Community Services - Regular Meeting

Good.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. We first, I would like to welcome we have three new members and a, I wanna say, a re up or a volunteer, that's doing a second term. First of all, Joyce Richins is on her second term now. We were we interviewed her last month, and we're able to get her on the consent agenda. So welcome back, Joyce.

Thank you so much. Thanks for sticking with us. We also have Tyler Jones. I'm gonna let these folks tell you about themselves because they can give you more information than I do at the roundtable. But Tyler Jones just came on board. Also, Leah Blackwell and, Heather Muck. Is Heather are you on Heather as well?

I am. Yes.

We lost video for a second. Okay. Well, let me just I'll just go ahead. I just have a brief update for you guys.

You wanna

do a couple of the minutes?

Oh. Yeah. And then do updates. Does anybody are you guys able to review the minutes? Does anybody have any changes or concerns about minutes from the last meeting? Okay. Well, we will go ahead and approve those then. And I think before we do the roundtable with the members, I'd love for people online to just introduce themselves and and tell us what organization or what entity they represent. And before we go online, let's do, Jeremy. If you wanna just your name and where you're

Okay. My name is Jeremy Martinez, and I'm with Los Alamos Los Alamos social service division. I'm a health care specialist. Sorry.

I got it's okay. Like, which meeting am I at today?

I have some sweet Thank you. Okay. It's awesome. So let's go through.

And And I'm gonna

Jordyn, would you like to introduce yourself?

Yeah, sure. Hold on. If you guys can you see me? Yes. Hello, everybody. I'm Joyce Richins. I'm, formerly a labor and delivery nurse here, in the community for about twenty five years. And now I currently am the infection prevention nurse at the hospital. So I've been here about thirty something years. Raised our kids in this area, grew up here, so have a lot of roots. Thanks.

Thank you. To just to Zalek, do you wanna introduce yourself?

Hello, everyone. I'm Giselle Martinez, and I work, with Firstborn Los Alamos. I'm a

home visitor, and we work with families from zero to five years old.

And I'm gonna have my camera off today because I just had my baby. So she's here with me. So I'm gonna turn off my camera.

You see her for a second? I'm sorry? Could we see her for a second? Can you hold her up?

Yes. Of course. Let me introduce you to my Maria Jose. Oh

my god. Giselle, congratulations.

She is so much.

Oh, well, thank you for coming to the meeting. I hope you get to feeling good soon.

I am feeling good. She's five days old. Oh, wow. Thank you.

Congratulations. That's great. So, Leticia, introduce yourself first.

I'm Leticia Martinez. I currently am working as a nurse practitioner with Las Clinicas del Norte, which is right behind where you guys are at. We're open two days a week. I also do department of labor nursing for home health nursing for patients.

So thank you, Leticia. Leticia's on the board as well. Did I miss any other, board members besides our new ones who will get at the roundtable? Think that's everybody. And then Jordan, introduce yourself as well.

Okay.

I will skip to Jeremy. He's Jeremy. Jeremy is our DOH representative.

Oh, okay. Hello, everyone. I'm Jeremy Espinosa. I'm the Northeast Region, community epidemiologist with New Mexico Department of Health, public health division, and a member of the the Northeast region health promotion team. Nice to see everybody. I might be cutting in and I might be disconnected suddenly. Don't panic. We're, I keep getting conflicting reports about power because of the weather storm.

So That's all that.

I'll be as here as long as I can be.

Sounds good. Sounds

good. Thanks, Jeremy. And Jeremy's a huge support to this council. Joe? Joe?

Hi, everyone. Yes. My name is Joe Gallegos, and I am the, nurse at the Los Alamos Public Health Office.

Excellent. Thank you. And Brandy.

Hello. Now good afternoon, everyone. Sorry that my camera will not be on this meeting. I am definitely sick, but I did not wanna miss anything. My name is Brandy Weiss. I am I work for the Los Alamos Community Foundation, and I am the program manager and Ingram fellow, and I am in charge of our health and wellness initiative in town.

We're happy to have you onboard. I know Liz is very happy to have you.

Thank you.

Did we miss anybody? Okay. Let's do the roundtable. I'm gonna start out because I have my laptop but not my charger, and just my battery's dying. So I wanna be able to refer to my notes a little bit. Is that okay? Go for it. Alright. Jess, I'm just gonna take a minute. I'm Lisa Hampton.

I'm the current chair of the health council. The first thing I wanted to do again is welcome our new members, and then I wanted to talk a little bit about our new working group. We were able to establish this week our working group, which we're calling our health center working group. And, basically, what we're gonna do is look at, kind of brainstorm. We put together we brainstorm what the community needs, sort of do a community assessment, and we've, put together a team representative of various entities, organizations, interests within the community.

If we were to create, either build or lease or what have you, we're not even going into that yet. But if we were to establish a community health, and we call it an action center because it's focused on taking action and basically getting things done, referring people to the services they need, and so forth. So we've got a kickoff meeting this afternoon. People on the team, include our co chair, Jill Dehaven, who's she and I are just gonna kinda tag team this whole thing and work together. And I'll tell you in just a minute about the schedule for it, but we also have David Israelovitz, who's a former county counselor who's also involved in the community foundation and and many activities throughout the community, retired landlord employee.

We have Tyler Jones who will tell you about himself. We have Sylvia Syeda who is has been in county planning, but now she's county project manager. And she's also a mom of a teenage daughter, and so we got that great perspective on it. And then Jessica will be popping in and out. And we've also asked Heather Muck if she has time.

So we're hoping that she might have time, and she brings the home homeschool mom, and she's involved in a lot of activities throughout the community as well. So that's our team right now, and we're excited about our first meeting this afternoon. As far as the timetable's concerned, we are gonna be meeting the first and third Thursday of every month in the library at 04:30 in the afternoon in the Mesa Library. So if anyone wants to just pop in and listen to the meeting or what have you, everybody's welcome. It's an open meeting.

It's a working group, not a committee, which is a little less formal, but we will be doing our analysis, coming up with our results and recommendations, and we'll be presenting this to the actual health council in the August meeting. So stay tuned for that. In the meantime, you know, we're gonna be doing a lot of work. We may reach out to other people, other organizations within the community to help us, you know, provide more information and input. It's it's kind of a huge undertaking.

We're just doing the scoping and requirements of it. We're not actually doing the project itself. We would be handing it over to the county, of course. But, between August and September, we may do several public input sessions. We'll just see how it goes.

We're thinking maybe two in Los Alamos, one virtually, and one in White Rock. So that's really all I've got on that, unless you wanna say anything else, Jill. It's evolving as as we go. Also, I wanted to tell you before my battery craps out about upcoming speakers for our just a second. Upcoming speakers for future sessions, and I know Jessica's gonna talk about that a little bit as well.

