disaster Relief Fund for Immigrants.

Next slide, please.

As Kou mentioned earlier, this fund was created to support vulnerable immigrant and refugee communities who have been financially impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic but were shut out of the federal assistance through the CARES Act and the state unemployment insurance.

As you know, the stimulus checks were denied to both undocumented workers and residents and also the U.S. born children and families that were mixed status families.

So investing in the Seattle families who needed help during this pandemic, we knew that that would ensure that Seattle communities and our local economy is able to recover faster and more fully.

So we were tasked to design and implement on a very short timeline a program that would provide such assistance to Seattle's most vulnerable low-income immigrants and refugee residents.

The criteria we used, the eligibility criteria that was decided on was that people had to be 18 years old or older.

They had to live in Seattle or attend school in Seattle or work within the city boundaries.

And also that they were ineligible to receive Federal CARES Act economic impact payment, also known as stimulus check, due to the immigration status.

And there was an income eligibility requirement, which was They were supposed to be under 50% of median household income in Seattle for the past nine months.

Next slide, please.

As I mentioned, we had to work really fast.

We designed the program in about six weeks from the time we find out that we were going to be doing that to the time we opened the application.

And that design process included Consultations with our community partners to identify priorities, the amount, the best outreach strategies.

to selecting the organization that was going to disperse all the money and administer the program, and that was Scholarship Junkies, to selecting 21 partners that would do one-on-one outreach and also in-language assistance for those who need to apply for this application.

Our application and all of the materials were translated into seven languages.

Which allowed us to reach into harder to reach communities in Seattle and make sure that language wasn't a barrier in accessing.

this important financial assistance fund.

We also developed safeguards to prevent misuse and fraud.

And also we heard that trust was an important concern for the community who were afraid to potentially reach out due to concerns of, as I mentioned earlier, public charge, and also due to concerns about the information being potentially disclosed or misused if they were to apply and receive such assistance.

So we are happy to report that most of the applicants who were approved for funding were able to receive the assistance within about two months from applying, which is really critical when you're looking and are waiting for money that might mean that you're not getting evicted and you're getting the food that your family needs.

So that two months is something we are really proud of.

Next slide, please.

Hold on just a second there.

We do have a hand raised.

Council Member Mosqueda has a question on that last slide or maybe on the previous slide.

Also, just for the record and the benefit of the viewing public and those of us here, I did want to make a note for the record that Council Member Sawant has joined the committee hearing.

She actually got here at the beginning of this presentation and I didn't get a chance to formally recognize her entry into the meeting.

So with that being said, Council Member Mosqueda.

The floor is yours.

Thank you, Madam President.

Thank you very much for this overview.

Really excited to see these details.

Just a quick question on the sort of logistics, and I didn't mean to interrupt the flow here.

So if you want to come back, I'm happy to do so.

But I just had a thought that came in as you were talking about rolling the program out here and how we got these dollars to communities.

So gift cards are what you used here.

Is that what you said?

Not only gift cards, we had several options and that was also what we discussed with the community.

There were options including checks and direct deposit and gift cards.

So, the option that was selected and applicants for the fund had an option to select how they wanted to receive their payment.

It was the same amount but the form of the payment was something that they could choose.

And most of them opted to receive a check.

Checks were pretty easy because they could be tracked and we could see whether they were cashed or not.

And also they could be canceled if lost and reissued.

But yes, there were some folks who requested gift cards instead.

That's great.

No, I just, I think that's really important because that helps to meet folks where they're at and what their comfort level is and, you know, maybe what their comfort level is with various institutions as well.

So, thank you for that background.

And I assume as well that that helped to address any sort of fees that were associated like with activation cards or with, you know, a deposit or things like that.

So, was that part of the conversation you all had as well?

Yes, we had several conversations about access to payment and also what it would look like for folks who are unhoused or unbanked.

We also had partnership with Seattle Credit Union that assisted us with cashing checks for folks who did not have bank accounts.

So there was extensive work that went into planning and addressing all of the barriers that would prevent that population from getting money quickly and effectively.

Very exciting.

And then just sort of the last question associated with that, as you're having these conversations with folks, is there also a discussion at that point, since it's like a point of service to talk about, you know, the utility discount program or other food assistance and housing assistance support?

Was there any sort of opportunity for cross-enrollment, if you will, if folks weren't concerned with the public charge issue and did want to go that route?

Yes, definitely.

So one of the things that was happening, we partnered with 21 organizations and those organizations, some of those were also partner with the fund like this on the state level, because those two funds, the city of Seattle and also the state one went in parallel.

And there were also some assistance coming from King County.

And so we've heard that when people called them for one with questions about one fund, they were able to refer them and cross refer them to various resources.

and help them apply for both funds.

And some of our partners, as I said, were doing food assistance and rental assistance.

We actually, at the beginning, at the very planning stages of this program, we considered whether we wanted to provide this assistance in the form for a specific need, like for rental assistance or food.

But then what we heard from the community very loudly was that The best way to truly provide meaningful assistance was to not tie it to any specific need because they could be so diverse.

It could be child care, it could be health care.

And so for our specific fund, we left it very broad and we trusted the community to decide what they wanted to spend that money on.

Excellent.

That's wonderful.

Thank you very much for that background.

And I won't, I won't interrupt you with a few slides to come, but I just wanted to say thank you as well for the disaggregated data.

I know we are always pushing for more disaggregated data, so it's very helpful that you are lifting up that information and making sure that we are really highlighting the various populations that we're able to serve.

So thank you very much, Council President.

That is my line of questioning.

Thank you so much.

Take it away.

Yeah.

So can we go to the next slide, please?

And that will actually have some of the data that I was just talking about.

So some numbers is we received over 18,000 applications and roughly 20% of them ended up receiving cash assistance.

So at the end, 3,705 people or households were able to benefit from this.

And as I mentioned, the payment came in the form of check or direct deposit or gift cards.

Also, early on, we got a direction that we wanted to prioritize this fund for the city residents and roughly 90% of all the money went to Seattle residents and about 10% went to people who work or went to school in Seattle.

