Committee on Neighborhoods, Education, Civil Rights & Culture 1/28/22

Terrific.

Thank you, son.

Good morning, everyone.

The January 28, 2022 regularly scheduled committee meeting of the Neighborhoods, Education, Civil Rights, and Culture Committee will come to order.

It is 9.31 a.m.

I'm Tammy Morales, chair of the committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Lewis?

Present.

Nelson?

Strauss?

Present.

Vice Chair Sawant?

Present.

Chair Morales?

Here.

Floor present.

Terrific, thank you.

Sarah is here.

Council Member Nelson.

Thank you.

Five present.

Thank you, good morning everyone.

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

Hearing no objection, today's agenda is adopted.

Colleagues, I want to say good morning to everyone.

This is the first meeting of this new committee.

In addition to the Office of Civil Rights and the Office of Arts and Culture, there are three new departments in my purview, Department of Neighborhoods, Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs, and the Department of Education and Early Learning.

I also have a new committee clerk, Devin Silvernail is here with us this morning.

I'm really looking forward to working with city staff in these new departments and continuing to serve our neighbors.

You know, as I was thinking about how this committee came together, whether we're talking about language access for immigrants or supporting economic recovery for our arts community, building a more robust early learning infrastructure for our littlest Seattleites, or investing to support community ownership of land so that we build community wealth, Really the goals of this committee are to increase access to opportunity and to ensure that we're, my goal is to ensure that we're centering racial equity in how we move forward as a city.

I want to invite the public to let us know what you'd like to hear from this committee, from the departments that are here.

And I'm happy to incorporate ideas and suggestions into our committee calendar as we dive into the work of these departments.

And finally, I want to thank our city staff for the work that they do on behalf of our neighbors.

I know very well that working for the city can be challenging, even before COVID.

And now that we're entering our third year of the crisis, which I don't think any of us ever could have anticipated, it's really important to acknowledge the work that you've all been doing.

So I just wanna say thank you.

Today's agenda will be hearing from the three new departments, departments that are new to me, Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs, Department of Neighborhoods, and the Department of Education and Early Learning.

So that is what we've got lined up for today.

And so I am going to go ahead and open it up for public comment.

So we will open the general public comment period.

Before I go through the long script, I just want to double check.

I don't see that we have anyone signed up for public comment.

Is that correct?

There is one public comment registrant.

There is.

OK.

My apologies.

So then I will proceed.

I'm asking everyone to be patient as we open this online system.

We're always looking for ways to fine tune the process and ensure that we have meaningful public participation in our council meetings.

It is our strong intent to have public comment regularly on meeting agendas, but we do reserve the right to modify public comment if we feel that this is being abused or is unsuitable for our meetings.

So I'll moderate the public comment period in the following manner.

Technically, the comment period is open for 20 minutes if we have people signed up.

Each speaker will have two minutes to speak.

I'll call on the speaker.

And if you haven't registered but would like to speak, you can sign up before the end of the public comment period by going to the council's website at Seattle.gov backslash council.

And the public comment link is also listed in today's agenda.

Once I call your name, the speaker will be given the, will unmute.

Sorry, I just lost my place in the script.

Once I call the speaker's name, staff will unmute the appropriate microphone and an automatic prompt of you have been unmuted will be your cue as a speaker to unmute your own phone and by pressing star six to begin speaking.

Please state your name, the item you're addressing, and as a reminder, items should relate to items on today's agenda.

You'll hear a chime when 10 seconds are left.

Once you hear the chime, please begin to wrap up your comments.

And once you've completed your public comment, we ask that you please disconnect from the line.

If you'd like to continue following the meeting, you can do so at Seattle Channel or other listening options that are listed on the agenda.

Okay, so the public comment period is now open.

We do have one speaker, Alexander Lomas.

So Alexander, if you would please press star six to unmute, and then you will have two minutes to speak.

Hi, yep, my name is Alex.

And unfortunately, when I looked for the agenda, it didn't provide me the items.

But I was planning on commenting on the like Department of Neighborhoods and how I hope that this will lead to a less bureaucratically slowing process of building new housing in better dense housing.

You know, as someone who has kind of watched a lot of development projects go into place in Seattle, I think that the current or maybe even now past system has been far too bureaucratic in its nature and how buildings that fully meet the codes, meet the standards, are still rejected on basis of character or some other reasoning.

And I find that given a building meets code and is a net benefit for a community in how it provides housing, especially dense housing, to a community, I believe that it should be able to go through a lot easier and a lot faster than what it currently is.

I also believe that with the current more bureaucratic system in place, I believe housing can be subject to, I don't wanna say manipulation, but a lobbying system that slows down the production of housing, which can negatively harm the housing supply and cause more and more homelessness.

So I just wanted to kind of wish this department the best in kind of fighting that kind of slowdown of new construction and developing a better housing for Seattle overall.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Alex, for calling in.

I do not see any other speakers, so at this time we'll close public comment and move on to the first item on our agenda.

Will the clerk please read item one into the record?

Yes, item one.

Agenda item one, 2021 report of the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs for briefing and discussion.

Thank you very much.

Okay, so again, colleagues, I am excited to be hearing from folks from the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs.

I did ask the department to present a review of their work in 2021 candidly for my benefit so that I can gear myself up for this.

So we have a lot of information in the presentation.

And they know that they're going to highlight the big items for us to be considering.

But I wanted to make sure that we at least had all the information available to us.

So I want to thank the staff for putting all of that together.

And I will hand it over.

hand it over to Catherine Cortez and Joaquin Wee of the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs.

Hello.

Can you hear me?

Yes, please go ahead.

Okay, thank you.

I'm Catherine Cortez.

I'm the Finance and Operations Manager at the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs.

We call ourselves oddly OIRA, or some people call it OIRA.

Either one is okay.

And I just wanted to mention on the outset that we are in director transition.

Our current director, Kubu, who has led us these last seven years, is leaving the city on February 1st, and we have a new incoming director on February 7th, Hamdi Mohamed.

And so that's why you get Joaquin and me today talking about what we have done so far and that you'll be able to hear from the new director when she comes in about our ongoing work.

I'm going to just briefly sort of touch on our background because I know there are some members who are new to our office and say that the mission of our office is to improve the lives of Seattle's immigrant and refugee communities.

by engaging them in decisions about the city of Seattle's future and ensuring that the city's programs and services equitably meet the needs of our community members, whatever their national origin, citizenship status, or language of preference.

We are, of course, a welcoming city.

And that is manifested in some ways through our office.

I will also say we have a lot of slides today.

I will not try to cover all the material, Joaquin and I won't try to cover everything on it, but please feel free to jump in council members, ask us questions or have us slow down or speed up if that suits you.

So moving on, we are a small office.

We are just 11 FTE in 2022 budget, but we cover a range of programmatic work to do with citizenship, employment, legal services.

What we're going to focus on today is primarily our 2021 responses to three major crises, immigration, pandemic, and racism.

These were continuing from 2020, but we added a really strong new tool and focus, as you can imagine, vaccines.

All of our work focuses on equity, and we always begin with community.

But in 2021 in particular, we were challenged to take our small community-based responses and really scale them up while continuing to be really rooted in community.

Luckily, with our small size, we can be responsive and innovative.

And we applied that to three things that we'll talk about primarily.

We'll talk a little bit about our immigration crisis responses at the end of the presentation.

But the three main focuses that we're going to have today are talking about our outreach and referral strategies to get vaccines to disproportionately impacted communities, including our immigrant communities at scale.

The work that we did on Seattle Relief Fund to get relief funds into folks' hands, $25 million in collaboration with HSD allocated for this purpose.

And then thirdly, fostering awareness and tools for language access for all city departments, really taking that citywide.