This month, Jessica's clearly gonna talk about social services and the health council roles, background, how much money we have, events coming up. So I'm not gonna go into that at all. We are gonna pass around a worksheet with upcoming events if folks would like to volunteer just to public outreach, education, tabling events, any activities that we're planning over the next six months or so, I think. As far as the calendar goes, we're hoping to, in April, we're reaching out to Christina Fisher, I think, New Mexico to see if she can kinda give us an analysis of what actually happened in the legislature. There's two days left, and they were just a bazillion health bills, health care, health care workers, physicians, just everything.

And so when the dust all settles, hopefully, she can, gives a synopsis of what has happened and what their future activities will look like. She spoke a couple months ago for the League of Women Voters, and she was just really an amazing person. And they're doing some great work, advocacy type work. And now in May, we're hoping that we're gonna be able to get some folks to come in and talk about issues related to bullying in in middle school and the high school. And then in June, we have a legal presentation.

Jessica can tell you more about that. I think it's Katie Twait from Legal. And then in August is when Jill and I will present the working group results. And then in September was when I was gonna ask Leah to come and speak with us about grief and also her role as a chaplain in the community. And that's also suicide prevention month, so that would work out real well. So we'll chat later with Leah. And I'm gonna let Celeste tell you about directory of services and providers that she's working on. And then the only other thing is which Celeste or

Jessica Only other thing. Look at all these I'm trying

to rush, and I'm trying not to run out of battery here, is our monthly articles in the local newspaper, which we've been done. So with that, I pass it on to you. Unless anyone has any

Do we

wanna do

Oh, wait. One roundtable before you? Sure. Okay. Let's do the roundtable, and then we'll come back to you.

Yeah. Then come back

to me. Okay. So Celeste, you're up. Okay.

Real quick. I'm so sorry, Celeste. We had two people join. Okay. Stephanie Gonzalez is our aging resource development. Oh my gosh. Stephanie, you're gonna have to jump in because I just blanked on what ARDC stands for. And also, Tina Dioux also joined. So let's get other community members Welcome. Welcome. Just a

brief introduction, and then we'll do a roundtable. Okay?

Yeah. I fall under Aging and Disability Resource Center, and we're SHIP counselors in that we do outreach and education and and one on one helping folks navigate Medicare and Medicaid.

Thank you, Stephanie.

And then, Tina, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Hi. I'm Tina Dio, and I'm serving on the county's inclusivity task force. And I am a liaison from that task force to y'all's council.

So yay. I'm glad to be here.

Thank you for joining us. I think did I miss anybody online? I think it was okay.

Now we got everybody.

Now we're gonna do roundtable, and then we'll do staff reports. So, Celeste Celeste Raffin, you're up. Okay. So I'm gonna just cut this short. Yesterday, Jessica and I met the possibility of doing trajectory. My it was really interesting because my biggest complaint about Los Alamos is there's all this stuff going on. Nobody knows about it. They don't know how to find it. And just at the meeting yesterday, I can't remember her name, came over to chat and say hello. And she said, yeah. I can't stand it. You can never find out about anything in this county.

Tina, it was it was Tara. Tara Hite stopped in for lunch. So It just confirmed why we were there to meet and so

was is to create paper cop, like a Yellow Pages directory that will be distributed to the entire town. So all the households have copies in the library, perhaps the grocery stores. That is just like a Yellow Pages that has all the health and social surface services things that are in this town. And it's gonna be a big we we have kind of a head start because baby net has produced something kinda like that. Although my biggest complaints are, number one, it's online.

And when you know, I've been copying it just so I can go through it and see what I think, but it's it's very difficult. You go online. It's hard to get there in the first place. And then once you finally find it, then you get into it. And after it tells you it doesn't exist and all this stuff, it's very difficult. And then it's just really cumbersome and hard to read through. And it's kind of one of these things where if you don't know exactly what you're looking for, you won't find it. So my goal is to make a yellow pages type book, very similar. Yeah. The county This is the latest county. Just what we was Spring. Yeah. Sorry.

Yeah. No.

No. I was just oh. I was going to say was my thing that gave me the idea in the first place is the county publishes directories for events in Los Alamos, and it does it quarterly, I believe. So my idea is to do it just biannually. So our first roles of business are number one, we're going to and this doctor or doctor suggested this was to go to the business licenses, see if we can just lose all the business licenses and find the health care related ones.

My second goal is to print out the the whole baby net. They can go through it and kind of figure out what I think about how it's organized, how we can better organize it, how we can do the categories, and how we can create an index. And that's kinda where we are now. We're looking more people to help. We're still gonna start. So if anybody's interested, just send just send Jessica or me an email, and we'll get it to Celeste. Okay?

Jill? Okay. What are we doing exactly?

Just a roundtable. Whatever you wanna talk about. Okay.

So I I think my focus

Can I back up a sec? Can you introduce yourself also to the new folks on Sure.

Sheila Haven. I'm a commercial real estate broker here in town. I I raised my hand when we saw some issues around defining what physical space should be for the health council, I mean, for social services. And so that's really gonna be my priority this year, at least this six months, is truly building a shopping list for what that is, what that looks like, and what what would be needs and wants both from staffing and what does that equate to?

I'm

also on the environmental and sustainability board up here, and then I'm also on the Santa Fe Airport. Yes. Someday we will have a shuttle up here to take to the airport.

The Santa Fe Airport? It's The Albuquerque Airport?

You can you can, you can get on a shuttle at the Santa Fe Airport to go to the Albuquerque. Now this would be hopefully, up here somewhere that you just park and get on and go to the flight. Awesome. Yes.

And I bounced back to Celeste because she didn't actually get to introduce herself. Celeste Raffin, I'm on the council. I know. But they wanna know what your background is. Okay. Leah?

Hi. I'm Leah Blackwell. I'm a new member, and I'm the chaplain at Los Alamos Visiting Nurses. It's a new career for me, and I'm learning so much right now. But I'm helping walk people through their end of life journey, and it's just incredible, being a part of that community. And I'm really grateful to be here with you guys and learn from all of you.

Thank you. To the Health Council. Thank you.

Heather,

can you just give us an introduction and just whatever your thoughts and concerns are?

Yeah. My name is Heather Muck. I am a homeschool mom. I have three girls. I homeschool at home. And I used to be I used to work with Home Instead, so I did a lot of senior care. But I haven't done that in a few years, but I do have a passion for kids and elderly. And I just look forward to helping better this community.

Thank you.

Welcome to the health council, Heather.

And from that, we'll jump to to Tyler Jones.

Hey. I'm Tyler Jones. I, work as a firefighter. When we get kind of working on deciding what building we're gonna move our social services in, I actually work in the fire marshal's office. So I could potentially help in that area as well.

I've got a pretty extensive emergency room nursing background, but I'm currently now working at Los Alamos visiting nurses and and kind of going in that direction. And I helped create a couple programs in Santa Fe dealing with substance abuse and homelessness, and and then with the aging and long term services department as far as trying to get falls and helping elderly people age at home.

