Mayor and Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening, Rockville. We are beginning our meeting on August 3rd, 2026, and all virtual. And we thank you for joining us here today. I'm going to start with the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you, Ms. Sarah Taylor Farrell. Have there been any changes to the agenda?

Madam Mayor and Council Members, there are no changes to this evening's agenda. Thank you.

Excellent.

Thank you. We'll now have the city manager's report, Mr. Jeff Mihalik.

Mayor Ashton, members of city council, ladies and gentlemen, good evening. I only have one item tonight, and that's just to invite people to participate with our economic development strategic plan. We're just starting that process right now. We've loaded that project up onto Engage Rockville, and we have a new survey. I'll also show you a hard copy of it. There it is. There's surveys available for people to go online or to hit the QR code. They pick it up live and please provide their comments. They can track the progress of the Economic Development Plan, Strategic Plan Development and provide their comments. We would appreciate it. Thank you, Mayor.

Thank you very much and I just wanted to flag 1 thing between the city manager's office and the city clerk's office. We did have several agenda items added on Thursday for consent. They were trying to get busy and make sure that we get a lot done before the recess. So just wanted to flag that if you downloaded your agenda earlier in the week to please feel free to check that out. Excellent Thank you. Mr city manager. Thank you city clerk. We're now moving on to boards and commissions appointments and reappointments. We do have a few, and I wanted to make sure that it's at least for the Human Rights Commission that we can move forward. Would anyone like to make the motion? Council Member Valeri.

Sorry, Madam Mayor, I was raising my hand for the previous question. I just wanted to remind folks that tomorrow night is national night out so that if they don't know of a gathering, you can check it out. Apologies, I don't know what's going on here.

I will just note that we are going to have a proclamation for that and we'll speak to that a little bit more, but please feel free to go ahead.

No, that's totally fine. I forgot we had a proclamation. That's great. Thank you.

No problem. Thank you. Teamwork. Does anyone want to make the motion for our Human Rights Commission appointees?

Madam Mayor, I'm happy to do that as well, if that's helpful. Please do. Thank you. Not a problem. Let me just pull it up real quick. I apologize. I am having some slow connectivity issues.

And I can, as you're doing that, okay, perfect. Thank you.

Yep, not a problem. Madam Mayor, I would like to, I move the appointment of Anna Day Long to serve an expiring three-year term, a new appointment to serve an expiring three-year term until April 1st, 2027. And Richard Hoffman, a new appointment to serve an expiring three-year term until July 1st, 2028.

Excellent. Do we have a second? Second. Thank you. All those in favor, please raise your hand and say aye. Aye. Thank you. Thank you all very much. Okay. We'll now move back to our proclamations and we have 2 for this evening. Uh, 1 is for national night out and the other 1 is for September 11th as national day of service and remembrance. Um, I will get started with the. 1st, uh, national night out. And I see Chief West is on here. I want to just echo and say thank you to all the previous things that we've given to the Rockwell City Police Department. Here is another one. There are over 20 events across the city that are happening. on every corner of the city. Some are large events, some are block parties, and I want to encourage everyone to get out and meet your neighbors. This is an event that is designed to have neighbors meet each other, talk about what we're doing for safety, but also our police department is going to be getting out to all of these events to meet folks and just to create more opportunities for community trust, partnership, and relationship building. There, as I said, more than 20 events across the city tomorrow. It will be starting somewhere around five o'clock until nine. So feel free to get your running shoes on with all of us as we try to crisscross the city. I do want to say the following. We try to get out to as many as we can, but because we have to get all across the city, we are not able to get to all of them. So please know that every single community is in our hearts and our minds, and we appreciate every community member that's helping to plan this event. With that, I'm going to read the proclamation. Whereas the National Association of Town Watch is sponsoring a unique nationwide crime and drug prevention program on August 4th, 2026 called National Night Out. And whereas the 43rd annual National Night provides an opportunity for Rockville residents to join with thousands of other communities across the country to promote cooperative police community crime and drug prevention efforts. The city of Rockville will be celebrating National Night Out 2026 and all residents of Rockville must be aware of the importance of crime prevention programs and the impact that their participation has on reducing crime and drug abuse in the community. Now, therefore, the Mayor and Council of Rockville, Maryland do hereby proclaim August 4th, 2026 as National Night Out and encourage the entire Rockville community to be a part of this special event and participate in the fight against crime and drugs. Can someone move the proclamation? Council Member O'Leary moves the proclamation. Do we have a second? Council Member Van Graak seconds. All those in favor, please raise your hand and say aye. Aye. Excellent. And we have a recipient here with Chief West. Chief West, please proceed.