So with that, I will skip over a little bit, just a record here of the particular funding sources that we used for these two big efforts.

And then I will move on to my colleague, Joaquin, to talk about our vaccine outreach.

Hello, greetings, council members.

Much has changed since I last appeared before you almost exactly one year ago today.

And what was then talking about our plan for equitable vaccine outreach.

I am happy to report that despite the lows of this ongoing pandemic, our work to lead with equity did have a number of highs.

Next slide, please.

Now, if you've ever completed a racial equity toolkit, you'll know that one of the first steps is community engagement.

And despite the very short timeline, we convened three large roundtable discussions with immigrant and refugee leaders to help inform the city's vaccine distribution strategy.

Next slide, please.

Now, this led us to our primary goal to ensure that Seattle's vulnerable BIPOC residents have equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines.

And to help us reach that goal, we centered on three strategies listed here.

One, ensure COVID-19 materials and information are available in language and at places where specific audiences access information.

Two, engage trusted messengers to promote culturally relevant outreach and engagement strategies to reach vaccine-hesitant immigrant and refugee community members.

And three, support access to COVID-19 vaccinations as individuals and families become ready.

Next slide, please.

Now for strategy one, to fulfill our obligations, we focused on ensuring translated City of Seattle COVID-19 webpages and shareable in-language images like the one you see here.

We also regularly provided educational materials in language to community groups, including small businesses, faith institutions, and nonprofits.

OIRA also conducted a multi-phased ethnic media campaign in seven languages and 30 online print, radio, and television outlets with messaging to counter vaccine hesitancy and ambivalence and these days recalcitrance.

This included sending translated press releases, which could then be easily placed into articles and other stories.

And then we contracted with community-based organizations to help inform limited English proficient immigrants and refugees through culturally appropriate activities, such as small outdoor in-person events or through phone calls to community members.

Next slide, please.

Six organizations continue to host a dedicated community COVID helpline in Seattle's top languages, and helplines have fielded over 2,000 calls since May 2021. These helpline partner contracts are funded through February, and we will be in the process of reaching out to these community organizations to determine which if any, will continue this service after the end of city funding.

It is possible that all or some would like the city to continue to publicize these phone lines and activities via social media or other mediums as we progress throughout the year.

Next slide, please.

Now for strategy two, we know that in-language messaging on social media or in Spanish-language newspapers can only go so far.

So our next strategy relied on trusted community leaders to take the COVID-19 vaccination info to the parking lots, streets, and stoops of our neighborhoods.

I won't read to you this full quote from one of our vaccine outreach partners, but we heard repeatedly that the person-to-person and voice-to-voice, text-message-to-text-message strategy was key to countering this false and dangerous vaccine misinformation that unfortunately continues today.

Next slide, please.

This is a list of community orgs who worked through most of last year to partner with the city, ensuring that the most vulnerable members of their community could access COVID-19 vaccinations.

And the image here was taken from a King 5 News report talking about the tremendous work of those, our CBO outreach partners.

Next slide, please.

Lastly, not only do we work with organizations on helplines and outreach, but perhaps most importantly, we work to ensure that the Seattle Fire Department vaccination distribution happened in immigrant neighborhoods.

This was a huge highlight to be able to integrate community organizing into this process, a process that led to community vaccination events or pop-ups in partnership with mosques, churches, and nonprofits ready to host.

Together, we planned 14 pop-ups from February to June, providing 3,352 vaccinations to mostly BIPOC residents.

I'm happy to report that we continue to work with public health and the fire department to plan upcoming pop-ups to address continued need for boosters and pediatric vaccinations.

This includes six CBO partners organizing pop-ups in this month, January, currently.

Next slide.

What we learned, we sure learned a lot from this experience.

And when I say learned a lot, I really mean that what we know to be best practices continue to be proven as, in fact, best practices.

One, impacted communities need identification and program design from the beginning.

We integrate them from the beginning.

And that, of course, is the cornerstone of the racial equity toolkits.

Two, provide compensation to achieve equitable outcomes across communities, of course.

Three, always provide translated information.

Four, ensure continuity of services through sustained funding and support.

And five, be responsive to adapting processes after hearing community need, of course.

Be nimble, and if there needs to be a change in the middle of the process, then be open to the change.

I also want to acknowledge the hard work of our friends at the Department of Neighborhoods who are alongside us throughout this process.

Together with Seattle Fire and the Office of Emergency Management, we all came together to, well, really save lives.

So thank you.

Thank you to all my colleagues in the city.

Thanks, Joaquin.

So now I'll move on, unless there are immediate questions, to talking about the Seattle Relief Fund.

We all know what a huge economic impact the pandemic has had on our friends and colleagues and community members.

And so the Seattle Relief Fund was funded at the $25 million level by the council to provide direct cash assistance to low-income Seattle households who've experienced these economic impacts.

and those disproportionately impacted by the public health crisis.

And so there were two phases to this rollout of funds.

In 2020, we had administered the Seattle Disaster Relief Fund for immigrants.

which brought $1,000 to $3,000 awards, relief awards, to people who had been unable to access federal relief or state unemployment.

And this phase one of our 2021 Seattle Relief Fund was done recertifying those folks who had received awards who were still eligible because of their income and their Seattle nexus, primarily living in Seattle, a handful of other workers at Seattle, our students in Seattle.

And we managed to accomplish that to reach all of our award recipients and recertified so that we sent out almost $6 million in one and $3,000 awards in that phase.

And then phase two was a huge second phase that we did in partnership with not only HSD, but departments across the city in an IDT And there was a new application process that was not just for immigrants, but for low income residents of Seattle to build on the success of being able to reach out to folks in our SDRF.

And of course, just noting here that phase one recipients weren't eligible for phase two, that while immigrants, of course, could apply for phase two, also it was not any that received money in the first round.

So I'll mention that the full report and the executive summary on this will be available at the end of February with all kinds of analysis and so forth.

So I'm just going to hit the high points here and we'll make that report available on request and then broadly publicly available as well once it's complete.

So as I mentioned, we were partnering with HSD and with 10 departments around the city.

We started with As we always do, community, hearing from community, what was the need, what was the way that we should define our priority categories, knowing that as much money as we had, we did not have nearly enough to meet need.

We worked with a partner that we had worked with successfully to administer the funds process the responses to applications, and then to make the awards.

That was the Scholar Fund.

And we engaged 46 partners to conduct outreach in language application assistance for folks who needed that extra help to make sure that our low barrier application was filled out correctly.

And we did all this in nine different languages, in media, eight different languages in terms of translated materials.

And we put a bunch of safeguards in place because we all know that there can be bad actors, and we wanted to prevent that.

And we did manage to, with our 13-point system, then expanded, catch some so that we can be sure that those who received awards were really, truly eligible and in need.

There were almost 64,000 applications received for the second round, dispersing more than $16 million.

And I'll just say a word here on this pie chart.

So in order to be eligible for this funding, you needed to have a Seattle nexus.

Primarily, this was residents in Seattle.

So you can see that of those who received the cash assistance in Phase 2, almost 99% were Seattle residents.

If people said that they were Seattle residents, then we did not go on to ask them the questions about whether they might qualify because they had a Seattle student in their household or because they had a workspace as an artist or cultural worker within Seattle.

So that just over 1% is only folks who did not also live in Seattle.

There may be, of course, many other artists or Seattle students within that Seattle resident category.

We had a number of priority factors that we used to measure people's vulnerability and need.

Many people hitting many of these categories.

Unstable housing and loss of income or job being the highest percentages.

almost the vast majority of folks who eventually received these $1,000 to $3,000 awards suffered.

And we had a really broad demographic, racial demographics.

These are non-overlapping categories, as you can see.

And I will mention also that 31% of our applications that were assisted with were in language, so in a language other than English.