Awesome. Thank you so much for being willing to join us. Welcome, Tyler. Patricia, do you have any updates for us?

We do have a counselor starting in our office who will be available on Mondays Tuesdays and Thursdays. So that's the only update I have so far.

For adult mental health?

Yes.

Awesome. Thanks, Leticia.

And then Giselle, do you have any updates as well besides the beautiful child you have?

That is quite an update.

I mean.

I guess the only update is that Firstborn is hiring for a full time home visitor at this point.

No.

Thank you. I think we've got every other count Joyce? Joyce, I'm sorry.

That's okay. Hey. Just so a quick quick update. You probably all heard about all the influenza, virus stuff that's going around. Hospital's feeling that. We've seen quite a few patients with flu. It's been a bad year for flu. And, you know, of course, measles is out there. We're trying to make sure we're prepared if we get, you know, measles cases. And then kinda lurking in the background is a bird flu, which we always are trying to work with our emergency management team and look at preparation. So we are getting more, and I feel like better information than we were about a month ago from, like, the CDC and some of those government agencies. That's helpful.

Thanks. That's encouraging. Are there any vaccine clinics coming up that you know of hospital?

Not anything for no. I don't have anything that yeah. I know for flu or anything, but flu will be in the fall usually. So yeah.

Well, then I will give my update and then go right into the presentation if that works for everybody. Just to piggyback on what Joyce said, at social services, we're keeping an eye on some of the federal changes, but there isn't really much to report since our last meeting. We're we're keeping an eye on HUD funding, changes coming down from Medicaid and, SNAP, how that might impact people's benefits benefit amounts or, what might be covered by Medicaid or Medicare, but we don't have a lot of guidance on that just yet. So if people run into people in the community and they have questions or concerns, they're welcome to call the social services office, but we might not have anything just yet. The reason Jeremy is here is because she has accepted the full time health care specialist position that was vacated when Ashley left on maternity leave.

And we've had Jeremy in our office for over a year. She was initially a part time mobile homeless outreach and has done an amazing job getting people housed or connected to Section 8 or connected to financial resources to stay in their housing. So we were thrilled that now we get her for forty hours a week instead of nineteen. But that also means that we have a part time position open for the mobile homeless outreach position. And so, Giselle, thank you for reminding me about Firstborn.

After this meeting, when I send materials out, I'll send the firstborn job announcement and the, part time health care specialist. And if you know of anybody, please forward them these job postings. That would be really, really helpful. I don't have many details yet, but social services just this week, we are proceeding with cooking up a plan to start a social work internship program, which I have talked about with several of you, partnering with NMSU. They have a master's of social work program that is entirely online, so it includes students from all across the state, including Northern New Mexico.

I've been talking to the coordinator of the program. And it runs through the academic school year. So September to June, we would have a second year MSW student doing their practicum hours from social services, but then ideally building a rotation around the county. So for example, the teen center has an art therapy room. Could the person partner there?

Could the person partner at the senior center, you know, in different departments? I've been talking to my counterparts in Las Cruces, because they have had a social work student there for a long time rotating among these things so I don't have to recreate the wheel. So that has been super exciting. But also because we've never had this, everyone's like, how will we do this? And I'm like, I don't know. Same as everything. Problem solving on the fly.

Is that person gonna physically be here?

Person would physically be here twenty hour fifteen to twenty hours a week during the academic school year. So that has been a huge gap at social services, not having a social worker. And as we saw in the comprehensive health plan that referenced the Think New Mexico report, increasingly, have to look at growing our own. And so this was kind of my attempt at maybe if we have social work students over the next couple of years, maybe there's an opportunity then in the future to put it into our budget or to build it out into a full time position. One of the other things we've talked about in the comprehensive health plan just to get our three new folks up to speed is how we might then envision a Los Alamos Crisis Response Team that would be a social services, an EMT, the police, the hospital.

How great would it be to have a social worker be able to be part of that team that we have built a pipeline into it? So more to come. This is the very first step. I am really excited and just continue to make that Rubik's cube try to work. So more to come on that.

Upcoming event on Friday, March 28. The press release just went out yesterday. Libraries, social services, some of our grief trained folks have been working on putting together the next deep dive that will take place at the library. It starts at 05:45 on that Friday and is limited to the first 50 people, but it's focused around grief and not just grief when somebody dies, but the variations of grief, that that people may experience through throughout the lifespan and throughout different life events. So there will be moderated groups, and really kind of allowing people the space to kind of work through and and learn more about this.

So that's been, I have not had a big role in that. Denny from our office has had more of of work, and Leah's been involved too. And, I just think it sounds like an amazing event, especially, you know, kind of coming out of COVID and and how people process grief during that. And and there's just all kinds of different ways people hear about grief, you know, linear, but it it's never a linear process. Right? And this is our attempt to to give people that space to to talk these things through.

We meet out from council of volunteers.

Volunteers? I've not heard from Eva Eva Jacobson at the library. I don't know that we need volunteers, but I'll double spread the word. Yeah. Spread the word.

So if you can send the information to us, we'll send it out to everybody.

I'll I'll corral it in a whole package and send it out. A group of us have been in meeting to plan a community mental health series of trainings. We're gonna get this kicked off in July, so much more to come. But we've been planning, there have been a group of us trained in suicide prevention. This also aligns with our comprehensive health plan.

Leah and I were in the same QPR training in Santa Fe last month. QPR is a suicide prevention training modeled off of CPR by Jen Bartram, formerly of the health council, and a group of others, there's about 15 of us trained. And so making a thoughtful plan for having these trainings available community wide, and really looking to see what it would take to get 1,000 people trained in, reaching out if you were worried about someone and and how that might really move the needle in our community. So we're expecting a bigger proclamation in May. So that will come.

And then building on that, other mental health and mental wellness, whether that's mental health first aid or other things and really thinking about building blocks so that people can go to their youth pastor, go to their little league coach, can go to their coworker, can go to, you know, whoever that might be and get referral a referral to a resource. Okay. Then the last thing, Lisa had asked me to pull just some updates from social services. So, ideally, we'll start doing this monthly. But for January and February combined over those two months, we had we helped a total of a 131 people over those two months, with a 113 existing clients, 18 new people.

So nine to 10 new people a month, which is higher than we have seen in previous months. In the previous months, we saw between three and six new people. So nine doesn't sound like a lot more, but, know, we we wanna be able to track whether or not more peoples come in. The primary services that people came in for, one we have categorized as just general assistance. It's kind of our, you know, people kinda call, and they're not quite sure.

They need, you know, some help figuring things out. But also utilities assistance, which is this is just a total, me editorializing. A little concerning because it wasn't a super cold January or February. And so given that we might be seeing an increase in people needing this, especially given that there might be a a continuing the end of the budget federal budget continuing resolution and or furloughs coming, we're just kinda tracking that. So utilities assistance was one of the most requested services as was food stability.