Madam Mayor, thank you very much. Our department plans for this all year long. The entire department will be out tomorrow night. We look forward to connecting with all the residents of the city and we will hit just as many of those parties. The police department will be at every one of them. So it's a great opportunity for us to get out, let our residents meet our police officers and know us on a personal level. So thank you for all your support and we look forward to it.

Excellent Thank you so much and thank you to the entire team. I know there's a lot of coordination that goes around with reaching out to residents and helping them to plan for a great national out and thank you to our community partners. This would not be possible without you. Please join us tomorrow. Okay, we have our next proclamation, which is to recognize September 11th and that will be by council Jackson.

Thank you, Mayor. So this is a proclamation that needs no really introduction. So let me jump right into it. whereas people of all ages and walks of life across America and around the world collectively witnessed an immense tragedy on September 11, 2001, and the events of that day instantly transformed nearly everyone's lives, some through personal loss and many through an unfamiliar sense of individual and national vulnerability, and whereas An unprecedented historic bonding of Americans arose from the collective shock, unifying the country in an outpouring of natural spirit, pride, selflessness, generosity, courage, and service, and now, therefore, the Mayor and Council of the City of Rockville, Maryland, do hereby proclaim September 11, 2026. as 9-11 Day of Service and Remembrance in tribute to the victims of the 9-11 terrorist attacks and to the many who rose in service in response to the attacks. And we urge the Rockville community to observe September 11th, 2026 as a voluntary Day of Service and Remembrance. Madam Mayor, I move the proclamation.

Thank you. Do we have a second? Madam Mayor, I'll second. Thank you all those in favor please raise your hand and say, aye. All right, thank you. I just to note, we do still not only do a proclamation, but have an event. So please join us on September 11th from 9 to 10, a courthouse square park. And if you didn't know, we have a bench for each person that is from the Rockville area who has passed away as a result of that event and remembrance of them. So please join us on that day. Okay. Madam City Clerk, I think that we didn't have anyone signed up for community forum. Can you just please confirm?

Madam Mayor and council members, that is correct. There is no signups for community forum, so we can move forward. Excellent. Thank you.

We're now moving on to our consent agenda, item nine. We have several on the list for today. I will read the titles. 9A is award and authorize the city manager to execute a contract with Ferguson Enterprises of Tysons, Virginia for request proposal 30-25. This is in relation to the advanced metering infrastructure project associated with our water system and everything is safe. It's just a system upgrade and that is what we're talking about in that item. Approve and authorize the city manager to execute a change order for contract with Boulevard contractors core of Owings mill, Maryland for the Lincoln park community center renovation project and amount not to exceed 316,000 on our about just to note there will be opening up that Lincoln park community center very soon. And that supports that project. Item C, approval of an authorization for the city manager to execute a moderately priced dwelling unit rental program agreements and approval and authorization of the city manager to execute the declaration of restrictive covenants for Twinbrook Place between the Mayor and Council of Rockville and Twinard Limited Partnership, subject to approval as to legal form by the acting city attorney. This is new housing that is being developed in Rockville and with Projects of this size, there are new Molly Price dwelling units that are for rents coming online. D, authorization for the city manager to execute a grants agreement with the U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration for FY2023, Active Transportation Infrastructure Investment Program for the Maryvale Park to Red Gate Park Shared Youth Path Study. This is in alignment with our Vision Zero plan, and we have been working to create this connectivity, and this study will help us advance those efforts. E is an award of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, Montgomery County, Maryland Cooperative Lead Invitation for Bid for Road De-Icing to Morton Salt of Chicago, Illinois. and the amount not to exceed $1 million each year with no aggregate not to exceed $5 million. F, authorization for the city manager to execute a settlement agreement with Engineering Corporation. This is related to water infrastructure as well. Colleagues, does anyone have any questions about these consent agenda items, or shall we move to approve? Okay. Who can make the motion? Councilman Van Graak.