And I'm happy to say that we were able to fund every eligible applicant who lives in Seattle.

So that was good.

We reached not everybody, not every worker and student, but every eligible resident of Seattle did receive funding.

As you can see from the slide, about 60% of those who benefited were households and about 40% were individuals.

And from those households that applied, we calculated that roughly 3,754 were children that were able to access this money.

Next slide, please.

This is information.

So first of all, we met with the community and we said, how do we do this?

One of our first questions was, do we want to go and provide assistance on the first come first serve basis?

Or do we want to have a application period that's open for a certain number of weeks and then look at all of them together and prioritize?

Because we knew that the need is going to be greater than the money we had.

And so what we heard in those consultations with communities that we needed to develop a prioritization system and set up criteria to see who is most vulnerable, for whom this assistance would be most meaningful.

And our community gave us suggestions to prioritize unaccompanied minors, unhoused individuals, single parents and survivors of violence, of people who are at high risk of severe COVID illness or those who already were.

had COVID in the past, people who lost income and renters.

And you can tell that most of our applicants and beneficiaries were in those categories.

Over 90% of them lost income and were renters.

We also were able to partner with organizations that serve unaccompanied minors because there was a concern We didn't want to give out funds directly to children under 18, but we worked with organizations such as KIND, Kids in Need of Defense and Youth Care, who work directly with youth and were able to purchase items for them instead of giving cash assistance to children.

Next slide, please.

This is a breakdown of racial and ethnic data of those who applied and received our funds.

And it shows the breadth of reach of partners that we work with.

So over 80% of beneficiaries of our fund were from Latinx community, and that's consistent with the data that we have about this vulnerable group of people who were shut out from the federal stimulus money.

About 10% were of Asian descent.

descent or Asian Americans.

And you can tell like there's a long list of languages that people preferred languages that people indicated.

And that's again, we wanted to highlight that our network of partners was able to reach folks that don't normally interact with government, don't normally, you know, aren't easy to reach because they speak languages that are very, very unique.

And we were so proud of that network of our partners for being able to reach those in the communities.

And over half of all of the applications that were submitted to us came in language other than English.

And a good percentage of them were submitted by our partners who provided one-on-one assistance with applications in languages other than the seven that we had the application be translated in.

And the next slide, please.

So this is the story that I think sort of summarizes and highlights why programs like this are important.

And what we heard from our communities during our debrief meeting was what struck them the most was talking one-on-one with community members and hearing their stories.

And sometimes it was the story of hope in the midst of despair, just like this story that we shared here with you.

The stories of the people who called made us realize how much the community needs these funds.

A caller told us about how his wife had gotten COVID-19 and she ended up getting a stroke and became paralyzed from the neck down.

This led him to stay home and take care of his wife and it caused him to lose his job.

It was very touching, and you could hear anguish in his voice, and he really needed the fund, and we wish we could have done more.

This story came from Organización Centroamericana, and there were many, many stories like that, but that's the one that kind of highlights.

And on behalf of that family and those recipients, we want to say a huge thank you to the city for providing this help and support in times like this.

And next slide, please.

And there is much to be said about the program and what made it successful.

We have a report coming out that we potentially will be sharing widely and the two main things that we want to highlight is collaborations.

Collaborations both between the city departments that were extremely helpful in expediting all of the processes that sometimes take a much longer time and we didn't have that time.

We're thankful for the internal support within the city, but also for all of our outreach partners that were able to prioritize this work and put pause on the other existing projects and reach out to the community and work over hours and weekends to make sure to answer questions and assist those who wanted to apply.

Also, a crucial piece that made this program successful was language access because it reduced barriers that often immigrants can't overcome without language access.

So as I mentioned earlier, we just want to say how proud we are for City of Seattle for living up to its values and demonstrating its commitment to immigrant communities and for using public funds to provide cash assistance.

And this, I think I'm done with my part of the presentation.

And if there are any questions about these two programs, I'd be happy to answer them.

but my colleague still has a portion of the presentation too.

Yeah, we have a few slides left in this presentation before we shift gears here.

Any questions or comments, colleagues?

I have not seen any hands raised.

Aksan, I want to thank you for this really in-depth presentation.

It's just a tremendous, tremendous amount of work.

And just want to sort of, again, thank Council Member Mosqueda, who's on this committee, for all of the hard work she did in making sure to include a specific line item to be able to provide this kind of assistance in the context of the Jump Start Seattle and for disaster relief in particular.

the impact has been really, really significant and important.

And I'm just so grateful for that leadership and I am grateful for having had the opportunity to support that work.

And this is the product of a lot of hard work by city council to meet community where they're at and support their needs in this moment of crisis.

In a lot of ways we didn't anticipate, but I'm glad that it worked out the way it did.

So thanks for all your work in that space.

All right, Peggy, are you gonna walk us through the language access portion?

I am so excited to talk about language access.

As you all know, I am always screaming to the heavens how important culturally appropriate language access is, not just translation or interpretation, but actually give people meaningful access in language.

So I'm so happy to be hosting this portion of the presentation as well.

So critically, critically important to our community.

Take it away.

Thank you.

My name is Peggy.

I'm the Language Access Program and Policy Specialist with OIRA.

Next slide, please.

And so before I share our positive outcomes and our response, I really want to share this quote and then also our office's approach to language access.

So this quote really sums it up that though we know that COVID brings us tremendous challenges and also crisis that we have to respond quickly to.

It also presents us a great opportunity to really be more responsive to immigrant and refugee communities and also ramp up our capacity to really rethink what language access means for the city of Seattle and how to really be the welcoming city that we want to be.

Next slide please.

So in this presentation, I will highlight four language access opportunities that we observe in our language access and COVID response.

So the first one is because of our partnership and we quickly did our approach at the very beginning of the pandemic, we were able to work directly with public health, King County, and then also Department of Health with the state to quickly think about what we should collaborate with for language access and then share resources.