So whether they get emergency food boxes from us or we connect them to LA Cares. And then housing related requests. And then we had a number of homeless claims that we saw, and so that was another big chunk of it. Of those existing appointments, 28 of the appointments were related to people who were homeless or at risk of becoming homeless. So that remains kind of a a big part of of what it is we do.

So I in the in future months, I will try to get this into, like, a a nice report that we can send out and start tracking some of that. Lisa had mentioned, you know, when you run into people in the community, they ask, you know, what are we seeing? And it would be good for you all to also have that information. So any questions just from that brief update before I give the actual presentation?

We have year to date last year.

I can pull that. That's a great question.

Informational tidbits that could be incorporated into an article for the paper. Yes. Because they're not they're not gonna be data entail data that they're.

Yeah. So

We can absolutely, like, then match it here today. Yeah.

So before you jump into that, what the do we wanna talk about the article?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So so for the folks who are new, we had started this initiative over the previous summer, getting a monthly article in the daily post and the reporter and then on social media with health council members taking a month and writing an article. And I can send some examples of the past months.

We have done carbon monoxide. We have done the importance of getting your vaccines that was tied to the hospital's vaccine clinic. And we have done the importance of having Narcan on hand and how critical that is as a life saving as a prevention tactic tool. Things that align with what the health council is working on combined with, you know, our own personal interests. Right?

You don't need to pick a topic that you know nothing about and then do a bunch of research and write something. I would never ask that of our volunteer members. But it it fell off a little bit over the holidays. That is totally on me because we were also busy writing the comprehensive health report. December and January were busy times, but we're trying to pick that back up.

Celeste has offered to write one for the next month. We brainstormed a couple of ideas yesterday maybe on the the measles outbreaks, that we've seen in Southern New Mexico, how to how to stay safe, how to make sure you have your vaccines or your get your titers checked. Celeste shared fascinating information about depending on when you were born, what you may or may not have received as a kid. But I will be sending out a table, like a a Google Sheets, Excel, that is fill inable. It's probably a better word for that.

And it would be great if everybody thought about taking a month, and then I'll work with you on help ghostwriting, help editing. You do not have to worry if you're not a good speller. Like, please do not be worried about any of that. We'll we'll make sure, Kirsten at the daily post also helps edit it. So but it would be great if you had an idea for an upcoming thing that you would feel comfortable writing on or you think would be good information to get out to the public.

And then with that, we've also been brainstorming a variety of outreach tabling events that we think would be good to have the health council at. And I'll put that in a table too. There are two, two in April that we could be at, an Earth Day event that is at peak, and then wildfire days. I'm I am pointing if you're watching me on the screen because we're at the Muni Building, and I'm think I'm pointing in the direction of the pond. I could be wrong.

But at the pond, there's a really popular there is an Easter egg hunt to it, but there's a bunch of other tables and events going on and kids can, like, tour a fire truck. It's the start of fire season, so there's a bunch of fire safety information there. But typically, we could put a a table there of health information. There's also an older adult health fair coming up in May. And then last year, we did Chamberfest in June and Science Fest in July.

And Science Fest in particular was wildly popular. We gave out tons of Narcan and talked to a lot of people about reducing the stigma of having Narcan in your medicine cabinet. And so I will also set up a sign up sheet if anybody would like to be involved in those. As you'll see in our presentation, it's related to our outcomes with the Department of Health, kind of doing this outreach in the community. But it might also just be a good way to tell people we have openings on the health council or ways for people to share, you know, hey.

Does is anybody keeping track of x y z health related thing? And for us to get that information and bring it back to the health council. So I'll send those out, tomorrow tomorrow or Monday.

So you have in Santa Fe. Jen Bartram. Last time we talked about and Jen

We did.

And I got some of the history of it. I don't know that I have enough, but it would make a good article. I think I need to talk to a couple more people like Maury.

Is there someone that can help you? Maybe you. We'll we'll we'll go back. That's just

We did wanna put an article about the history of the health council. Thought would be a nice, you know, nice historical record of of how the health council came about. Right? And so

And are we

I think those articles are more important than usual, I guess, because as we prepare for our ask and want and grocery list on physical location with all the services, the more we can engage the community on all the value both motivation and social services brings to the community, the easier the, reality of is going to go down a little easier. So I I think

What's getting us out there? Yeah.

I think

presence and important. People know. My love's less. Yeah.

I think it's I think it's important.

You know, I think one thing everybody talks about how much things are gonna cost. That's a big thing. But nobody looks downstream.

No. I think I think you have to connect.

This is our process. And and and, yeah, we have to put the cost. But I think we also really have to push. If we get this, what what could we get from it? What are we buying? It matches how much it's gonna

What's cost of not doing something?

Cost of not doing it. Is it both right? And, also, what are the benefits of doing it? You know? If you have this, this, and this, it's like you, you know, fireproof your home when the fire comes, it's not gonna burn down. So you're not gonna have to go to. You're not gonna have to leave a house, and you're not gonna have to rebuild a house, and you're not gonna have to buy all the houses. Blah blah blah. People don't think about that. They just think, oh, it's 55. Yeah.

Well, I think the creating, you know, some verbiage around the system of social services, The services that are provided, the cost analysis. This is what we're doing now if we could even when we grow into something bigger. Here's, you know, here's more dots that could get connected Because it really is, and you brought this up several times and absolutely true, it really is a whole community. It's it's not it's not in the desperation level. It's all it's in the whole community.

There's everybody up here looking for all sorts of support. Kids, loved ones that are on final stages. I mean, it isn't it's almost invisible because, to be honest, Jessica, you do such an awesome job. We don't ever see how hard of a heavy lift this is. And, yeah, the this is a town that always goes to cost, so I think just doing some analysis of that and then sharing it. Totally transparent.

Downstream. Yeah. Because

What that's is the news?

What's the spot you're gonna

And I will say I, real quick. Can can the folks online see the slides?

Yes.

And if I flip can you see the next slide?

Yep.

Okay. Great. Once last year, I went through the whole presentation, and nobody online told me that they couldn't see the presentation. So now we always have to check. You can tell I don't all the faith in this technology. Those are all really, really good points to keep in mind as, you know, kind of what a road show might be to to prep all of this. I will say the Department of Health is very big in that upstream, you know, making prevention bigger. So

And and health council budget is a little is you requesting are you requesting additional staff this time around?

The social services budget, we I I don't know the status

of that request. So let me follow-up next time with that. We

the county budget stuff is due March, and then in April, it goes to county council. Yeah. We had a meeting a week in a a week ago, and then my understanding was Friday and Monday and Tuesday, they put all the final stuff together, but I don't know where our request ended up in that. So Okay. Okay.