Madam Mayor, I move to approve consent agenda items A, B, C, D, E, and F. Excellent.

Thank you. Do we have a second?

Second.

Council Member Jackson seconds. All those in favor, please raise your hand and say aye.

Aye.

Aye. Okay. Thank you very much. We will now move on to our work session, a work session for grants to nonprofits. I would like to welcome Nick Shushka. She is the Collective Impact Manager in the Department of Housing and Community Development, as well as Sarah Maisel, Program and Grant Specialist from the Housing Community Development Department. And we also have a panelist, Ryan Trout, who we'll be supporting. He is the Director of Housing Community Development. Welcome. We look forward to your presentation.

Good evening, everyone. Thank you for having Sarah and myself, Nick Sushka, tonight. We are looking forward to our grants work session about our city's grants to nonprofits. As we said, my name is Nick Sushka. I am our collective impact manager here in the city of Rockville. I work in the Department of Housing and Community Development, where I support the city's grants to nonprofits, as well as partnership work, such as our Bank on Rockville Coalition, and our Rockville Goes Purple efforts. I'm joined this evening by my colleague, Sarah Mizell, who will introduce herself.

Good evening. My name is Sarah Mizell. I am the Programs and Grants Specialist under the Department of Housing and Community Development. And I'm very excited to share what Nick and I have been working on today.

So for our presentation this evening, We will be requesting feedback on a few items. We'll provide background and a little bit of overview of the grants programs in question, as well as program design changes, review next steps if those design changes are adopted, and then have time to hear the requested feedback from mayor and council this evening. We have three questions this evening that we're requesting feedback on. Should the city adopt five proposed impact focus areas to guide future grant funding decisions? Should one or two of these impact focus areas be prioritized in fiscal year 28? And should the city provide a streamlined renewal pathway for high performing programs? So some background about our grants programs to nonprofit organizations. We've provided grants through two primary programs, our human services grants and community organization grants. These are reorganized into a single community services and enrichment grant managed by DHCD in fiscal year 25. And the city's community empowerment matching grants were also moved under DHCD in FY26. There've been several benefits of this reorganization, including stronger nonprofit partnerships as we've worked to not only connect nonprofits that receive grants more to city departments and provide greater support from a single grant management team, but also to one another through efforts like our community partner cafes and our nonprofit symposium. That's also allowed us to connect nonprofits to more resources across the region, like Nonprofit Montgomery and the Maryland Nonprofit Navigator. We've worked to improve outcomes tracking and accountability through this streamlined single grants program. And through that, we've identified opportunities to standardize and improve administrative processes. Most recently, we've been able to make some changes about right-sizing requirements for smaller, lower complexity grants up to $10,000. And Sarah will share more about the benefits of those new requirements on the following sites.

Thank you so much. Right. So, like Nick was saying, um, we have already begun a little bit of this process transitioning, um, into this model for the lower, smaller, lower complexity grants that are $10,000 or under. Um, so we already have a model like this in place with the community empowerment matching grant, which will now be the community empowerment mini grants. Um, this model includes one time upfront payments. one time post project reports for the quality assurance. And the reason why this model is in place, many of these organizations are smaller volunteer ran, and they're operating on very tight budgets to put on events, maybe one to maybe two events a year. So they really rely on this funding within their budgets that are already constrained. And To right size this model, we do require a quality assurance, but it would be a post project report on the metrics that they would submit in the grants process in the application process. So, for FY27, The Community Empowerment Matching Grant would be administered by June 2027, but for the current FY27 Community Services and Enrichment Grant for awards that are $10,000 or less, we've already shifted this model a little bit in the next slide. you'll see we have these organizations that fall within the $10,000 threshold. So for example, we have F. Scott Fitzgerald Literacy Festival, as well as the Village Support Network. Next slide, please. And so, for the 28 proposed budget, we would include this smaller shift from the community services and enrichment grant program to the mini grant program. So, the mini grant program for 28 would accept 10,000 dollars requests. That would be the cap and we anticipate about 15 to 10 applicants for that grant program. The application would open in March of 2027 and close in April. And in that time, we would also convene the panel to review those applications. So, then by May, we would have a selection and recommendations to the city manager's office. And then by June, 2027, we would have the approval via consent agenda item. So, with that, I will pass it back over to Nick.