And we heard wonderful results from the community.

We're just mentioning a couple of anecdotal ones here.

I won't again read these quotes, but really people who were in dire situations on the brink of eviction, really having bills piling up, that we were able to give at least some small amount of relief.

And we managed to get this out before the holidays, which to the money and to almost all of the hands of people who are awarded.

And so we know that that made a big difference for folks.

We really saw Seattle Values in action here.

Strong collaboration with community, our outreach partners, and strong relationships that we built on within the city to make sure that we can get this done as quickly and as securely as possible.

And we very much fulfilled our mission as Immigrant and Refugee Affairs to make sure that language access was at the forefront of this, so that people were able to access this regardless of their ability to speak English.

OK, so moving on to language access, I will mention that as an effort that we scaled up greatly this year.

I will say that the Language Access Program has been around a little while, but the executive order that really made it strong citywide, embedded in citywide practice, came in 2017. And we've been slowly moving towards cultural shift, direct investment.

COVID made a huge emphasis on that, because it was so important to be able to get out timely information, curate information in languages that folks could understand.

And so it's in some ways been an opportunity for us to really embed these practices and skills throughout the city as different departments took roles in COVID response.

And so some things that have happened just in the past year are a centralized translation system.

So that instead of individual departments either contracting with a vendor that does all kinds of languages, but may not be locally based, or having to find their own individual translators that speak, that are local and speak local versions of different languages.

They're able to do that centrally.

They, we can, and then those translators are able to get their payments, not just from individual city departments, but in one lump sum.

for each set, maybe month of work that they do.

And in order to back that up, of course, we have translated, we've recruited and established a community translator team, 50 plus local translators, so that we have that capacity to quickly respond to all of these needs.

Also, for the first time for the 2023-24 cycle, of budget.

We worked with departments that had 24 departments submit language access plans that really talk about their need and their spending so far and how that need will be met going or what would be needed to meet those need to translate and communicate in all those languages to their audience in 23, 24. And A key backbone of this is the City Language Access Liaison Network.

So representatives of all city departments who are meeting, really beginning to understand the best practices and the needs, not just for translation and interpretation, but for really communicating messages, not just in English, but in all the languages that our Seattle community members speak.

I have put tools here that I don't need to cover.

And so with that, I will go back to Joaquin.

Thanks, Catherine.

I'd like to conclude our presentation by briefly discussing our work last year to undo the significant and fortunately lasting damage that the Trump administration wrought upon immigrant and refugee residents.

Next slide, please.

While last year Trump was no longer the president, his policies and rhetoric continued to have far-reaching effects on immigrant communities in Seattle.

What this means for OIRA is that instead of publishing public comments on the record against anti-immigrant federal rule changes, we started writing comments in support of pro-immigrant and pro-refugee policies, such as reversing Trump's harmful public charge order and increasing refugee admission caps to levels before the Trump administration.

Last year, we also continued our national leadership on a number of pro-immigrant actions.

We led a coalition of municipalities, including New York City and Los Angeles County, in opposing the Department of Justice's accelerated dedicated court docket.

This would erode due process for families seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.

We also continued our leadership in important national coalitions, such as Cities for Action and Cities for Citizenship, which helped propel Seattle to become a leading city on immigrant integration, as well as part of the vanguard of cities across the country that defended our immigrant and refugee residents and stood against the Trump administration.

Lastly, we were proud to submit our four racial equity toolkits, which directly informed our Seattle Relief Fund and COVID-19 vaccination work.

This concludes our presentation, and we're happy to take your questions.

Thank you.

Thanks so much, both of you.

I have a couple of questions, and then I'm happy to open it up to my colleagues if they want to chime in about anything.

You don't have numbers on your slides, so I'm going to say the COVID-19 Vaccination Community Helplines.

I have it as slide eight.

So you mentioned, I think this was the right slide, that this program is funded through February.

which is just next month and is providing really important service especially since we're still in this and really want to make sure that everybody has access to the information that they need to be able to access and feel comfortable accessing vaccination.

So can you talk a little bit about what happens at the end of February if we can't figure out this funding situation and what kind of resources you're needing in order to be able to continue these partnerships?

And I had a third part of the question, but I forgot.

So let's start there.

Yeah, I'd be happy to speak to that.

So our process, as Joaquin described, is that we fund these small organizations, six that you see listed here, in order to maintain helplines.

And we also fund some of their organizations in order to make sure that they are able to, if not maintain a constant, consistent helpline to do outreach events and to otherwise make available information in their languages to their immigrant communities.

And to do that, we give them fairly modest monthly stipend of about $4,000 per organization per month.

That funding will end.

And so what we'll be doing is reaching out to them and determining, are you able to continue providing this service if we're, you know, channeling as much information as we can from public health, from other places to make sure that they're aware of what the city's strategies and resources are?

Are they going to be able to continue to fund whether it's a staff person to be able to answer the phone or to be sending out a translating materials in-house, et cetera, whether they'll be able to do that.

And if they are able to do that, we'll be talking to them about how they might want us to partner with them to continue to publicize the availability of this information in social media.

And, you know, but our ability to buy ads and in ethnic media and otherwise publicize or to fund them to continue this ends.

And to do that, we're spending about $64,000 per a month on directly on these community-based organizations in order to be able to staff that, to be able to accompany it with, you know, a media strategy, even a modest one, You know, it would be about $300,000 for three months.

We would love to be good partners and to be able to look at a longer term of six months or so, so that they can really build in that capacity, maintain it, and know kind of that the city's there with them trying to reach these most vulnerable folks.

Does that cover what you?

Yeah, thank you.

That's helpful information, additional information.

Council Member Nelson, did you have a question about this slide or a different topic?

Well, one in part is a different topic.

Thank you.

Do people still need an appointment to get a vaccination at our city-run vaccination sites?

Because if so, One thing that I noticed when I visited the Rainier Beach vaccination site when it was last March is the communications that people get.

So it's one thing to have multilingual information about these sites, but the appointments, you know, to get an appointment, that website is all in English and the emails and texts that people get back are in English.

And so I'm just wondering, I think that that could be, There needs to be some multilingual materials there to help people actually get into a vaccination site, one of the city-run ones, if it's still needed.

That's what I wanted to know.

Yes, thank you for that question.

As I understand, both sites are taking walk-ins for folks with no appointment, but the preference is for folks to make an appointment.

And so I do know that folks have been able to, it's a longer wait, but folks have been able to roll up to either the Rainier Beach or the West Seattle vaccination clinics, which are currently in operation, and to get an appointment.

It just might be a wait of one or two hours.

And regarding the Signetics is the platform that we use for the, or that Seattle Fire Department uses for the appointments.

And there was language access integrated into that.

There have been some issues regarding that, and that's something that we are that we have notified them about.

And we are able to at least let people know that if they're having trouble with Signetics, people can call the customer service bureau from Monday through Saturday, I believe 8.30 to five or to six, and then talk with a customer service representative who can quickly bring a telephonic interpreter through language line solutions and then talk people through the process and maybe even encourage them to walk up if needed or to even walk them through the process of making the appointment for them on that end.

So what sometimes we're not able to do through online were able to complement with the phone.

And to be honest, a lot of immigrant and refugee limited English proficient folks prefer the phone and often get overwhelmed by the internet.

I mean, English is my first language.

I get overwhelmed by the internet sometimes.

So sometimes having a voice on the other end of the phone is helpful for even me.

And with respect to that, I'll also mention that all of our funded partners are trained in using signetics and have been able to assist people in making in making appointments when they're ready to do so.

That's part of what we are funding, of course, to be able to attend trainings and learn how to use the city resources so that they can be trusted navigators.

Thanks so much, Council Member Nelson, did you have another question that that answer your question?