So I'm gonna jump in. We are, like, almost perfectly on time for for having forty five minutes for this. I am going to give an overview, for the new folks, but really for everyone. First half of the presentation is what social services covers, and then flows into how the health council works. So county as a whole has a number of, excuse me, boards and commissions.

The county health council is one of them. I love that in the interviews, we ask everyone, have you read the county charter and or the charter for the board and commission to which you're applying? Nobody ever says yes, which like, well, how why would anybody read that dry document ahead of time? But this is an attempt to help everyone understand, like, there's the county, and we have departments and divisions and how all of that works, and then how does a board and commission work and kind of how they interplay together. By all means, in case we run out of time, do not wait till the end to ask questions.

You're welcome to jump in. Or if something's not clear, I am always, always, always willing to meet for lunch or coffee. Jill and Celeste and Lisa know I will meet you for coffee. To feed her anytime she needs. Right. And I'm happy to go over this in all kinds

of detail. This to us with

I will send it right after this meeting.

I thought you had some

Maybe I did. I also was so fiddling with it this morning. Did I send it? Attached. Yeah. Good. Look at past me. Okay. So this is a big picture overview. I'm a big fan of of color coding and and putting things into buckets.

Social services really oversees five things, five items. You'll see them kind of put into buckets here with oversee the health care assistance program that we generally refer to by its acronym HCAF. We also provide one on one case coordination, which also involves some community outreach to let people know what we do. But people come into our office for assistance or case coordination, and then we we help refer them as we can. We oversee a large variety of contracts with community safety net providers.

Providers. Those are all listed up here. I will go over all of this in some more detail on the following slides. But, of our safety net in the community, whether that's youth, youth with mental health needs, teens, older adults, everyone who falls in between any of those age brackets, when the county has identified a need in the community, we have issued an RFP, a request for proposal. We then evaluate those proposals, set you know, develop what a budget might look like for those services, and then make contracts.

So x number of years ago, we thought it was important for teens to have a safe place to go during out of school time. And that's how the teen center came about. That's right here downtown. It is managed by the YMCA, but we maintain the building and help with some of the activities that go on there, the senior appreciation night. And they run movie theaters after prom so kids aren't out drinking or doing other unsafe things.

We've The community has decided that it's important to have drug and alcohol prevention. So we have two the county funds two prevention specialists at the Los Alamos public schools, etcetera, etcetera. And so if there is a gap in the community and if we decide, you know, there's data and there's stuff to support it, like, then then services come about. And if we've missed one or something new comes up, then that's why we have this bucket for special projects. We noticed, you know, there wasn't really anyone addressing homelessness or kind of an an opioid response when there were a series of overdose deaths in 2023.

And, obviously, social services makes a good hub for that. And so then we've kind of built some some room for special projects, that orange section there down on the bottom right. And then the health council is housed under the social services. And so, I'll go over some of these in some more detail in the next slides. Right now, we have this is wrong, but we actually have five FTEs, because Jeremy is now one of our full time employees. And so we have one open part time contracts. We oversee the senior center, two facilities, two activity center facilities, the team center, and some other special contracts in there.

Can I ask a quick question? Of course. First of all,

thank you for

this, Graham. You're like, wow.

That's why Jess's head is so taller at Graham all the time.

You know, we just started reaching out to regional providers who have a thought of working with because at a point in time, we'll realize that

Yep.

You know, we can't be all things to all people up here. We've gotta so is is that an is it there an appropriate place on this graft that's maybe under special projects?

That is under special projects. Kind of the regional collaborations. I probably should make it more broad than just housing. Yeah. Way more than health. It is. My my prerogative. Yeah. That's a great point. I should fix that too. Look at all these tables. No. That's a great point. Here is our k. So you saw all of those boxes, but this is the total staff.

They're we're not a very big office, but we are very mighty, small and mighty. Alyssa Sanchez, some of you may know, she is our management analyst. She oversees all of those contracts, processing the the invoices, the quarterly data that everyone submits to us, helping with all of the facility needs. As you can imagine, there's just a lot that goes on behind the scenes to make all of this work. Denny and Jordan are our case coordination specialists.

Jordan just came on in October because, one, it seemed completely absurd that Denny was seeing a client list of between sixty and eighty people, Kind of all of the the case coordination fell to her. But then when we had looked at the data, we saw kind of an increasing number of older adults coming in, people 60 needing help, you know, basic stuff, not knowing the difference between what Medicaid covered or Medicare, not knowing how to navigate, needing food assistance or utility assistance. And so in last year's budget request, we asked for a second case coordination specifically to work with an older adult population and then build those connections, with the case manager at, Stacy at the older adult at at the senior center. And so kind of we have two, if you imagine, two different kind of constellations, 18 to 59 and then 60. But there's obviously a lot of overlap.

Right? We we get we're building connections with the police when they're doing well check visits to connect to our office. Same with the victim's assistant or self help or any of the other partners we work with. So we're we're kind of they both work together on that. As I mentioned, Jeremy was in that open part time position, that we had built from a grant to help people who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless.

Same thing working with JJAB or the senior center or other partners if they think somebody is about to be evicted, getting them into our office as a prevent like, it's easier to do it before there's been an eviction. Right? So helping get people in. But now that second health care specialist position sits at our front desk, And I lovingly refer to it as our triage, like you would at the hospital. Jeremy has only been in this position for two weeks.

So don't all rush in. But to be at that position where people call, they don't know what help they need. They need somebody empathetic to do an intake, get them in for a longer meeting with Denny or Jordan, or it sounds like, you know, you need some emergency food assistance. Swing by. We'll get a box of food together for you and make sure you get connected to LA Care so we're not having people fall through those gaps. So Jeremy is now our specialist in charge of that.

May I ask one question? Uh-huh. Can you explain the difference specialist role in the kids?

Sure. That's a good question.

The title that the county

has. How about I move on to our next slide Sure.

Where we

will answer this? That's a great question. Thank I I think they were just two different positions that were made a while ago. But the the way that we find them internally is kind of, if you think about the nurse practitioner who may come in and take your vitals, and then the doctor comes in and has does a a full workup. So the health care specialist you might see first kinda helps people figure out what services they may qualify for.

Huge asterisk here. We don't get someone their Medicaid. Right? Or, like, we don't make the determination that they qualify for a HUD section eight voucher, but we can help review those paperwork. We are, We can help determine some things. But I think sometimes people think, like, they'll call us and, like, I need Medicaid today. And we're like, well, that's not how that works, but we will help get you connected to the right places. We can't fix your utility bill. Right? That's, like, another good example.

If you're if you are having trouble paying your utilities, we can help you fill out the application. Our, customer care here, our department of public utilities has a fund to help with that, and there's some different, pathways for that, we can help fill out that application in our office, or we can, you know, direct you to come here to customer care and do that. Or places that do have direct care, direct financial assistance like LA Cares or Self Help, we can help make those referrals and get you connected to them. But we don't make your utility bill go to zero. Right?