Thank you, Sarah, this is Sarah and I noted a process that we've been able to begin to implement in the current grant year benefiting some of those grantees who've already received awards as we've been preparing their grant agreements. We've been notifying them about this shift, letting them know that they'll be able to request that full grant award. up front that has, as Sarah said, been welcome news for some of these organizations, particularly those volunteer-run organizations. And this shift to the fiscal year deadline also allows us to now have both grant programs on the same timeline and further improve transparency, as Sarah noted, by including those approved grants on the consent agenda for mayor and council so that you can see which grants the community panel has selected for these many grants. So as we move into the rest of tonight's work session, we'll be talking about two further program design changes that we're proposing. Those are primarily about the Community Services and Enrichment Grants program. So a little bit of overview about this program. Last fiscal year, which we have just finished closing out, we supported 40 programs run by 34 nonprofits with a total funding of $1,781,110. As we move into this fiscal year, Sarah and I are in the process of setting up our grant agreements and preparing to support 48 programs that will be managed by 40 nonprofits for a total of $1,845,790. These grants are run by nonprofits that meet community needs and enrich the lives of Rockville residents through a number of different service approaches, providing programs, events that connect residents to one another, and help improve things like access to needed community services. For this particular grant program, we require quarterly reports, and we also conduct an annual site visit. This helps us to measure how each grant is achieving its outcomes, which are identified by the grantees and their application. It also has the benefit of our staff being able to support nonprofits. If they are encountering challenges, if they need further support from the city or from other resources, and we can identify opportunities from collaboration between nonprofits. As I noted last year, we were able to resume the opportunity to regularly convene nonprofit partners, both that have grants and that partner with the city in other ways through our community partner cafes and our annual nonprofit symposium. And Sarah and I provide ongoing staff support throughout the year, providing those connections for nonprofits to resources and helping to raise more awareness for Rockville residents of the opportunity to benefit from these services, attend nonprofit events, and participate in the programs that they lead. We have continued to identify further opportunities to strengthen this program. As I mentioned, we've seen benefits of the reorganization so far, but we believe there are still opportunities to streamline requirements, improve the evaluation process, increase alignment with the hoped-for outcomes of this grant program, and importantly, invest in more long-term outcomes. Even though this grant program is a single year of funding, we know that many of our nonprofit organizations apply for funds year to year. And they're doing that with the understanding that many of our community goals and community needs are going to take more than a year to support or implement. If you're running a youth development program, you're working with elementary school students through high school, you have multi-year goals, of course. And so we've identified some opportunities for the city to further support long-term outcomes that we know that many of our partners are also aiming for. The program design changes that we'll discuss this evening have been formed by many different sources, the primary of them being the City of Rockville's five guiding principles. In addition, we looked at the recently completed Rockville Human Services Needs Assessment, which provided opportunities for community members, nonprofit organizations, and members of our Human Services Advisory Commission to help us understand the evolving needs of Rockville residents. We've received feedback from multiple grantees who have continued to provide feedback to us, both directly as city staff and to mayor and council. As we noted, we complete annual site visits with our grantees, and we've had many other opportunities to look beyond the city as well, as we consider grantmaking best practices and the evidence-based practices that are outlined in frameworks like the Upward Mobility Framework and the Economic Mobility Catalog. Our first recommendation for this evening is to adopt impact focus areas. This is arising from a few different needs. One need that we see is for well-defined criteria to help our community panel evaluate the many worthy projects that we receive requests for. As I noted, in the year that we are headed into, we'll be funding about $1.8 million in grants for 48 projects. But our community panel received requests for $2.8 million in projects. So we expect those applications to continue to greatly exceed available funding. We think that we will be best able to support organizations in prioritizing applications when they know what those grants are going to be evaluated against. And we want to make sure that our community panel has clear criteria that they can use to help them recommend among many worthy projects. Under this framework, proposals that are most aligned with the impact focus areas would be competitive for the highest ratings, but importantly, we wanted to maintain flexibility for proposals beyond the focus areas as well. And so we've proposed to continue to prioritize our service areas. As you can see on the bottom of this slide, the city has, going into this grant year, nine service areas, including adult education, arts and culture, housing services, senior services, And we're proposing in the next grant cycle to continue to ask organizations to identify one or more service areas, as well as describe the program and program outcomes. This is something