OK, your hand is still up, so I just want to know.

Yeah, I was about to take that down.

OK, OK, fair enough.

OK, thanks.

I want to stay on this, particularly the language access issue.

First of all, I did not know about the sort of interdepartmental work that's happening to bring all of the translation services in-house.

So I'm really happy to hear about that.

And I think the issue that it raises or the question that it raises for me is, As somebody who's been involved in a lot of community meetings, you know, my previous work was doing a lot of community engagement work, and the language access is always an issue.

Does this mean, or can you talk a little bit about what it means to have every city department now contemplating their community engagement language access needs?

And will that, does this mean that there will be like a line item in each department's budget for language access when they are doing community outreach strategies for their work?

Or can you just talk a little bit about what this means across the city in our departments in terms of, this component of really authentic community engagement?

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, as you know, every department in the city is vastly different.

And so we have sought flexibility for departments in making sure that they can determine whether they want to build into, for example, each of their program budgets, an amount that they can use for language access to centralize it within their division.

and have it as a line item, as you say, and so forth.

Citywide, the funding is not entirely centralized.

The program in OIRA is small.

It's just two FTE.

And those folks are able to go out or they will be able to fill the second position to provide technical assistance from early stages for each department.

So being able to think about how are they gathering the data about what their need is, how are they creating their materials in a way that is translation ready and so forth.

So that small piece of budget is centralized.

Otherwise departments will have some discretion to decide how they're doing it.

with that support.

And then once they get to the stage where they need to contract with interpreters or translators then that can be done through this central assignment system.

And I did want to just mention you had talked about bringing it in-house and that's not quite true unless we think of our whole Seattle community as in-house and that we're really working with translators who are in the community.

There is of course the language premium policy which was implemented And it's still coming on board from a couple of years ago for city employees to make sure that we're taking, we're compensating employees who are bilingual and able to use those language skills on the job.

And we're using those to make sure that our response to community and our offerings are more accessible.

But in terms of our professional translation and our ability to really communicate outwards in language, we really do rely on community members for that and compensate them for that.

Okay, very helpful.

We'll be diving deeper into this part for sure.

Okay, colleagues, does anybody else have questions for Catherine or Joaquin?

I do not see any.

I have.

I'm sorry to bug you again.

No, please go ahead.

So the utility shutoff moratorium will be ending, and so I just wanted to Let folks know that City Light does have a utility discount program.

And so I chair that committee.

And so please, if you want information about those, or just get the word out that if folks need help on utility bills, there is a discount program that exists.

Also, I just wanted to add that we are fortunate to work with Seattle City Light on an ethnic media campaign to ensure that in-language advertisements as well as press releases were placed in different ethnic media outlets around the city, informing people about the utility discount program and the different pieces of information Seattle City Light has about the program as well as numbers they can call to talk with someone with an interpreter.

Got it.

So you're on it.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Okay, well, I want to say thank you again, Catherine and Joaquin.

And, and I also do want to say that I am, I am wishing Ku well.

I know that as a refugee from Vietnam, she really brought a critical lived experience to the work of your office and she leaves a really important body of work behind in improving access to resources for our neighbors.

So wishing her well and just wanted to say thank you again.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Okay, let's move to the next item.

Devin, will you please read item two into the record?

Agenda item 2, 2022 Department of Neighborhoods Work Preview for briefing and discussion.

Great, thank you.

Okay, so we've got Department of Neighborhoods Director Montillas here, Malia Brooks, am I saying that right, Malia?

And Jackie Minna from Department of Neighborhoods.

So I will hand it over to you to share your presentation.

Thank you, Councilmember.

Thank you for the opportunity for having us to describe a little bit about what the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods is doing.

My name is Andres Mantilla.

I am the director of the department.

Lucky to be part of a great team, some of which are joined here today with us to talk a little bit of the overview of 2022. talk a little bit about the work that we did in 2021, and then really introduce some exciting new initiatives, including a new division that we're launching in 2022, focused on reimagination and recovery, and specifically on a new generational wealth program.

Council Member, I know that you're very interested in.

Thank you to Council Member Strauss, who previously chaired our committee, and loved the work that we did with him, and looking forward to the work that we can do with you, Council Member.

So I will let my other colleagues introduce themselves.

Malia.

I'm Malia Brooks.

I am the new Division Director for our Reimagination and Recovery Division.

I'm happy to be here.

Thanks.

And I'm Jackie Mina, the Reimagination and Recovery Strategic Lead for DON.

Great.

Are you able to see my screen here?

Great.

See if we can advance the slide.

Here we go.

So a little bit about who we are as a department.

Our department is over 70 FTEs, really embedded in the community.

We provide resources and opportunities for community members to build strong communities and improve their quality of life.

Our vision is to engage with every Seattle resident.

We meet people where they are and help them build closer ties, develop a stronger sense of place and engage with their community.

Each other ends with city government.

We do this by really centering two North Star goals, what we call our North Star goals.

Goal one is to put race and equity at the center of all of our decisions and actions.

And goal two is to invest in the power of community to forge their own solutions.

And we do that through a number of ways, including our community grants that we'll talk about a little bit later.

Um, we organize our work around 4 core strategies.

The trusted advocate model is 1 that came from community council members.

You are.

Familiar with some of this work that came out of South Seattle, South King county and rainier beach and white center through the white center.

C.

D. A. But the trusted advocate model is based on where we intentionally send our community and our work.

Is through our community liaison program, which is meant to build authentic relationships that are rooted in mutual trust and respect.

We are currently in the contracting process with our 2022. Community liaisons, but in 2021. We had 45 different community liaisons representing 27 languages and communities.

You heard from our partners in OIRA.

Our community liaisons work very closely with OIRA in things like the dissemination of vaccine information and education.

as well as in other initiatives.

Our people-centered storytelling is where we invest in community stories and provide a platform for community voices to help shape the civic conversation.

I really encourage you to take a look at some of those stories.

We're consistently publishing those, one went out this week, that really kind of highlight the experiences that folks are having through the pandemic.

and really kind of elevating some of the important storylines for their communities.

We invest in programs around civic education including our PACE program.

Some of you have participated with PACE in 2020 and 2019. We led the city's census work in partnership with OIRA as well and through our civic education program we share Resource knowledge and tools to increase civic participation.

Cultivate effective civic activists and leaders, and in 2022, part of the civic education and 1 of our priorities is going to be the council redistricting process.

We'll talk about later.

And then finally, our 4th core strategy is investing around equitable engagement and investments.

This is such a core piece of what we do.

Our focus is to engage with communities most impacted by city policies and projects.

Center their ideas in the development and implementation of city investments and this is back to investing in the power of communities to forge their own decisions.

Our community grants is centered in this work.

We have our Food Equity Fund, our Neighborhood Matching Fund.

The Neighborhood Matching Fund has been around since the late 80s, and in fact, today is the release date for the next round of around $860,000, $850,000 in Neighborhood Matching Fund grants that will open today and close on March 28th.

So interested parties should go to our website to find out more information.

As part of our equitable engagement, we are also launching this week, and thank you to the leadership of Council President Juarez, the Indigenous Advisory Council.

That application is open right now and will close on February 28th at 5 p.m.

So a note for those that are interested.

So in 2022, we're going to highlight here a few priorities.

This is not everything that we're doing, but just some of the work that we're doing that I'd like to highlight with the caveat that we're still in the transition with the new mayor, kind of identifying additional priorities that will be added onto this.

So in 2022, our work is to co-lead the racial equity and engagement work as part of the West Seattle Ballard Link Extension, or the WSBLI project.

And DON is responsible for building relationships with community, providing the capacity and partnership necessary for community to be powerful self-advocates.