The social services can't do that. The other things we help with, there is a program through that HCAT, that health care assistance program, for someone who is deemed indigent or at a certain income level no assets, that they still do a burial. Here in our community, it's a cremation service, and then you are how is that the columbarium at our cemetery? It's like the the word for that place. That everyone is, you know, do a a dignified burial.

And so we we process that. If somebody there's a a process through the county to make sure that happens. And then also working with Leticia and Las Clinica is making sure that people who are in our detention center, if they need health care services, that they get those and that those are also paid for from this health care assistance program.

And and the Unite us software, are you using? Yep. It's a Yep. Good.

Kind of. There's some bugs in there, but we're working them out. We we're getting there. So then the difference between then the health care specialist and the case coordination, a great question prompt that I didn't ask Lisa to do, but perfectly rolls into. So then, you know, sometimes people need more than just some help with utilities or just, you know, a one time food box.

And so, you know, they become a client then of social services, and then we're gonna help as much as we can get them to a place of stability. We're not really a time limited. We are not income limited. People you know, we we try to get them out of that crisis. Like, we are not twenty four seven in an immediate crisis, but we are that first store that people come in.

And then, Jermaine and and Jordan and Denny just know a lot of those resources both in Los Alamos County and regionally and increasingly kind of statewide because there's a lot of behavioral health resources in Albuquerque and other places to help get people connected. So, again, we can give you that emergency box of food, But, ideally, we wanna get you connected to LA Cares or Santa Fe Food Depot to get, you know, a whole box of food that may provide a couple weeks worth of food. But then we really wanna then talk to you about jobs or education or or or, right, how do we build those layers of stability in for a person. The list is on here. We we try to help with housing services, which you know up here, there's very limited open apartments.

There's even fewer open affordable apartments or or landlords that accept section eight. So that is one of our biggest barriers to helping with that stability. But we try to get people referred to medical offices or finding a therapist or connecting if they might need to talk to the victim's assistant. There's a lot of things that we try to piece together for people. Sometimes when you're you're in that crisis, it can just feel really overwhelming.

And and our role is to listen and then figure out where we can help plug them in to to help. So Lisa mentioned Unite Us. It was one of our big projects last year. We have this software that is called a closed loop referral. It ideally has all of these places so that we can send a referral through the software.

They can immediately get it. All the paperwork is in there. We are actually meeting with self help next week or the week after to to work out some of the kinks that we have seen. But it's been a really, really good way to get people into it, into the social services because the the website is just right there on our website. Okay.

Gotta move faster. Community providers, as I mentioned, and you saw lots of little blue rectangles. We have these contracts throughout the county. A couple are in, are outside of Los Alamos County. Our goal is to make sure we have services for everyone from young children and families to older adults, and that they're integrated in a kind of person first way with kind of a trauma informed care approach so that we are not making people retell their hardship stories, but that, you know, all of us are doing the work to to help wherever we can.

So there is a lot of collaboration. You know, for example, I will be this afternoon at the Hawk Hangout, which is a way for middle schoolers to get to know Askable adults in the community to break down some of those barriers, having police officers, municipal judge, social services, teen center, a bunch of YMCA folks, all of us on-site for a fun activity. But then it also then I get connected to the teen center because those are middle schoolers. So then how do we build high school events and, you know, make sure they are connected to our suicide prevention. Right?

Like, there's a bunch of kind of capacity building, or I like to think of it as scaffolding, happening throughout the county. Another example, a group of us have been for the past two years planning community conversations, kind of evening events where parents can come and in a low key way learn about how to address their kids' cell phone use or drug use. We just met today to talk about last week's youth risk and resiliency data. And some parents came to that, but how do we get a safe place for parents to ask about? I saw this rise of bullying, and I'm worried about my kid.

And how do I how do I how do I? So building all of these events and trainings so that both professionally and just kind of publicly in the community, social services is helping to lead kind of like an overarching lowercase m w mental wellness. Right? Like, what are those stressors, and and how can we be a place? Like Celeste said, I think about the upstream effects all the time. If if a parent has lost a job, what is the stress that the kids are seeing? Are they taking it out, bullying other kids at school? But then is the parent stressed about getting evicted and losing their health insurance? And right? And so, like, these things just build on each other all the time.

It's building a lot of nets together. That special projects, just as things have come up, I am sure my social services staff is like, Jessica always promises no new projects, and then I am constantly coming up with new projects for us to address these gaps. I hate that the the image we use, like, that we say it's a safety net. Like, a net has holes, and we know people fall through the holes all the time. So how do we strengthen that net, make those holes smaller?

I this is what I have been, you know, obsessed with my whole professional working life. So we we I've been in this position for two years. Immediately when I started, there was a a state grant to address homelessness in places that were not Albuquerque, Santa Fe, or Las Cruces. And so we received a grant of 165,000, which is what brought Jeremy on board. There had not previously been many homeless outreach efforts in the county, and so we are literally making one on one connections.

I think it's fair to say Jeremy knows by name, like, personal connection to nearly everyone who is currently homeless in the county and working on meeting them where they are. One person in our county just today got his GED paperwork completed and, had a really emotional time at our office. And this opens up now looking for jobs and getting additional stability, and and it's just a bunch of baby steps. But it started a year ago getting his paperwork, his birth certificate so that he could get a photo ID so that so that so that. Right?

And and so this is what we do over, you know, a period of a year sometimes. The state has received funding from the federal opioid settlement. This is one you're gonna have to take me out for coffee, and I can talk about this at length. To date, we have received $801,000. The health council made a plan for addressing 760,000 of those dollars.

More has come in this year, so more to come on that and what we're gonna do with that. But I'm happy to talk about, you know, what this plan looks like. It you'll be shocked to know builds on all of those community partnerships I just talked about, and across all of the ages and not just focusing on oh, I did put a slide in here. Great. Coordination among these partners, building more community wide trainings and outreach. And social services has really taken the lead on distributing NARCAN widely throughout the community. It's one of the best evidence based practices we have. I did put a slide in. Here's, we had initially imagined a five year plan

Hey. For Real quick. Sorry to interrupt you. On partners, you'd put, like, PD and the schools and stuff. Like, you'd mentioned you're gonna have an EMT. Correct? Are you guys gonna be partnering through the fire department, or how's that EMT gonna

That is oh, for the crisis services?

Yeah.

It's a great question. Currently, I've had, one introductory meeting with one police officer and a firefighter whose name is escaping me, but I can while we're talking, flip through some notes here. The the crisis services would likely be funded separate from the opioid funds that we would actually, build a pilot and then ask the county to fund it separate from opioids. Although, I mean, since we just got an additional 40,000, who's to say? But it would be reaching out through fire and developing it through there. I am blanking on the firefighter's name, though.

Help with it, Jessica.

You can

help with making connections, I think.

Kevin can't play.