that's been standard in our application for the last couple of years. What we would like to add are five recommended impact focus areas. that are more outcomes focused and will help us to establish clear criteria for the community panel to evaluate how well a proposed project aligns with a hoped for outcome. These five impact focus areas are housing stability, economic mobility, youth and family success, service access and navigation, and community enrichment and belonging. These five impact focus areas, if adopted, would allow us to incorporate them into the application and evaluation and would allow organizations to identify how their services would align with one or more of those impact focus areas. So for example, if we look at the impact focus area community enrichment and belonging, Preferred strategies that we can solicit in FY28 applications could include programs that help reduce social isolation or proposals for arts, culture, or community building activities that increase belonging or civic connection. And an organization that's proposing a program could identify that they'll provide an arts and cultural program that supports community enrichment, and they could include how they would measure how well their programs are increasing belonging. Or for example, an organization that's providing food distribution services might select youth and family success if the primary outcome of their program is meant to support youth in schools and reduce hunger in families. So it will really be up to the organizations to identify how they measure the outcomes of their programs and how those would align with one or more of our five impact focus areas. Again, I want to emphasize that we would continue to ask organizations to identify a service area that aligns with our current service areas. We would also continue, as we currently do, to ask and assess how proposals support our city's JEDI priorities. We've just recently adopted a strategic plan for JEDI at the city, and this is a great opportunity for us to align those applications with the JEDI priorities, and we would continue to ask how applicants would improve access, opportunity and outcomes for Rockville residents. That would be across any of these five impact focus areas. But what would be different is that we would be able to integrate the impact focus areas into the application and provide a way for our community panel to evaluate how well a proposal would achieve those outcomes. Our second recommendation for our program design change this evening is to streamline renewal for high-performing programs. As we mentioned, many of our applications come from organizations that are trying to achieve outcomes that necessitate more than one year of funding. We know that many of the needs that our residents have or the community goals that we're trying to support need more than one year of funding. We also are aiming to reduce the application burden for high performing programs that are requesting renewal funding. What we mean by renewal funding are the applications we receive each year for existing programs that are asking for the same amount of funding. We do receive a significant number of those applications each year. So the second recommendation that we're seeking your feedback on this evening would be to allow a streamlined renewal for high performing programs that are seeking funding to maintain that program. We would recommend that we allow those high performing programs up to two years of renewals. We could include a modest cost of service adjustment subject to available funding in the city budget. And after two renewal years, those programs would need to resubmit a full application and participate in the review process again. Importantly, this doesn't mean that organizations are never reviewed. you would always begin with a full application that is reviewed by the community panel, recommended for funding. And then we would use the site visits and the quarterly reports to help us identify high performing programs that are meeting their performance metrics and are achieving their program outcomes. We would begin that process in the year ahead, which would allow us to then identify high performing programs that could seek a renewal for next year. If we adopt this approach, we can focus our annual competitive review process on other applications, such as applications from new organizations, proposals for new programs, or organizations that are undergoing significant changes. And we can provide more consistent support to organizations that are seeking to continue a program with largely the same amount of funding who've already shown that they are achieving the outcomes of that program. If these changes are adopted, staff will finalize program changes based on mayor and council feedback this evening. We'll communicate to current and prospective grantees through the application materials, our technical sessions, and our next community partner cafe that would take place in September next month. When we launched the FY28 community services and enrichment application, we would incorporate those five impact focus areas. Again, that application will launch next month. And when our community panel convenes, it would review the applications with impact focus areas incorporated into the evaluation criteria. This would allow us over the coming year to then measure those high performing programs that are achieving their outcomes and we could offer streamlined renewals next August before the launch of the FY29 application cycle. So we look forward to hearing your feedback this evening again on those three questions. Should the city adopt five proposed impact focus areas to guide future grant funding decisions? Household stability, economic mobility, youth and family success, service access and navigation, and community enrichment and belonging? And should we prioritize one or two of these impact focus areas in the next grant cycle, FY28? Lastly, should the city provide a streamlined renewal pathway for high-performing programs? We look forward to hearing your feedback.