And although we are active along the whole alignment from West Seattle to Ballard, we have a specific area of focus in the Chinatown International District, given the history of the investment in the project that has happened in that community, and as well as in Delbridge, where we're looking through our racial equity toolkit at specific interventions and specific policy shifts that should be considered as part of Sound Transit and the city's work there.

We're going to hear a little bit about our generational wealth program.

This is an exciting piece of work for 2022 that was funded through the Equitable Communities Initiative last year.

And our work here is to lead an interdepartmental team to build a baseline infrastructure for city departments to learn, collaborate, and invest in community-centered approaches.

Council Member Morales, We are very aware of your statement of legislative intent around community wealth, and we'll be working through this IDT to address some of those concerns, as well as the guaranteed basic income pilot that was passed by council last year.

As I mentioned, we have our community grants in 2022. We are continuing to strengthen the recently launched food equity fund program.

that invests in community work where communities have been most impacted by food and health inequities.

This is particularly important as a result of the current pandemic, which has exasperated food inequities, food deserts, and we're really looking at funding food justice programs as part of this.

We've heard a little, but you've well, you've heard in the, in the public comment, and it's a priority for us to work around the comprehensive plan.

We have 2 ways that we're working with our colleagues at the office of planning and community development.

1 is through our community liaison program where.

They're going to partner with several community liaisons to expand and extend their community engagement efforts over the next couple of years.

And then specifically through our work with our historic preservation program, that is going to use this opportunity to update the historic resource survey that hasn't been fully updated since 2008, 2009. And then finally, our redistricting, which builds off of our census work and continues to facilitate the outreach and engagement and educational attendance of the redistricting work plan, which will be due November of this year.

So that gives an overview of some of the things that we're working on.

If folks have questions or council members have questions now, I'm happy to take those, or if not, we can go into the new division

Let's go ahead and finish the presentation and then we'll do questions.

Great.

Thank you.

So as I mentioned, we have launched in 2022 a new division in the department that's called the reimagination and recovery division, and I'm going to turn it over to my colleagues, Malia Brooks and Jackie Bennett to take us through it.

So, again, my name is Malia Brooks, very happy to be here today and the opportunity to present before you.

We are really excited about being part of the development of our new division reimagination recovery, which grew out of the community and staff demand for more increased accountability.

and more equitable government.

This division seeks to cross-pollinate transformative initiatives, innovation, investments into citywide efforts, policies, and practices with an emphasis on prioritizing communities that have been historically and intentionally under-resourced.

Our communities will co-create programming with this division and drive the changes that we want to see in local government.

Sorry, I think I forgot to say next slide.

Next slide.

As part of our division, we have our living system.

Our living system, as noted in our commitment to co-design programs with community, we are centering this value in our internal relationships with DON staff.

Over the past few years, DON has been working to ensure racial equity is at the core of how we are anchoring our work as a department.

In 2018, we launched the Living Systems as we reimagined our RSA Change Team.

The vision of our Living System is to foster a healthy, whole, thriving living system which results in a diverse people who are resilient, full of energy, peace, compassion, balance, interdependent, connected, in community, a place where there is movement and growth.

People feel loved, trusted, protected, and safe.

Next slide.

Our Living System Workgroups support staff to build racial equity skills, reflect on programs and policies, and lead positive change at the department.

Ultimately, we want to ensure RCAI is not an add-on, but truly integrated into DUN's work and well-being.

Our Living System Workgroups are Learning Community, Hiring Recruitment and Retention Workgroup, Policy Workgroup, Dismantling Anti-Blackness, also known as DAB, White Caucus, People of Color.

These workgroups are organized by our DON Living System co-leads.

These are 12 staff members that serve as our co-leads, and they're committed to doing RSAI along with their existing work.

Next slide, please.

For 2022, we are addressing racial equity in three system areas in our department.

The expansion of our racial equity analysis and transparency and DON's budget processing.

Strengthening partnerships between staff and leadership to ensure DON's racial equity structures are seamlessly working together to address the needs of our department and our communities.

We're investing in internal communication tools that promote a shared understanding of how D.O.N. is building towards racial equity.

Next slide, please.

Jackie Minow will now present on our new generational wealth program.

Yes, thank you, Malia.

So we're tremendously excited to follow ECI's lead and structure our generational wealth investments this year in a way that builds a strong foundation for the city to make long-term strides, including race-based wealth gaps.

This means spending this year learning, aligning, and base building.

Four major goals that we've identified for our generational wealth work in 2022 are one, building strong alignment among our departments so all departments feel a sense of shared ownership over this work and we move forward as one city in our strategies.

As Andres mentioned, we started convening an IDT a few months ago and together departments are working on a shared work plan and by the end of this year we're hoping to have a shared communications plan for how this work is going, how we're measuring impact, and what recommendations we have for how this work can continue at the city.

Our second major goal, we'll be launching a community roundtable and learning hub, whereby staff and community can partner to develop a shared approach to closing race-based wealth gaps.

As part of this exploratory work, we'll be looking into specific strategies, such as estate and succession planning, banking, investments in economic markets and real estate, and specifically the impacts of a guaranteed basic income as directed by Council last year.

Our third major goal will be working with national policy partners to grow our understanding of the opportunities and the barriers that may impact our long-term vision for this work.

And lastly, This year, we will be launching community-based pilots to begin the work of directly investing in wealth building for BIPOC communities.

These pilots will be tangible actions that we can learn and grow from for future programming and recommendations.

These goals are also intentionally interacting and they build off of each other and that's because we want to really have a multi-layered strategies for how we're addressing economic inequities that are impacting BIPOC communities.

Specifically, we hope to build this work so it's addressing systemic issues and can, with time, begin to close the race-based wealth gaps that are impacting our BIPOC communities.

Thank you, Jackie.

West Seattle Ballot Link Extension, also referred to as WSBLE, is a project that will bring 14 new stations, two water crossings, and a new tunnel through downtown Seattle.

This is a highly impactful project, and we recognize that historically, transportation projects have had impacts on surrounding communities.

and that that burden of those impacts has primarily been carried by BIPOC communities, Black, Indigenous, people of color.

The city has committed significant resources in staffing and community partnerships to disrupt this historical burden of harm on BIPOC communities.

DOENT is leading the racial equity and engagement work group responsible for building relationships with community and providing capacity to be powerful self-advocates.

We send our work by partnering with community supporting capacity building and transparency reporting of our efforts to community.

In addition, we will push sound transit and our capacity as partner to center BIPOC voices and the planning development of the WSBI project.

One example is through our joint racial equity toolkit, the first of its kind and interagency collaboration.

DON has been and will continue to approach this work through the reimagination framework, and we work each day to actually disrupt historical trends.

The Chinatown International District, also referred to as CID.

The CID is a historically significant, culturally rich community.

In 2019, most of the recent work in community self-determination started with the founding of the community coalition, the CID Vision Group.

Thank you to our partners, Susan Yang of Denise Louis Education Center and Elaine Ishihara of API Community Advocating Together for help for tirelessly effort to convene this broad-based coalition of community stakeholders.

DO and is grateful in the last year's budget cycle, a new position was created and additional resources to support community's work to advance council, as advanced by you, Council Member Morales and the full council.

The position will focus and reimagine how we can work together within the city.

This position will support organizing our collective efforts, convening departments who work more collaboratively in the CID community, focusing on building relationships that work to repair past harms and provide a roadmap for future collaborations beyond Chinatown International District.

Next slide.

This ends our presentation.

Thank you very much.

Actually, there should be a slide actually above that.

Yeah, I think we made one edit based on a conversation that I need to have with Councilmember Mosqueda.

Okay, so thank you.

This is great.

I have a couple questions.

I see Councilmember Strauss has a question.