So at the very beginning in about March and April last year, we work directly with Public Health to host seven in-language webinars, sharing COVID resources and information with our immigrant and refugee community members.

And then till this day, we still work with Public Health.

In fact, we just host two COVID vaccine information sessions, one in English and one in Spanish with public health.

And then we have seven more in language information sessions coming up in this month and next month.

And then the second opportunity is we're able to leverage our city staff language capacity.

Here is an example.

So OIRA helped the Office of Economic Development quickly assemble a team of multilingual resource team, and they are city staff from the Economic Development Office and also from other city departments to support small businesses owners in Seattle to help them apply for SBA loans and PPP loans and answer questions about what they to do if they lose their revenue and then also to support them to navigate through a city system and then get resources they need.

And they are able to support eight languages and then directly work with business owners to address their challenges and issues.

Next slide, please.

And then the third opportunity here is we are able to, because of COVID, we are in need to quickly translate COVID-related information and then to have our turnaround time in a very short four to eight hours.

And so we form a team of local community translators of more than 50 local translators that we can work directly with to translate up to 20 languages in a very short turnaround time compared to previously it would take as two weeks to translate, and then now we can have it translated within a day or even shorter.

And we, till this day, continue to work with community translators to promptly respond to community needs.

And then the fourth opportunity, and it's also a longer term opportunity that we see here in the language access system, is a centralized language access vision.

With the community translator group and also through working with other city departments to think through the language access services.

We are creating a more robust language access workflow that will allow us to gradually build up our translation knowledge and then build up a database where today or I read translate something tomorrow that will be able to share with other city departments.

And so that vision is in-house translation shop that would directly provide services to other city departments.

And this is also because of the leadership from the council and then also the mayor's office with the COVID relief fund, joint COVID relief fund that we are able to really further think through what that increased capacity look like.

Next slide, please.

So we have more positive outcomes coming out from the Language Access Program.

And we are also able to build up more capacity and resources and then share with other city departments.

So I included two SharePoint sites here for people to visit and then get resources and share with their department.

So with that, that is a quick summary of the Language Access Program and positive outcome.

Are there any questions on the program?

Colleagues, any questions or comments on this program?

OK, I'm not seeing.

Oh, there we go.

Council Member Mosqueda, please.

Just saying thanks again.

I really appreciate the feedback and the council president said it well, but this is always really exciting to highlight the importance of that shouting that happens at council and the priority that the council president mentioned.

So thank you for your time today and really excited to see this.

Thank you.

All right, I think this is our last slide.

V, can you advance one more?

I think there's just a sort of closeout slide here.

Oh, no, here we go.

I forgot there was a little bit more.

Council President, this is just taking the opportunity that the partners that we worked with centering our approach with community.

And we have convened a couple of vaccine roundtables where we've learned in more detail why our community members or the folks that they work with are choosing or not choosing to get a vaccine.

And so here are just a few things of what we learned.

And we thought we would just throw this slide in here because I think a lot of the work that the incredibly talented OIRA team just shared with you, our focus now is trying to help the mayor achieve her vision of reaching a 70% vaccination rate for our city.

And certainly the work that we need to do to ensure that BIPOC communities get equitable access to those vaccines will be critical to achieving that goal.

And I think that is the wrap up for our presentation.

So thank you so much for this opportunity to share the results.

And again, I think that council members can feel proud about the investments made in these programs and the results that we were able to achieve together.

Absolutely true.

Thank you so much to all of you for being with us today and really appreciate the work, obviously, that you're doing.

In terms of equitable vaccine distribution, we did have an opportunity to hear lots of details about that work from OIRA's perspective during our last committee meeting, so appreciate hearing a little bit more about these roundtables, which we had just sort of touched on lately.

Colleagues, any other questions or comments for OIRA before we shift gears to deal?

Looks like that's it.

Well, thanks.

Thanks to you, Director Vu, and to Peggy and Oksana for being with us today.

Really appreciate all of your hard work.

We're going to go ahead and move to our last agenda item, which is item four.

Will the clerk please read item four into the record?

I'm sorry.

Yes, item four.

Go ahead.

Agenda item number four, deals prenatal to three and childcare strategies for briefing and discussion.

Thank you so much.

Okay, so this is our last item on the agenda today.

It is also just an item for briefing and discussion.

So I want to welcome Director Chappelle and his DEEL team members to committee today.

And I'm really excited about an opportunity for us to talk about child care and strategies.

This is also another discussion and briefing that flows from direct investments supported by the city council in this space.

I'm really excited about hearing more from you all and sharing with the public the different ways that the city can support new families and our youngest learners, those that are the ages zero to three.

and how we can better meet the child care needs of our young families and families throughout the city.

So we know that during this pandemic, it has been painfully highlighted how vital child care shortages are and how important childcare infrastructure is for our working families across the city.

So we have a lot of ground to cover in the subject area.

I'm looking forward to this committee discussion and looking forward to figuring out what is next in order to continue to support our families across Seattle.

So with that being said, I'm going to hand it over to Director Chappelle.

All right, thank you, Council President.

It's good to see you.

Good afternoon, Council Members.

As always, we're happy to be here to report to you on deals prenatal to three and child care strategies.

And we also will be providing you, as Council President said, with an overview of our investment in those areas.

Joining me today is our Early Learning Director, Monica Liang-Aguirre.

And in a moment, you'll get a chance to meet our Senior Policy Advisor for Early Learning, Cameron Clark.

Next slide, please.

Thank you.

So our objective today is really just to update you on DEEL's recent and ongoing work in these areas that you see up here.

Prenatal 3, our Child Care Assistance Program, Child Care Stabilization Grants, and then our ongoing research and outreach.

Next slide, please.

So before I hand this off to our early learning director, I'd just like to start by reminding you of the two department results that guided or should I say that guides the work of our early learning division.

The first is that all children are ready for kindergarten.

And the second is all Seattle families have access to high quality and affordable child care.

These are the population results that or should I say the population level results that we want to see from our early learning investments.