Okay. Yeah. I I helped build a program similar to this in Santa Fe here, so I can maybe

Oh, there would be much more to come on this, Tyler. Team.

I really we really wanna just concentrate it, focus thing just on because what's

one more project? But but also Jen Bartram mentioned somebody who lives in Los Alamos also helped I'm blanking on her name because I have not yet met her. She helped set up the crisis services in Santa Fe as well. So I think there'll be a roundtable where we all kind of brainstorm together to come.

I have a quick question on your the services that you provided. You mentioned the young man with the GED. Is there anybody into town?

No. Go

ahead. He's

not young. He's older, but that's okay. Yeah. Get hired. He is.

Is there

we are partnering with the Department of Workforce Solutions. A press release is coming out this afternoon. Because, right, we cannot do all of the job skills, but it turns out the state Department of Workforce Solutions does do that. And Sarah still connected me to this woman, Sarah, who connected me

Oh, Sarah.

Sarah doing it. Wife. But Louisa Padilla will be up at our office on Tuesday. She does job interviewing skills, resume skills, how to dress, how to do handshakes. Oh,

this A ton of money.

And, hopefully then recurring one on one meetings with people as they need it.

That is great. I wanna step back. Tyler, did you get your question out there? We kinda jumped all over you. So did you get answered what you were looking for?

Hello? I think he he was talking about crisis response as opposed to opioid funds maybe.

Two separate I just don't think we let him finish his

You

still there?

I'm here. Sorry. I got, tied up by the little.

You have to say, why? Is that what you're telling us?

That's what you're talking.

But we, I will I will leave you in once we start those crisis meeting conversations.

Was that your question, Tyler? I mean, did you have a question? Did it get answered?

Yeah. Exactly. I think you guys covered it. Thank you. I

just wanna make sure.

Real quick filler photos, social services in action, Jenny had an outreach table, our beautiful kitchen at the senior center, distribution at LA Cares, all those tables. We partnered with the victim's assistant to do a domestic violence awareness.

The girl

in the tie dye shirt is mine. Yeah. The other ones are probably nice too, but, you know, I'm partial to her. Box at Narcan, our food pantry at our office that we also have a fridge and a freezer because we can act as proxies and pick up the food from LA Cares and the Santa Fe Food Depot. If somebody cannot make it on a Friday, we will make sure that they get their food.

Just wanted to very quickly highlight, we collect tons of data from our community partners, And you can see where some of the increases. The first three lines are here from JJAB, data submitted by JJAB, which is the Juvenile Justice Advisory Board. They do mental health resource referral for youth and their families. You will see where the number of interactions jumped from 23 into 24. The number of family resource services went from 6,500 to 13,000.

The number of unduplicated youth, people who went to J Job to seek services went from 330 youth to over a thousand. You'll also see where the number of meals provided to seniors went up from 27,000 to 30,000. That is annual meals provided to people 60, both at both locations and delivered. And then they provided almost 3,000 transportation trips last year.

And that is still within county. They haven't to take Correct.

To Santa Fe or So

transportation of the seniors is one more project I am working on.

So there was something last year, just real quick. It was a training, a free training for women in instruction. Do you remember that? Is that the same workforce Yes. Solutions? Okay. Perfect.

Cool. Cool. Cool. Alright. Let me jump into the health council stuff, like why you guys are all actually here unless you wanna apply for the part time social services job. That was all the previous slides. The the mission of the health council as a boarding commission is to provide information to the community and recommendations up to the county council. We are considered an advisory role to the county council. Right? There are seven county councilors that are elected.

We don't have a county manager. We have a county manager. We don't have a county mayor or city mayor. So, like, the county council is is the governing, and we are an advisory to them. There are other boards and commissions, transportation, lodgers, environmental sustainability, open trails and open spaces.

So it's a way for the community to have volunteers discussing what's under their purview. Ours is really big because health impacts a lot. And then make those recommendations to the county council. What do we think is important and what can we take up to them? Health councils have been required by the New Mexico legislature since 1991.

For a long time, there was a informal community health council, same acronym. But then in December 2019, it became there was a resolution passed by county council to recognize it as an official board under the board and commissions. And so we have this very interesting role where we interface with the New Mexico Department of Health. There are health councils in, I think, all counties or most of the counties and tribal nations, that are, you know, the on the ground boots on the ground for community health related matters. So it's there's a state piece and then a county piece.

I'm not gonna go over these because I assume you all are responsible humans that will do all of these.

That's in the board's information statement.

It is in the manual. I did print out a couple of copies if anybody here wants a paper copy. And and Heather and Tyler, as new folk, if you want a paper copy, I'll make sure to get you one. Don't tell the environmental sustainability board because we're supposed to be only doing electronic ones. I know this meeting is being recorded, and I'm being cheeky. But

the beans.

We're also supposed to oh, yeah. Because you're on the environmental board too. Oh, jeez. But Don't tell us. So in in the past, we've had other funding from the state. We and other junior bill, other resources from legislators. Right now, our sole funding comes from the, New Mexico Department of Health through a contract we have with them. And I'll get to the budget on the next slide. But every year, there are key deliverables set out by the Department of Health. And I meet with them monthly, to make sure we are making progress on these.

I should back up a quick step. Across the state, there is there are a lot of ways that health councils come about. Some are their own independent nonprofits, like registered five zero one c threes. Others are set up through county structures like us, and then some are tribal nations, and and it kind of runs through the tribal governor. And there's also quarterly meetings and then a series of annual events.

And and Lisa and I were at the annual one, and I did not know this, but it's really a third, a third, a third. A third are independent nonprofits. And there's pluses and minuses to both. If you're an independent nonprofit and you get money from the state, then you're also looking for other funding all the time. If we have ideas and don't have funding, I can take it to county council or, you know, find ways to flex our social services budget to make a priority happen.

So but that also means we are beholden to county regulations. Like if we wanted something over 60,000, it would have to go through regular procurement rules. We're still subject to anti donation clauses, etcetera. But on this slide, before I get to the budget, some of our key deliverables are to meet regularly, which we do. We meet monthly.

To achieve recognition from a local governing body, which we'll talk about later because we will likely put together a proclamation and go to council maybe in May for mental health awareness month. But as you remember in January, we did a work plan that is also required for the county so that they they try tries to make it as easy as possible. Make connections with other health councils at the annual meeting. We checked that one off. We have a community health improvement plan.

This has been a multiyear endeavor, that initially was focused on having software so that we could collect the data, which was Unite Us. So we we accomplished that. And then focusing on different health priorities that were laid out by the state, the ones that were selected when when Lori was chair so that it runs on a fiscal year, so July to June. But with suicide prevention, crisis intervention, including promoting the 988 crisis line, and then the opioid overdose prevention, distribution of Narcan. And then because of all of this, I complete monthly and quarterly and annual reporting.

And so it's stuff like, send us the minutes from the last three health council meetings, which we have because we are a board and commission. All of this is public notice. All of this, we have to have minutes, and so we send those along.