First of all, I just want to congratulate you on finding an acronym for the West Seattle Ballard I hadn't heard WSBLE before.

I've been struggling to find an acronym for the name of my committee, and I'm not coming up short.

Anyway, I do have a question about the work happening in the CID.

I know we are going to have a lot of work to do, particularly around community engagement, translating information about the Sound Transit project.

Can you talk a little bit about How shall I say this?

How Sound Transit is contributing to the work that needs to happen with engaging community and how the city partners with them in translation services and getting materials out so that people really understand what's happening with this project.

Yeah, thank you council member and I also want to recognize that Jessica brand from the department of neighborhoods who oversees.

Oversees the work and the transit lead is on as well, but I will say that in a minute.

I will say Council Member, it's a good question.

We've worked very closely, not just with our internal city partners, but with Sound Transit as part of the racial equity work, as part of our community engagement planning.

And Jessica, if you wanna add to that in terms of kind of what the next steps look like as we continue to implement now the community engagement plans.

Yeah, we're excited in 2022 to build on a partnership that we started in 2021 with our community liaison program and Sound Transit.

And so we have contracted with 11 community liaisons to be focused in on the Chinatown International District as well as Delridge.

And so we started last year with some intensive training and support.

And they were able to go out into the community with Sound Transit, doing door-to-door outreach for businesses, attending community meetings, being at fairs and festivals.

This year, actually just last night, they were able to be trained up on the important draft environmental impact statement that was just released.

And so they will be very much helping to spread the word.

Sound Transit has continued to do some translation work, but we were able to, through the community liaisons, actually transition from translation to transcreation, so allowing folks now who understand the content to also help to explain it in language.

And so our partnership is one that continues to expand what both agencies are capable of, and what both agencies are capable of together.

So I'm excited to sort of see how we move forward, but I think a lot of that is in partnership.

Good to know.

I know that's a big challenge.

That material is dense, and I can barely understand it in English.

So kudos to everyone working on that.

I want to go to the generational wealth.

Well, we don't have to go to the slide, but I have a couple questions.

So I really am excited about this work.

I am eager to see how we can start to move in this direction of really closing the racial wealth gap and what the city can do.

I know it's going to be across departments, but I'm wondering if you can maybe talk a little bit more about the outcomes that you seek to demonstrate how we're closing those gaps or if that's, if we're just not there yet.

But I'm always thinking about like, what are the outcomes we're shooting for and how do we get there?

And I know this is new and stuff that we're just starting to pull together, but I'd love to hear a little bit if you have it about what are the outcomes we're looking for and what are the strategies for getting there?

Yeah, we're early in the process, so some of this will change.

But Jackie and Malia, do you want to take that one?

Sure.

I can highlight at least one outcome that we're really looking forward to this year.

As I mentioned, we will be launching pilots this year.

And one of those is, again, directed by ECI to think about financial literacy and how we're investing in programs that are sharing knowledge around how to secure wealth in communities.

And so we're going to be partnering with local nonprofits and perhaps even a legal firm to provide estate and succession planning, financial literacy courses, and pro bono legal services.

And so we're hoping that at least this year, you know, given that we have limited funding, really prioritizing how are we not just growing assets, but securing assets that communities of color have already built, especially when we think about who participates in real estate or in estate planning and succession planning, right?

The numbers there definitely don't point towards communities of color being active participants in those legal systems, and so how can we expand and secure assets that communities have already grown this year.

So we're looking forward to really being able to talk about the impact of that pilot this year.

Another thing that ECI directed was to launch a portal of city resources.

And so we're hoping that through the development and working with other departments on creating an internal inventory of our programs and an evaluation of our programs.

So really understanding, you know, which ones have been most effective in reaching our goals of closing race-based wealth gaps.

I think that'll be a deliverable this year that will really set us as a city on course to make impactful investments in the future.

And so that inventory plus that external portal that will sort of be a hub of resources that community can access and really understand all of the different ways that they can build wealth at different stages of their life or as business owners versus, you know, employees or, you know, however it might be.

But just having that resource available and in a unified place, I think will be another strong deliverable that we'll have hopefully by the end of this year.

Great.

Thank you so much, Jackie.

Council Member Strauss, I'm sorry, you had a question.

Thank you, Chair Morales.

Not so much of a question, just wanted to thank Director Montilla and everyone.

I'm sad to not have you in my committee any longer.

I will say it does make the acronym for my committee much easier going from one to just land use.

I do know that you know I've spoken to the chair about this there's still more work that I'd love to work with you on in the historic districts.

And I just wanted to take the moment to recognize the Department of Neighborhoods does so much from P patches to language recreation storytelling recovery and I want to take this moment to thank you and your team.

I know the people who are doing the work are the ones making all of these changes happen.

Thank you, director.

Yes, thank you very much for the presentation.

I asked the org chart and in the external relations section of your organization, I'm wondering, and the generational wealth focus of Dawn, do you have anybody that's working on a regular basis with the neighborhood chambers, particularly in neighborhoods that are undergoing rapid gentrification?

Yeah, thank you for the question.

Council member Nelson.

We have a external relations division.

So this is we've heard from our reimagination recovery division.

We have an external relations division that's led by Wang Wang, of which our outreach and engagement teams sit under that.

including our community liaison team as well.

Erin Chevron is our outreach lead and within her team are our community engagement coordinators and some other of our strategic advisors that are focused on among many things working with neighborhood groups and then with a particular focus on those that are looking at history of gentrification or displacement, as well as others in the community that we have relationships with.

We're always looking to expand those connections and in relationships, and the team works really hard at doing that.

And I'll just say in terms of the generational wealth building work, OED is a strong partner of ours in really sort of guiding this work, seeing how we're leveraging investments and relationships that we already have in different neighborhoods.

And so that integration is definitely a part of how we're building this program.

Thank you.

Okay.

Any other questions from colleagues?

Don't see any.

So just want to thank you all once again for being here and sharing this presentation.

Really looking forward to learning more in the – particularly in the generational wealth category.

I'm excited for that new division.

And thank you so much for being here.

Thank you.

Okay, let's move on.

Devin, will you please read item three into the record?

Agenda item three, 2022 Department of Education and Early Learning Work Preview for briefing and discussion.

Thank you so much.

Okay, so we've got, I believe we've got Dr. Duane Chappell, Marisa Roussel, and Aaron Okuno, is that right?

Great.

OK.

Good morning, Director Chappelle.

I'm going to hand it off to you.

Yeah.

Okay, good morning Councilmember Morales and thank you for inviting us to committee today.

I also want to say good morning to my to my other or your other our other Councilmember colleagues that are on the committee.

I am the proud and privileged director of the best department in the city, Dr. Chappelle, but I'm also super excited about this opportunity just to kick off this year with an overview of just DEEL's work for work plan, or should I say work, but also for the returning council members to this committee.

As you just mentioned, we are joined by Marissa Roussell.

She's our interim policy director and director of communications.

We're also joined by Erin Okuno.

She's the executive director of Southeast Seattle Education Coalition.

And as I mentioned, just super excited about what we're getting ready to get into.

Next slide, please.

Yeah, so at deal, we truly have just an amazing diverse group of individuals who are super committed to transforming the lives of our Seattle children, youth and families.

As you see here, we're rapidly growing.

department.

We start off now, as you can see, we' folks.

Um, and as you can our annual investment, i So super excited about that and you can go to the next slide.

Thank you.

And, you know, as you can tell, just from my voice, my excitement.

I'm also really proud to share with with you deals commitment to anti racist to being an anti racist organization.

We stand in solidarity with our children, students, and families and communities against acts of racism.

And not only do we stand with them, we also model this expectation and behavior through our investments, which are to close race-based opportunity gaps.

and just, again, excited to share that with you.

So what you see here, these are in deal.