Next slide please.

So what I'll do now is I'll just take a quick moment and pass this off to Monica, our Early Learning Director, to take us from here, talk about our early learning investments.

Great.

Good afternoon, Council Member President and council members, we're glad to be here at the much awaited conversation around all of our prenatal to three investments in childcare.

Just to continue where Dwayne left off, I wanted to just give an overview of the different buckets of investments that we have.

We obviously do invest in preschool heavily.

We also invest in childcare, in home visiting, in health and developmental supports.

And then we have a fifth bucket, which is around sort of one-time funding, which you'll hear about as well.

And really, prenatal to three, or at least birth to three, covers everything, is infused in all of these investment areas.

We're not going to touch on preschool, even though it does serve three-year-olds, because you've heard a lot about preschool in the past.

We really want to focus more on some of our less talked about programs.

And I think what you'll see in our presentation is that we do a lot of different things in this area, and we're going to touch lightly on a lot of the different programs and invite an opportunity to speak more about them at a later time if you have questions.

And then just to give you an overall look at our our budget and how we invest, you can see that preschool is the biggest investment for early learning, followed by childcare, followed by home visiting and then health and developmental.

So just to see sort of how it how it all breaks down in terms of if our investments.

So I'm going to hand it off to Cameron Clark, who is our senior early learning policy advisor.

But previously, he was our strategic advisor for our Birth to Three investment.

So he has a lot of familiarity with some of the programs that he helped kick off back when the sweetened beverage tax became a reality and started amplifying our investments in this area.

So I'll pass it to you, Cam.

Yeah.

Thank you very much.

I'm not, sorry, is the PowerPoint advancing?

I didn't see the budget slide.

It's okay.

So I guess the next slide after that is where we're at.

I apologize.

I forgot to advance.

That's okay.

Great.

All right.

Well, thank you, Monica.

We are excited to share an overview of our work in prenatal to three ideal.

Supporting the success and strength of families with young children in Seattle is crucial to closing opportunity gaps.

You know, I think research has found that very early childhood experiences matter and set the foundation for all future development.

I think in particular, crucial brain development occurs in the first few years of life.

Establishing a sturdy or fragile foundation is the foundation for all learning, health, and behavior that follow.

And a significant amount of brain development actually occurs in the first year of life.

Positive and negative interactions, which are a major focus, especially of our home visiting work, but also our coaching and health work, in the first three years can really have lasting effects on development.

So I think one thing I note is that a key difference with the focus of prenatal three versus, for example, our pre-K investment is that families and caregivers are really oftentimes at the center of our supports and investments.

It's a major focus of the work.

You'll see as we move through our programs that DEEL has a mixture of program types that we fund that provide supports not only directly to children, but also to mothers, to caregivers, to child care providers.

essentially anyone who spends a lot of time with young children, because we think they're crucial to the process as well.

With that, I'll go to the next slide.

So this is a brief timeline.

The city has been investing or funding programs in prenatal three, going back to 2002 with the Nurse Family Partnership, which is implemented out of Public Health Seattle King County.

We added Parent Child Plus starting in 2011. That might be a new name for some.

It was originally called the Parent Child Home Program, or PCHP.

And then passage of revenue from the Sweetened Beverage Tax provided an incredible opportunity to expand our work starting in 2018, bringing on additional programs.

After 2018, we were actually able to receive some more funds from SBT to expand our work in Parent Child Plus, family child care, early learning health, And in 2021, we actually have a new program, which is a community grant program we're very excited about, and it's in the planning process.

With that, with the timeline, Monica and I will briefly walk through our current portfolio of work.

Next slide, please.

So our work falls into four categories, home visiting, health and developmental supports, childcare, or quality supports really related to childcare, and a new addition this year with a community grant program.

We'll talk more about the community grant program in a few slides, but work that emerges or grants that emerge from that program are likely to cut across these categories and also potentially into new spaces as well.

All of our investments have a strong focus on working with families of color or caregivers that historically work with families of color.

And one of our ongoing goals is to build more connections from these programs to high quality preschool experiences, particularly ones we administer such as SGEP and ECAP as well.

As Monica mentioned, we'll try and keep our summary short in the interest of time, but we can follow up with information on any of these investments individually.

Next slide, please.

And I believe, yes, Monica is gonna walk us through our home visiting work.

So home visiting is like, as Cam said, is an area that we've invested in for quite a while now.

It's a prevention strategy to support pregnant moms and new parents to promote infant and child health.

foster educational development and school readiness, and also help prevent child abuse and neglect.

The visits typically focus on linking pregnant women with prenatal care or promoting strong parent-child attachment and coaching parents on learning activities that foster the child's development and supporting parents' role as their child's first and most important teacher.

What I love about this slide is this is sort of, these are pictures from 2020 of how home visiting has pivoted to remote practice and, you know, generally speaking, home visiting has proven to be even more critical during COVID.

This level of support, this culturally responsive and highly personal support that families are receiving has proven to be extra important, especially with our communities of color and within immigrant and refugee communities who might otherwise not have had access to some support and information about what is going on.

Overall, you know, I think our home visiting providers expected to see a high dropout rate during COVID and surprisingly and pleasantly surprised that actually that wasn't the case.

Some had to drop out, but overall retention was quite high and people have responded that this was again a very important lifeline connection during this really stressful time.

And staff also has reported that while it's obviously a complete change in practice of doing this very relationship based program and having to go remote was really stressful and a lot of barriers to try to get over with the technology.

But it also, there've been some positive things in terms of having families feel more empowered from the get-go and really taking leadership in developing their skills and working with their children.

And our providers have also learned that they needed to provide other kinds of supports as well outside of the standard curriculum.

I'm speaking generally again about home visiting.

as being, there were some silver linings in this year, but it's lovely to see that this was a much needed connection that was able to sustain throughout the pandemic.

So we have three different types of home limit, home visiting programs.

If you could go to the next slide, please.

The first and the oldest one that we've been working with is the Nurse Family Partnership, which serves low-income women pregnant with a first child.