I want to say, thank you very much for thinking so critically about the programs and the grants so that we can continue to evolve as a city. I know that this has been a progression and things have changed to make things more effective and targeted over time. I also want to just think the nonprofit community members who are doing such incredible work. That's really an extension where government can't do, but we can support and lift up and to really respect and recognize them as third party intermediaries that are doing really good social safety network programming on behalf of the city. And I know I speak on behalf of my colleagues that we're just so thankful that we have incredible nonprofits. I also acknowledge that times have been really hard with a lot of changes. that are happening in the federal space that are impacting grants and payment schedules, et cetera, and there's been more uncertainty. So thank you for having the nonprofit round table so we can wrap our arms around what is happening, what is the realistic life cycle of some of the projects that nonprofits are working on and what are their challenges and what are the opportunities that we can be better and more responsive to our community? So, I'll just say, thank you on behalf of all of us. I'm going to I have several questions, but more about just fine tuning and figuring out how do we adjust some of these items? But I really just say, I agree with. With the concept and love what you have done here. I want to, I'm going to call on as if we were starting from the right of me on the days, and then we'll move to the left of where we normally set. So, with that, I'm going to turn it over to council member bank.

Thank you, Mayor, and thank you guys for putting this together. I know a lot of us have talked significantly over the past number of years about trying to make this entire process more smooth for the nonprofits to understand, more streamlined, and better understanding and focused. So this is exactly what I think we want to see and I think what the nonprofits and the community want to see. With regard to the feedback, first, and I think your number three is really critical, a streamlined renewal pathway for high-performing programs. We've heard it continually from the nonprofits that sometimes going through the process, I mean, I've heard from nonprofits where the person who was in charge of it missed the packet, you know, and all of a sudden they're behind the eight ball and things get off track. So providing a streamlined renewal pathway, I think, is critical and exactly the right way of thinking about this. With regard to kind of your first two questions, I want to understand a little bit about essentially what we're doing here, because I know we've got some significant nonprofit partners that we work with. Are we just talking about those who regularly have been under $10,000? Because we've got some significant partners I know who have been above $10,000, who are significant partners that do amazing things. I know there's Community Reach. I know there's the Rockville Volunteer Fire Department. I know there's, you know, Sister Cities. Are we talking about some of these large partners as well? Or are we solely talking about some of these larger grants or a combination of both?

Thank you for that question. Just to make sure that I understand, you referenced the grants above $10,000 and below $10,000. Are you asking if the program design changes for the impact focus areas would affect the $10,000 above grants? Or are you asking if the streamlined one-time payment up front and one-time project report at the end would only affect those grants under $10,000?

I'm actually asking about both. I'm trying to understand this process that we're trying to get at. And are we reforming a certain section of them? Are we looking to reform all of them? How is some of the decisions and the focus that we're doing here going to apply to all of our nonprofit partners, both the ones under 10,000 and the ones below and above?

Thank you for that. I understand the questions. So the changes that are underway are to the Community Empowerment Matching Grant Program. That was previously a very small neighborhood focused program that some nonprofits participated in awards were typically 500 to 1000 dollars. We are shifting that to a community empowerment mini grant program that will accept proposals up to 10,000 dollars now. And that aligns with the city's other fiscal thresholds where we can do GAX payments, for instance, through procurement up to $10,000. So we've aligned those smaller, lower complexity grants and have taken the opportunity there to streamline so that we can do a single upfront payment up to $10,000 and just require that one end of project report. But you're correct, that would be limited to proposals that are $10,000 or less for the new community apartment mini grants.

That's exactly my understanding. I just wanted to make sure, because I know there have been some questions that I've gotten from folks with regard to the understanding. Here's another question I had. You might recall we've had a number of conversations from the DAIS with regard to grants and proposals with regard to projects that either the city might be able to provide it or there's other avenues. I know one of the examples I know Madam Mayor's talked about it. I've talked about it deals with some of the legal services that I know that there are other avenues out there with regard to with regard to in absence of our funding. Has there been some discussion with regard to guiding our future grant funding decisions, with regard to what other opportunities are out there when choosing which grants we're going to go forward with the limited funds that we have.