We pretty much, we just have four results.

The first is all Seattle families will have access to affordable, quality childcare.

The second is we gotta make sure that all of our children are kindergarten ready.

Our third result is that all of our Seattle students graduate from school, college, and career ready.

And then I'm sure, as you all have been following and know, that our last result is we're really going to make sure that all of our Seattle students attain a post-secondary degree, a credential, or some type of certificate.

Again, I'm just super confident that everyone support these goals and we're excited about this.

So now what you see are our three core strategies, and this is just how DEEL, this is our guide for how we invest and support our Seattle children, youth, and families.

So we have equitable educational opportunities.

We have, an example of that is our tuition subsidies for both our preschool and for our Seattle Promise.

We have our student family supports and an example of that one is just where we're invested in school based health centers.

And then our third strategy is.

And photo should I say for a high quality and environments.

This is where.

We really make investments in like our culturally specific and responsive programming, such as the Kingmakers of Seattle, which is a program and that's administered by Seattle Public Schools.

So again, super excited about that.

And now, so what is our budget?

So we have two service divisions in DEEL.

We have an early learning service division, and we have a K-12 and post-secondary service division.

And in 2022, our adopted budget is 121 million, with majority of the spending coming in early learning, as you can see.

and contributing to our r care and access to kinder we also invest in K 12 a Okay, so as you can see here, the felt the families education preschool and promise levy is the largest source of deals revenue, which is at around at 78%.

And so thank you for going to the next slide.

So now for our FEP investments, we convene a levy oversight committee.

And this committee, what they do, they review, advise, and just make recommendations and advocate in support of our FEP levy, or should I say our FEP investments and priorities.

We have 17 members of this Levy Oversight Committee.

Council Member Morales, you're representing us from the council when you were there last night.

And as I mentioned a moment ago, we have one of our appointed members with us today.

And what I'll do is just, I'm just going to pause and I'd really like to invite Erin Okuno just to share some remarks about your experience on the Levy Oversight Committee.

Hi, thank you.

Thank you for having me.

My name is Erin Okuno.

I am the Executive Director of the Southeast Seattle Education Coalition.

We are an organization focused on the Southeast Seattle region, so Beacon Hill, Rainier Valley, and we worked really deeply with communities and families of color to find out what they're interested in, what their what they want to see for their children of color around education.

And we work really intensely with a lot of the small community-based organizations and a lot of the CBOs and nonprofits that are connected to many of these communities of color.

It's really fun.

We have a lot of really great conversations.

I'm really proud of the relationships we've been able to build across the community and also with different organizations, institutions, city government to make this happen.

I'm also really proud to say that I've been fortunate to work on the Seattle Preschool Program.

I was one of the co-chairs when it first started, now many, many years ago.

And my youngest child was in the inaugural class of SPP, and she is now a thriving fourth grader who is very secure in herself and likes to tell me exactly what she thinks.

And I credit SPP for giving her that strong grounding.

And my older child is also a benefit of and I see the benefits of the levy investments across many of the schools in our neighborhoods and including the schools that my children attend.

So thank you for all of your work.

Thank you.

Thank you, Aaron.

Appreciate you being here with us and glad to hear those stories.

And so what I'm going to do now is I am going to turn this over to Marissa.

Marissa is going to share just DEALS 2022 priorities and the plan work that we have with council this year.

Great.

Thank you, Dwayne.

Hi, everyone.

So what you'll see on the slide here is just some recent past engagement that DL has had with Council.

We know that there's some changing in membership on the Education Committee.

And so I just want to highlight for you the deep and extensive work we did with Council in 2018 and 2019 to develop the FEPP levy Council passed an ordinance in 2018 that specified council's intent as it relates to the levy and of course the implementation and evaluation plan.

All 140 some pages of it was adopted by ordinance as well in 2019. In 2020, there were a number of council statements of legislative intent that DEEL did work on and submitted back to council.

So we've shared with you information about our data disaggregation practices.

We've submitted extensive reports completed by external consultants related to increasing access.

and supporting the infant-toddler child care sector.

And we've also submitted recommendations regarding the city's participation in the Washington State Opportunity Scholarship Program, which we're excited to share was started this current year with support from federal coronavirus response funding.

We also had three temporary amendments to the FEPP implementation plan in response to COVID-19.

In 2021, as I mentioned, the Seattle Rescue Plan investments, not only did those support the Seattle Promise Program, but they also included resources for the childcare sector.

So we are aligned on those priorities with council, and we're really excited to continue the work in support of childcare, for sure.

This year, DEEL's priorities are to continue to sustain a response to COVID-19 and to support children, youth, families, and service providers as best we can.

We know that there are policy changes on the horizon related to child care at multiple levels.

So King County will be starting their child care subsidy program.

Again, that's funded by the Best Starts for Kids levy.

We also know that additional funding for child care subsidy programs and businesses may be coming from the state and child care has been indicated as a priority at the federal level as well.

So ensuring we're aligned and can maximize the use of local resources is important to deal.

And as Dwayne shared, our department has grown really quickly.

18 of course we took our SPP levy and our families and education levy and they became one you know giant levy and we're really proud of that and the work this year is to build a stronger connection across all areas of investment so that there's a true preschool to post-secondary path pathway for Seattle's youth.

As a specific racial equity goal, we'll be focusing on differentiated supports for Black and Brown scholars with an emphasis on math instruction.

And as we shared with Council last year through the Seattle Promise Racial Equity Toolkit that was shared with Council, there are some disparities in Promise Scholar outcomes, and we'll be focusing on that this year as well.

The investments from the Seattle Rescue Plan are intended to address this, and we'll be continuing to monitor the success of that program.

And this fourth, I'm sorry, the sixth priority is related to deals, internal operations, improving our systems and structures for all of the grant making we do, as well as staff development and career opportunities internal to the department.

And then my last slide for you today is just a signal of what's to come.

So our FEPP levy oversight committee will meet monthly.

They have an annual retreat.

And they will be advising this spring on proposed uses for deals, undesignated fund balance from the FEPP levy.

Some of you may recall during the budget season that just ended, required that $4 million from that undesignated fund balance be purposed to sustain Clifford Investments and the Seattle Promise Program.

The second bullet point speaks to legislation that we hope to transmit to council in late February.

We began work on this legislation with former Council President Gonzalez's office in the summer of 2021, but we were unable to bring it to committee last year, so that will be coming your way soon.

As always, you all will receive a presentation on our annual report.

There is a one-year lag on this report because we don't receive academic data from the state until the following fall.

So this will be for the second year of the FEPP levy.

And we know child care is a priority of many members on this committee, so we anticipate bringing you more information about changes we will make to be in alignment with county, state, and federal investments.

And Dwayne, back to you.

Yes, thank you, Marissa.

And so I'm not going to read everything on this slide, but we just really want council to know that we are in consistent and regular communication with our partners.

We know everyone is doing their best to continue the important work of caring for our young scholars, our kids, and educating our youth during this pandemic.

At DEEL, we've done quite a few things to help support, you know, the service providers and help mitigate the spread of COVID.

And I just also really just want to highlight just the support of the CLIFR investment for child care providers and workers, as well as for the equity enhancement in the Seattle Promise Program.

Because of those enhancements, that actually enabled us to just establish a pathway for reentry.

for our Promise Scholars whose college experience was really disrupted because of COVID.

And those funds, they actually also enabled us to increase or expand the equity scholarship component of the Seattle Promise from 500 a quarter to 1,000 a quarter, and also include just an additional reach for more of our lower-income scholars.

Our communication team at D.E.A.L. is also part of the work from O'Ira and Don that they mentioned earlier today when I was listening to the presentation.