And it's actually our only program out of all of our investments that actually works prenatally.

So that's the only thing that gives us the prenatal touchpoint.

It is implemented by Public Health San Antonio County, and it's implemented regionally.

And like I said, It's had a big COVID pivot this past year, but we've continued to see positive results in terms of graduation from the graduating participants who are able to further their education and career goals, and also having positive birth outcomes, which is another goal of Nurse-Family Partnership.

Next slide, please.

So the Parent-Child Plus program is our program that is a cultural responses home visiting program that works through CBOs to provide the service to families.

In general, our graduates of the program have been shown to increase kindergarten readiness, so they reduce special education placement and increase literacy.

It's a funding collaborative between Best Arts for Kids, United Way, King County, and the city of Seattle.

And this has been a program that we continue to invest in and we are working closely with Best Arts and United Way to just increase the support and the infrastructure needed, the technical assistance needed to really spread this program and to grow this effective program.

Next slide, please.

We also, back in 2017, we were one of the first cities that piloted a parent-child plus model specifically for family child care.

So, the theory was that if this program is as effective as it has shown to be with families, What if we apply a similar model to family child care providers, or the home-based child care providers who work with larger groups of children?

So it was adapted from the core model, and we started with just a small pilot, and of the following years, doubled the number of family child care providers that we worked with.

We've tweaked the model to meet the needs of the family childcare providers who felt for the first time that they were getting some sort of regular professional development and support.

And we also extended it to a two-year model because they wanted to make sure that they got a little bit more support for a longer amount of time.

So that is a wrap-up of our home visiting programs.

I'll stop here and see if we have any questions.

Any questions or comments colleagues?

I don't see any hands raised Monica.

I just want to say how excited I am that we continue to fund this particular model.

It's.

the numbers sort of show and the results sort of show how important this is to just, you know, getting to families, meeting families where they're at, and sort of inviting them in a way that is culturally and linguistically appropriate into That culture of early learning for their children.

And we know that this is good, not just for the kids, but for the whole family.

And continue to be such a big, big supporter of these kinds of investment models that at one point in time were considered emerging or promising programs.

and are now lucky for us, just such a strong evidence-based practice and model for us to continue to support.

So really, really grateful for URL's ongoing work and partnership with external partners to continue to make this a really strong investment in program.

So Cam, do you wanna continue talking about our other?

Investment.

Go to the next slide.

Actually, we'll add one thing about Parent Child Plus as we go on that it has been pretty successful as we've adapted to family child care providers.

And now there's a lot of discussion at the national level of whether we could adapt it to other populations like family, friend and neighbor providers, particularly also like populations that are incarcerated.

So there are there's a lot of it is really thinking about how we continue to leverage that version model.

Next slide, please.

So I will kind of talk through the rest of our prenatal, the three investments.

The first one, we have two in health and developmental supports.

The first one is the developmental bridge.

It's another one of our kind of exciting new pilot initiatives.

We refer to it as a bridge.

It's overseen by King County and implemented by the Boyers Children's Clinic in conjunction with other ESIT or Part C providers.

It's a really challenging program to explain.

It involves a lot of different systems and eligibility.

At a high level, it was designed with King County Disability Division, Endeal, to support families that are falling through the cracks of the Part C system, so the zero to three system.

It's a fairly new program, it's going into its third year, and demand has really spiked with COVID, and we expect that to continue as services continue to be interrupted.

The program has been well received by participating families, particularly this year, with many families stuck at home.

We expected to serve about 60 to 75 families this year.

We ended up serving about 120 families as we went through.

Next slide, please.

Our second investment in health and development support is early learning health.

We've been working with the Child Care Health Program at Public Health Seattle, King County for a number of years.

They're actually one of the first programs that implemented a child care health consultation in the state.

I believe they are the first.

So we've been working with them and partnering with them on our pre-K program.

And they are like a phenomenal multidisciplinary team of nurses, mental health consultants, community health workers, and nutritionists that focus on early childhood public health.

The Sweetened Beverage Tax allowed us to expand their team to have a birth-to-three focus, providing public health supports to CCAP providers working with infants and toddlers.

They focus on health consultation directly to our CCAP providers in child development, mental health, nutrition, and interpreting and complying with pretty complex licensing regulations.

During COVID, they became a go-to resource during the pandemic, supporting providers individually in the field collectively.

And particularly, you know, the nurses at CCHP, as we call it, created the first COVID-19 guidance for B3 and other providers in late January of 2020, and then continuously updated that guidance as the science evolved throughout the year.

And they have some really incredible stories, but they did become like sort of the preeminent resource around public health and COVID for our early childhood community and our birth to three community in 2020, and continue to be so in 2021. Next slide, please.

And so we're talking about CCAP moving to quality supports, you know, a deal we feel that, you know, quality child care is as important and critical as access to child care.

If we want to make inroads and continuing to close or close the opportunity gap, we need child care to be high quality.

So, similar to the Child Care Health Program, DEEL has been providing culturally responsive coaching and professional development to our SPP program since the 2014 levy.

And SPT, between beverage tax, allowed us to expand their work to incorporate a birth-to-three focus.

So, our birth-to-three model, which we implement at DEEL, offers in-classroom coaching and professional development.

The coaching is to improve educator and caregiver practice, create high-quality nurturing learning environments, promote healthy child development, ultimately leading to long-term positive child outcomes.

Coaching is currently limited to approximately a combination of about 30 infant and toddler classrooms and family childcare providers, and it's a cohort model that moves through CTAP each year.

On the training side, our suite of trainings offered are intensive and aligned with the Washington State core competencies for early learning professionals to enhance educator knowledge, skills, and abilities, and will expand in 2021. to reach all CCAP program teachers serving infants and toddlers.

I think the one thing I really would point out is there was a major gap in professional development coaching for infant and toddler work.

I mean, the lion's share of investment and supports have all been around pre-K, both in the state and frankly at the city level.

And so this has filled a tremendous need for the community.

Let's move on to the next slide.