And you mentioned real quick the addiction workshop and also the workshop for the youth that you had. Well Summits? It was the not the addiction workshop. It was the well, the youth summit, and then the other one was the

The Summit? I don't know.

The one. Leah, you were were you at that one? It was the grandparents raising grandchildren? No. It was just the recovery one. The recovery one. Sorry. I couldn't get that word out. Yes.

Let me let me loop that in.

That's a

great point. Because there were

two specific events which also met those deliverables. Correct.

So that's I will loop all this in. And I will I can stay on to, like, ten minutes after if there are questions. I know this is a lot. So from that Department of Health, this year's funding equals $80,977. Last year, the New Mexico Alliance of Health Councils went to the state legislature and asked for funds to be recurring for every health council in the state.

Before we had this 80,900, the previous year's amount was 15,000. And before that, it was, like, 9,000. So there's been increases. Again, this is why, you know, if you were your own nonprofit only getting 9,000 a year, good luck enacting all these deliverables. 80,000 is a wonderful jump.

But in my head, if you're your own nonprofit, like, that's not even an executive director. You know? I mean, that and benefits and supplies. Right? But that is how much if we need all of the deliverables, we will have by 06/30/2025.

So fiscal year twenty five. So, for example, as I have submitted our monthly minutes and our roster, then some of the deliverables get checked off, and then you receive a check. So it's like deliverable based. We don't receive a set amount per month or per if if we don't do if if Lisa and I didn't go to the annual conference, like, wouldn't receive that funding line. What we have spent it on so far was the community wide health survey in service of the comprehensive health plan.

And it's pretty open what it can be spent on. And if it doesn't all get spent by the end of the year, it just rolls over to the next year. So in past years, part of it paid for, we had a staff person who was helping develop the comprehensive health plan. Part of her salary, previous needs, moved health council money to pay for her. We also used it for, some of the transcription software that she was using to capture the community interviews.

We could print a health related directory because that is in our comprehensive health plan and aligns with our goals for outreach. We could decide to do a youth and family health survey, mental health survey, to just focus on parents both at the school, homeschooled, anywhere in our community, and what they feel are the biggest needs. I'm just throwing out ideas. There are lots of things. If we're doing these tables like we did at the grandparents raising grandkids events, we can pay for the registration fee at the table, swag for those tables, etcetera.

We social services have a tablecloth and a tent. We don't need to buy those. But if we wanted to give out pens, I don't know, somebody more creative than me comes up with that. But so in the past, to to Lisa's point, there are other outreach events we did. Jeremy wrote and won or got approved a grant to do recovery themed events in September, which is historically recovery month from drugs and alcohol.

And we held an event at SALA, which the I'm blanking on his name, but the the head prevention guy from Department of Health came to it, which was so exciting. And lots of other people from recovery related events came to or resources came to. So again, if there's a fee to be at Earth Day, because it's an event that PEEK runs, health council has a budget to do it. Now, back to having to follow county rules and regulations because we're a county entity. For example, the community wide health survey, we had to send out I'm blanking on the procurement word for it, but like letters of inquiry.

Because Like, it it was kind of an RP and RFQ. But because it was gonna be over a certain amount, like, you still had to follow all of those county regulations. So if you wanna make a suggestion, like, I would like to have a speaker come in who's gonna be a $100,000 and rent out Duane Smith, but I think it meets our outreach goals. We can figure that out. We don't have a 100,000, but we would have to follow all of those same So is it the cutoff for It it depends.

But yeah. There's also ways, like, we can't work around things by doing it otherwise. Anyways, real quick last two slides. Last year, here were our key initiatives for the new folks. Big one was completing the comprehensive health plan, implementing the software, and then building those priority areas for outreach.

And then just in January, we completed the new work plan, which hilariously is on a calendar year, not a fiscal year, but whatever, to begin implementing those short term action items, including a directory of health care information, a crisis response, and working with our regional partners, all things we've identified we want to begin working on. That's on our plan for this year. Making sure we complete our deliverables for the Department of Health and the Alliance. Supporting those community related health initiatives, we wanted to give ourselves enough flexibility. So as we added new members, Leah, Heather, Tyler, if you hear of an event or you're part of an event that might require this.

Oh my gosh. Two minutes to spare.

You can come straight from the airport, counselor.

For those of you online, I don't know if you could see. Counselor he had he just came in from a from a conference in DC. Was it the NCUA? Yeah. And that he probably wouldn't be able to make it. And, with two minutes, it says fair, he shows up.

Could we just

speak for? Yes. And I've just been our last key initiative, participating in discussions toward and we put this on the work plan. I know we none of us love the word, but I just copied and pasted a social services hub that we all really prefer to call the Community Health Action Center. And with a minute to spare, I'm done with my presentation.

We'll get you the slides. But if you could come over here so the people online could see you

in. Sure.

We'll let Councilor Reidy close the meeting. For for Heather and Tyler

jump

oh, no. Tyler's still on. And for Leop, I know this was a ton of information. I really am open to meeting for lunch, coffee, if you wanna take a walk on the New Urban Trail, whatever it is. Heather, I'll meet you at a playground. I'll bring my kids. Whatever works. But I'm happy to answer questions. It's a lot of information, but I am so, so grateful that people always want to volunteer at the health council and then jump in to address all of these issues.

Just want to welcome our new members and and have is my on?

Yes. Now you're on. Sorry. I took it off presentation mode.

Okay. Yeah. So just wanna welcome members and thank everybody for what they're doing, and I'll watch the video when it's posted, put you on the slides. And if you have any questions, I'll check-in.

How was your trip? Anything health related? Or

Not especially. I switched everything. So

do we need to do anything on the minutes or whatever? Because we're at our 01:30, so I just don't I wanna give everybody No.

If everybody if people need to leave, they can leave.

Hope you can

stay and chat. You're gonna adjourn it at 01:30? I'm sorry? Invite all of

you guys to something. On March 14, we're gonna be at the capital. It's gonna be kinship and grand well, grandparent and kinship day. We're trying to pass the sale two by two, which is a pilot program for and grandparents. It's not for Los Alamos County, but it will support other areas. So I'm a kinship like the support for that because we really, really need the support for the grandparents stuff. And with this pilot program, I'll collect data, and we'll be able to hopefully ask to support more areas than just the couple areas that they pick. So I just want you guys to support team. Thank you.

And if you have that flyer, I know you sent it to me a while ago, but resend it to me, and I'll package it with all the stuff to send it out.

Okay. Okay. Well, we can adjourn then. And I

I just wanna I have two things, but not by the meeting.

Please. Yes.

I'm

using the mouse between Zoom. There we go. Thank you, everyone. I am going to to end the Zoom, but thanks for being here. We'll see you next month. Request for quotes. Thanks, Denny.

Did not think of that.

Why do we even bother with