But specifically, it's focused on outreach and communications and messaging and also some graphic design work just really to promote vaccine access and acceptance among our BIPOC communities.

Thank you.

So lastly, what I have here, just some reminders.

We'd like council to support, or should I say council support in promoting.

We are recruiting new members for our FEPP Levy Oversight Committee, and we know that there are some brilliant, many brilliant young leaders and scholars whose voice would actually add value to our work.

And we listened to one last night.

So if you're listening to this and you're a high school senior, or if you know a high school senior at a Seattle Public School, please encourage them to apply to the Seattle Promise program.

And so they can explore just a rich array of coursework that's offered by the colleges.

And they can consider that as the next step after high school.

I think we all would agree that our Seattle College partners have done, they have some amazing programs, including the fire science degree program that launched at North Seattle.

It just launched this fall at North Seattle College.

The fire, should I say, our fire department has really been amazing throughout this pandemic and I just hope our youth will consider just a career as a firefighter as a way to achieve whatever their aspirations or goals are.

And that concludes our presentation.

Just just want to thank you for this opportunity again.

Looking forward to your partnership as we continue this journey to transform the lives of our Seattle children and youth.

Thank you so much, everybody.

And Aaron, thank you so much for joining.

It's really good to hear from you, particularly as a member, not just of the oversight committee, but as a community member from the district, who I know has been doing really important work in this space for a long time.

I have a few questions that I will start off with.

I would love to hear a little bit more about the partnership that you have with the school district, particularly as it relates to mental health supports.

You know, our kids were at home for almost two years.

I know there's a lot of stress and trauma that our students are experiencing because of, you know, the isolation and the sort of alienation that they're experiencing.

And I know that we don't have nearly enough mental health supports right now, but can you talk about what we are able to do and how the relationship with the school district works?

Yes, I will.

I'll speak to a little bit of that and Marissa, if I leave anything out, just add so we have an amazing partnership with Seattle Public Schools.

We meet frequently.

And with them being the largest recipient of most of our funding dollars, you know there are several constant entry points where we connect with them in regards to the mental health supports that that that's being provided.

So you know we provide.

There's a school-based health clinic in all of our 17 comprehensive high schools in Seattle Public Schools, and there's a component within the school-based clinic that provides mental health support.

And so within those mental health supports, the students have access to the clinics and to the staff that are there.

just to help them throughout this pandemic.

And I'll pause right there as a piece to see if, Marissa, if you wanted to add anything else to that.

And this is also in conjunction with our partnership with Public Health King County right there.

So there's a nice little triangulation between Deal, Seattle Public Schools, and our good partners at the King County Public Health.

Thanks, Wayne.

The only thing I'd add is that we know this is an urgent issue and concern for young people.

It's being discussed at the federal level, at the state level.

So while our school-based health centers do provide clinical services in this space, we acknowledge that it's insufficient for the challenges our youth are facing right now.

And I would like to encourage us to think more broadly about what those mental health supports could look like.

DEEL has investments with a lot of community-based organizations who, while their staff are not licensed or clinically trained, you know, mental health interventionists, those relationships that young people can developed with other youth workers, adults, teachers, peers, they can support each other.

And so we know this is a priority for our levy oversight committee.

It's something we'll be talking more about this year with them.

And we hope to both focus on the need for clinical services to support mental health, but also think more broadly about what community care and other interventions to help our young people could look like.

So thank you for that.

So 17 high schools, do we have that kind of support in any of the elementary or middle schools?

They do.

They do their support in elementary and middle schools.

We actually just expand.

So there is a total of 29 school based health clinics throughout Seattle Public Schools.

And we have them in the high schools, middle schools and elementary as well.

Thank you.

So I have two more questions.

You mentioned legislation about the potential amendments to the FEP plan.

Do you have a timeline for when we might expect that?

Yes, the goal is transmittal by the end of February.

And as your team knows, some of our staff are facing child care disruptions to work.

So DEEL staff are working diligently on it.

We'll try to get it to you in February.

That's good to know.

We're trying to get our own calendar set, so just trying to anticipate what's going on it.

So we talked about this a little bit before, but related to the child care investment strategy, I'm really interested in understanding How we support parents and how we sort of grow the pie of availability of childcare so I'm interested in.

you know, the slots that are available, subsidized care in particular, subsidy rates, the actual cost of providing for home versus center-based versus informal care.

And I know we talked a little bit about this, but can you just help us differentiate between that kind of care and the actual work with the preschool programs that DEEL is involved in?

Yeah, I'll start off by saying, and then Marissa, if you would like to chime in, you can.

I'll start off by saying I would definitely be more than willing to bring our early learning director, Monica, just to have maybe a deeper dive around that.

So we can kind of go through from the programming, whether it's CCAP, SPP, our family child care network, and then some providing a little bit more of a budget analysis.

So I will be more than happy to schedule something for us to do a deeper dive on that, whether it's at this committee or individually with you.

And Marissa, did you want to speak to any other pieces of what she just mentioned as well?

Yeah, there's a lot of different entry points to impact the goal of expanded child care access.

So DEEL's core work through our child care access program is about providing subsidies.

So that's the affordability piece through our program.

Some changes that we've done in the CCAP program in recent years are we've expanded which providers can participate.

So we are now recruiting providers just outside of city limits.

to support Seattleites.

We've increased eligibility for subsidy rates recently in alignment with the state's income thresholds.

And one of the benefits to providers we've instituted recently during COVID is that we are compensating providers based on child enrollment in the subsidy program, not based on attendance.

So if I, as a parent, choose to keep my child home from daycare related to COVID, that would not negatively impact a CCAP provider.

So those are examples specific to CCAP.

That's around over 200 licensed child care providers in Seattle who participate in that program.

And then, as I mentioned with the Seattle Rescue Plan funds, those dollars were available to all licensed child care providers in the city of Seattle.

We're in a space where DEEL is considering our work as it relates to those providers participating in our program, as well as all licensed child care providers in the city.

And a lot more work in this space, both in conjunction with HSD, who have Seattle Rescue Plan funds to support facilities, as well as the county.

And then to your question related to the Seattle Preschool Program, it's a great question because a lot of those providers in SPP are also licensed child care providers.

So there is an intersection in that work.

And as Duane mentioned, our early learning team is best positioned to answer that question for you.

Perfect, thank you so much.

Okay, colleagues, are there any other questions for our folks from DEEL or from our oversight committee representative?

I am not seeing any.

So, okay, well, this is all really helpful for me.

Thank you for presenting and sharing all this information.

We will be following up to get a little deeper dive on some of these issues so that we can make sure we're covering them this year.

If we don't have any other questions, oh wait, sorry.

We did not get the presentation in time to post it before the committee, so will we be getting a copy of this to present?

Yes, we'll make sure that we send it over for it to be posted.

Thank you so much.

And we'll make sure in the future we get the presentation over in time so it can be posted.

Fair enough, thank you so much.

Yes, Council Member Strauss.

I thank you, Chair.

I just wanted to say to Director Chappelle and your entire team, thank you for all your work.

Keep it up.

I'm just so glad that I get to stay on the committee that you're reporting to.

I know with all these committee changes, just consistently impressed with your work.

I didn't have any questions during your presentation because you're exceeding and excelling.

So just keep it up and let me know how I can help.

Thank you, Council Member Strauss.

And I appreciate you for acknowledging the team, because the reality is, as I started off with that picture in the beginning, we do have an amazing group of brilliant, some of the smartest people I've ever come across in my life that are truly committed to kids and families.

And it's because of them that our child care and early learning providers are able to do the amazing work.

So we have a great partnership.

So thank you for acknowledging them.

We do have an amazing team.

And we appreciate your support, too.

Very good.

Well, thank you, everybody.

Thanks.

Have a good rest of the day.

And we are adjourned.