I'll just talk about our newest program, which is not even in implementation yet.

So the prenatal to three community grant program.

This new funding originated from a recommendation from the Sweetened Beverage Tax Community Advisory Board, otherwise known as the CAB.

Right now it's one-time funding.

The desire is to create opportunities for community-designed ideas and solutions in the prenatal space that can be accessed by community-based organizations, that the funding can be accessed by community-based organizations.

The theory is those closest to the community should have a big role in designing supports for the community that they work with.

So we are working now closely with, there was a community engagement effort by the CAB to originally make this recommendation.

And now we're working closely with the Community Advisory Board, Best Starts for Kids, community-based organizations to design the funding model, as well as review other related city funding opportunities.

Planning's ongoing and we anticipate having an RFP available this summer for the funding opportunity.

And with that, I believe I will turn it back to Monica on the next slide.

talk about the Child Care Assistance Program.

Yeah, thank you.

So, yeah, I'll give you a general overview of plans that we had and have for the CCAP program.

If you can go to the next slide.

So 2020, again, threw everything a little bit into a tizzy for us, of course.

This was supposed to be the year that we were going to do a pretty extensive expansion.

We increased our subsidy budget to serve 600 more children.

We were going to provide professional development and financial incentives for providers.

We also increased the eligibility for families up to 350% of federal poverty level.

And we also prepared a much more robust outreach plan to meet this expansion goal.

When COVID hit, the needs of our providers and our families just changed drastically.

And we were still able to change the eligibility and provide incentives, but our professional development was put on hold.

And we also just had to do a strong pivot to provide supports due to COVID.

So we'll talk a little bit about some of our immediate COVID and then we'll talk about our ongoing utilization of CCAP and plans for the future.

So if you go to the next slide, please.

As I don't need to tell you, our childcare industry was really impacted negatively by the childcare, by the pandemic.

And at the very, very beginning, PPE access was a primary concern for our providers when everything was, especially when the supplies were so scarce at the beginning.

We held two separate supply distribution events for our early learning and child care providers and were able to really give them much needed supplies at a time when they could not either find them or afford them.

We also made some pivots in our policies with CCAP to support providers.

We started paying for enrollment versus attendance since April of 2020 to help providers rely on full payments for the months and without burdening families for additional payments.

We continue to pay subsidies for children even when the site is closed due to COVID exposure.

We just wanted to give providers just a more regular income stream.

And then we also changed policies for families.

As you know, at the end of 2020, for November-December, we waived the co-pay for families completely for CCAP, so it was completely free for families.

And now for January through June of 2021, their copays have all been reduced by 50%.

So this has been a welcome policy shift for families, as you can imagine, who have really felt the brunt of the constraints that the pandemic has put on everybody.

Um, and then on that family copay relief component, that's that's that's like, across the system for C cap.

So, in other words, there's not like a C cap is is already sort of means.

Yes, exactly.

So it's just sort of across the board, universal.

Yes.

Our families are between 200 and 350 percent FPL to qualify to begin with.

So but for all of them, there was everybody had a small copay.

So they were either eliminated completely or now they're 50 percent off.

Great.

Yeah, and then Cam's going to talk about the Child Care Stabilization Fund that we just are wrapping up right now and was a big, big boon to our sector.

Next slide, please.

Great, thank you.

So we're going to talk briefly about the Stabilization Fund before I throw it back to Monica.

We're going back and forth to review CCAP utilization.

CDEEL began designing a COVID relief program to issue a child care stabilization grant fund last fall.

Through funds allocated by council, the overall intent was to provide stabilization funding to the child care community who stayed open amidst the economic and public health challenges of the pandemic.

The key tenets of the program was to prioritize providers serving families on subsidy and or in geographic priority areas of the city.

We're also able to work closely with, actually, with OIRA on language access supports.

We actually worked directly with Peggy.

It was nice to see her presentation right before this.

Next slide, please.

DEEL worked with Child Care Resources to administer the Child Care Stabilization Grant Program.

They had actually administered two other stabilization grant programs, so they were a good partner in this effort.

And the program was for licensed child care providers and family, friend, and neighbor providers.

$2.4 million was allocated for the fund.

$100,000 was reserved for family, friend, and neighbor providers, with the maximum grants of $500.

And the remaining was allocated to licensed child care providers with maximum grants of $10,000.

Just briefly, because family, friend, and neighbor isn't a common term for a lot of people, it's a type of care that's very common with young children.

Essentially, it's an individual providing regular care at least 10 hours a week who is not the guardian and parent of the child.

It could be a grandmother or an aunt.

a neighbor, et cetera.

And it's also really heavily used and accessed by the immigrant community in Seattle.

The grant applications closed on January 27th for childcare and January 29th for family, friend, and neighbor.

Next slide, please.

Awards for licensed providers varied in size between $5,000 and $10,000, depending on license capacity.

So essentially how large you were was actually the biggest definition if you received an award and how much money you received.

Additional funding was available for if you provided after hours care or whether you served families at a high concentration on state, city, or homeless subsidy.

The average award side for licensed child group riders and school age programs was $6,528, which actually indicates a lot of our providers were family child care providers because they were on the smaller side.

Childcare resources is currently processing the award grants as we speak, and we'll be issuing checks this month, I think, in the next two weeks.

So childcare providers have been, I just want to note a few more things before I wrap this up.

Childcare providers, you know, have truly been on the front line and essential workers.

If there's a definition of that, they certainly meet that during this crisis.

And we really appreciate the council appropriating these funds for a financially fragile sector, even in good times, let alone in COVID.

And then I'd also note that we're also optimistic with the near passage of the federal stimulus bill that we hope that additional stabilization funding will be coming down for the childcare community this year through the state as well.

Any questions on that before we move on?

Council Member Mosqueda, please.

You're still on mute.

a year later and still cannot pull it together.

Thank you so much.

I just wondered, and apologies if you have already included this in your presentation, but given the national statistics that we continue to see about 40% of all the child care saying that they're going to close and close for good potentially last summer, Do we have any indication of the impact in Seattle, both in terms of closures and parents who won't be able to find child care as they try to reenter the workplace?

I know that this is also a big deal, not just for workers, but the small businesses who are seeking to reopen that have come up.

So do we have any of the hyper local data on the number of child cares that are saying that they might not be able to reopen again?

We can get you really more specific data.

I will say that in Seattle, has not been hit hard, as hit hard as other parts of the state.

We're not seeing numbers up in the 40%.

And our CCAP providers, and Monica, jump in if it comes top of mind for you.

We've only, I think we've seen very few closures amongst our 200 CCAP providers.

So I think we have been a little bit more fortunate in Seattle around childcare closures.

There have been some, but not to that same degree.

But there are, I believe, some more hyper-local statistics, and we can get that to you.

Yeah, that'd be great.

I mean, I think that you're right.

Washington State overall is also not as bad as some of those national statistics between 14 and 24% of those childcare saying that they might not open, which is still huge if it's a quarter of childcare.

But that'd be wonderful to know what the hyperlocal childcare situation looks like, especially given the headlines that we saw the year before about there being record numbers of kiddos being born in the city of Seattle.

I'm very appreciative of our child care being open and very grateful that the child care providers are now able to get access to vaccines as well, but just thought that would be helpful to have on hand.

Council Member Mosqueda, I had pursued a similar line of questioning with D.L.

when I saw some of the headlines that were specific to Washington State.

Um, and, um, they, they do have that information, um, available.

They might not have it.

Monica might not have it at the, at the sort of end of her cursor right now, but, um, but I know that that information, that hyper local information is, is available and, um, cause I've seen it and, uh, and would just ask that folks, um, follow up by sending your office an email with, with those statistics.

definitely faring way better than the county, way better than the state, way better than the national scene.

And I think honestly, that's a testament to the fact that we probably had a baseline ecosystem that was a little bit stronger than in some areas in terms of child care provider supports and whatnot.

That doesn't mean that we're in the homeland, as they say, in terms of being able to do more.

But I think the impact here has been not as deep as it has been in other parts of the country.

Go ahead.

Thank you, Madam President.

Just a quick follow-up, because now we've got the wheels turning here.

Given the data that we've already seen about child care deserts throughout the country and looking, again, hyperlocal in Seattle, it just made me think, if you do also in your follow-up have any data on what your indicators would show would be the needed number of child care centers in the city to address the unmet need before.

That would also be helpful as we look at where there might be a gap and where we need to actually go even before COVID.

So thank you.

Again, I know that's not exactly something that we pre-identified for this presentation, but if you're able to share that, that'd be wonderful.

I will be very excited to hear that that 1 of the very important budget actions that we got passed in 2019 is specifically on that issue.

And we gave deal some funding and I have.

2 beautiful reports sitting on my table that sort of previews some of some strategies and recommendations in that area.

So that's.

That's the policy question.

You hit it right on the nose, right?

We have an opportunity to really do a scan of the environment and the ecosystem to evaluate where there are child care deserts and pockets within our own city.

And DEEL has been working on that all of last year.

And we have been speaking to them about having them come to this committee in the spring with some really clear identified strategies um, to address any identified needs through this, um, sort of academic research community-based effort here.

So, um, so we are, our wheels are turning in the same direction and that makes me very happy.

Thank you.

You just covered the end of our presentation.

We'll skip that slide.

But yeah, there's a lot of work going on right now in this sector.

It's highly complex, many different levers right now.

And so we'll be excited in a few months to come back and give you all of our great ideas based on this project that you helped us do.

So let's continue.

And I'll just talk a little bit about CCAP utilization, which may also just sort of help frame around what the current reality is around CCAP and our child care providers in the city.

So if you could go to the next slide.

The first slide really just, hmm.

That's not the slide.

Yeah, there we go.

So it just shows the real picture of COVID, right?

The top dark blue line is 2020. And you can see in March, we were at 555. And then it just kind of went, whoo.

It's just plummeted, right?

And until over the summer, we were down in the 300s.

And that is because, you know, Families, very rightfully so decided we're going to do whatever it takes not to send our children to congregate care.

It was the families that have essential workers that really truly have no choice, who have to continue sending their children.

So this was.

This, of course, is one of the reasons why child care providers are in such trouble is because their enrollment went down.

But it tells a really strong story about just the demand and what families are comfortable doing, especially vis-a-vis what the schools were doing and how to understand what families are comfortable, how they're comfortable sending their children to care at this time.

Our enrollment dropped 30%.

We were supposed to expand in 2020. That did not happen.

We went down 30%.

If you go to the next slide, this talks a little bit about our age distribution.

This has been a big talking point for a while now with Council Member Gonzalez about the difference in how many infants and toddlers we're serving versus preschool and school age.

And we still continue to serve mostly preschool children and school-age children with far fewer infants and toddlers.

And, and the real focus of the council budget ad that we were just discussing was around making infant access for infant care more affordable and more accessible to families here in Seattle so that that is we're going to be talking a lot about that when we come back.

Interestingly.

this is the first time in Seattle that actually infant care is available.

And there are no wait lists.

And if you actually want to send your infant to child care right now is the time to do it, because many of our providers have vacancies.

So that's been heard of previously.

But again, shows that families are not ready to send their infants to congregate care at this time.

Yeah.

What a change in circumstances from previous years where you had to get on wait lists when you were pregnant in order to even have a fighting chance for it.

So obviously on the demand side, on the family side, good news if you're ready for congregate care, but also paints a very different picture for our providers who are really struggling in this moment.

Right.

And if you go to the next slide, please.

This just is a breakdown of the of the demographics of our CCAP enrollment by race and age.

So, you know, overall, 86 percent of the children we serve through CCAP are children of color.

Our largest group being African-American or black.

or African.

Just as a note, this is the last time that you will see our data disaggregated this broadly.

We literally just this week transitioned to another database system that is going to allow us to continue with the Fed 7 and other.

but will also allow participants to self-identify as Middle Eastern, North African, or also share more detail about their heritage, such as whether they're identified as South Asian or East African.

So that's going to help us rectify some of the disconnects between our demographics and our language, which you'll see in a minute.

So we still can't understand too much with the way that's broken down right now.

But if you go to the next slide, you'll is about language and overwhelmingly all of our families identify as English-speaking.

Again, once we have a better understanding of some of our race and ethnicity data in the new system, we'll be able to We'll be able to understand that story a little better.

We also know that there are just families who are very hesitant to indicate what language they speak at home because of it being a public program and have hesitancies around that.

So that continues to be an area that we're trying to understand better and analyze.

Monica, on this particular issue, so I appreciate that the question is framed is what language is primarily spoken at home.

Is there any sort of survey or understanding of what language people want their children, infants and toddlers to learn in?

So in other words, like if you had a choice of you know, an immersion or bilingual program, what language would you prefer?

Has that question been posed?

Do we collect the data?

I'm not entirely sure.

I'll double check that.

I don't think that is a question we ask for our childcare.

That is absolutely for our Seattle preschool program where we have dual language programs very specifically designed to teach in two or more languages.

But I'll have to get back to you about the about whether or not that's an option for CEQA.

Yeah, I'd like to see if it is.

I know for our family, we were very interested in identifying a provider who had a Spanish immersion curriculum and really challenging to find that person.

in certain parts of Seattle, certainly can say that it was difficult to find in West Seattle where I live.

So I'm just wondering whether there's an opportunity to sort of understand this language component by asking that preference.

It doesn't necessarily mean that that's the language that's spoken at home, but I still think it gives us an important data point of sort of both the the provider network that might be available, and also sort of the language preference in terms of curriculum from the family side as well.

That's great.

Well, let us know when your daughter's ready for preschool.

We have some great dual language programs available.

Two years ago.

All right.

So the next slide, I just wanted to give a quick summary of these.

We have three big initiatives, council initiatives that were that were funded in 2020. Obviously, a lot was delayed because of COVID, and we just sort of picked up that ball again at the end of 2020. The child care CBAs, there are actually two separate ones, one focusing more on CCAP and some of the ways that we can increase access to infant and toddler care.

Another one was more of a national survey to look at other look at other jurisdictions to look for other ideas in terms of how to increase access.

Both are well underway, as you know.

President has the reports on her desk, very, very in-depth surveys of different approaches, different case studies by cities, and we have an internal work group right now that is triaging a lot of ideas and recommendations, as I call it, sort of the, you know, The cheesecake factory menu and we're trying to really kind of distill it into something very tangible things that are really appropriate for the Seattle context things that are that are accessible to us in the near future versus long term one so that's all coming to you in this later this spring.

And then we are working on another slide on the labor harmony agreement language.

And that's been a process that we picked up at the end of 2020 and is on the roll right now.

We're collaborating closely with SCU 925 to establish the process and partner in this work.

We put together a steering committee of very diverse stakeholders.

in the community to help us guide the process and actually that was a really great decision and is super informative.

It's a very complex topic and we're really digging in and more broad outreach is happening this month and next month as well.

We are looking forward to coming back with updates on that as well.

And then finally, I just want to acknowledge that, you know, childcare is, we're working within a larger ecosystem.

We have the county with the Best Start for Kids coming up.

for renewal and they are proposing the resurrection of their childcare subsidy program.

So we're gonna be partnering with them to align and make sure that we're collaborating as much as possible and making that a benefit for all families.

So that is on the horizon as is some more state funding for the Working Connections Program.

So we're trying to stay afloat, not to stay afloat, stay ahead of all the different policy pieces that are moving regionally as well so that we're in alignment and being as resourceful as possible.

And I believe that concludes all the work that we're doing in prenatal to three and child care.

I know we threw a lot at you and apologize that we kind of rushed through it, but if there's anything that you want to follow up on, you've identified a few more things, a few things already, please let us know.

Yeah, and I think Council Member Mosqueda might have a comment or a question.

Thank you very much for reading my mind, Council President.

I just wanted to note, Monica, thanks for your summary you talked about in your overview and the next steps there, the conversations you've been having with labor, and you mentioned SEAU 925. And I just wanted to say thank you.

uh, just a huge amount of you and the team at, um, the work in to make sure t providers and the company have an understanding abou is so important and that and meaningful steps towa childcare providers, sim how that's a really good investment for those child care businesses and organizations.

So I really appreciate the work that D.L.

has put into those discussions and I know that community members, including folks from the labor community, very much appreciate that as well.

And I think those conversations combined with the demonstration projects through the county's Best Starts for Kids levy give us a real shot at having child care workers have the money that they need to stay in these jobs, have greater longevity, and turn our kiddos into, you know, turn our systems into a more equitable system for all kiddos.

And this is a win-win.

And I'm just real excited about it.

So I found a thank you for that really hard work.

I know it's time intensive and very much appreciated.

Okay, colleagues, any other questions or comments?

I'm happy to report that we are about just on time, so I'm excited about that.

Okay, Director Chappelle, anything else you wanted to add?

No, just wanted to, as you can tell, we're excited to continue to serve our brilliant scholars and families through these investments, as you heard today.

And the reality is it just takes a truly, it truly takes a real collaboration to make this happen.

So thank you for allowing us to share what we're doing, and we're looking forward to continuing to support our families and young scholars.

Absolutely.

Well, thank you, Cameron and Monica and Director Chappelle for being with us today.

Thanks for all the hard work.

I know there's more work that is being done.

So just want to thank you all and your teams for, you know, really being innovative, honestly, and for also just learning how to adapt in a period of time where adaptation is super important.

Thanks to you all.

Okay, folks, I'm gonna say whatever words I need to say to bring us to a conclusion.

So if there is no further business to come before the committee, the committee will be adjourned.

Hearing no further business, that does conclude our meeting for today and our meeting is adjourned.

Again, I wanna thank you all for your participation today.

Take care, bye-bye.