So thank you for the question about have there been discussion of guiding those applications when there are other services that are being provided. That's not something that was discussed per se in these program design changes, although the evaluation criteria do currently ask if there is a community need or a gap that's being met. And I would anticipate that continuing to be a part of the evaluation. But to your question, that specific conversation has not taken place.

And so I guess one more question. I know that a number of the nonprofits that have come to us from the city are squarely within helpful issues, but might not be squarely within one of these impact focus areas. Are we treating these impact focus areas broadly to ensure that we're covering what's needed? And I guess my worry here is, first of all, I love the idea of the impact focus areas. I think that's absolutely all right to make sure they're in some focus areas. My one worry... I accidentally hit my mute button. My one worry is that we're necessarily, I don't want these to be prohibitive with regard to a program. And just one example that I would be thinking of, and I know that they've been a little bit outside of $10,000, but I'm using it as an example because it works, the Rockville Science Center. Rockville Science Center, I would believe there's youth and family success and there's community enrichment. and belonging, but one could have it as a separate whole whole category for what they provide to the city. And I just want to make sure that these ideas of these impact focus areas aren't necessarily going to be a hurdle if one does an organization doesn't fall 100% behind one or two of the proposed funding areas.

Nick, you want me to take that one?

Sure, go ahead, Jeff.

Okay, thanks. Council Member Van Graak, I want to move back. I'm going to break a rule that I always say to the team about going back to a question that's been asked and answered, but you and a couple other members of council have talked to me about services that people have requested for grants, such as legal services that can be provided through other means. We have talked about that a little bit. We are going to make sure that when people are applying for grants this year, we're going to make sure that one, they're trying to hit these five impact areas. But secondarily, if we know there's another entity that provides funding, like for legal services, we're going to try to steer them there. Because what that's going to do is it's going to provide funding for some other program. So I heard that loud and clear from council and i'll talk to the team about that um the other thing i'll mention is just to answer your more recent question is yes the goal is to really try to make sure that grantees are looking very diligently at those five um impact areas that are on your screen but yes they are going to be broad enough that people can make an argument to us and i can't stress that enough of where they think their grant falls into one of those categories And then the evaluation committee is really going to kind of slice it and dice it and say, yeah, we agree, or it falls a little bit short. And if it's a little short, it'll be ranked lower relative to the ones that we know are right on point. So hopefully that answers the question.

No, that's perfect. You guys have both answered the questions. So that helps me with my feedback. So with those answered, number one, should the city adopt the five proposed impact focus areas? Yes. Focusing answers and their nonprofit partners to those areas are good. However, that leads me to the number two, where I actually am not in favor of that. I think that we should be allowing folks and allowing nonprofits to be within the impact focus areas, because we don't know what's out there and what programs are going to be proposed. And I would hate to say that we're going to prioritize two out of the five, only to find out that because we didn't prioritize one of those other areas, we've lost out on supporting a fantastic program. So I think you guys are absolutely right to be focusing and ensuring that our nonprofit partners are focusing in areas. But I don't want to necessarily just limit it to one or two per year. I want to give them the opportunity to say, hey, we're going to support our community in one of these five ways. But fantastic. I love the thinking. I love the direction. And I love the focused energy. So fantastic job. I really appreciate what you guys have done.

Thank you, Councilmember. We'll now move on to Councilmember Shaw.

Can you hear me?

We can hear you. Thank you.

I also want to echo my... There's an echo. Can you come back to me? I think there's some package.

No problem. I'll come back to you after Councilmember Jackson.

All right. Thank you, Mayor. So first of all, let me say excellent presentation and excellent work. I've been talking about this with the city manager and with my colleagues for a long time, and the subject of nonprofits and working with the city is something that's near and dear to, I think, all of our hearts. And we've really done, or you guys, sorry, not we, you, have really done a stellar job in doing outreach to nonprofits, holding seminars, the recent meeting that was held, the second summit held, or whatever it was, I'll call it a summit. But the second one was great. And then the nonprofit cafes continue in that mold. And I know that I've been talking about having priorities for the grants that we give. Sorry, the cat and dog are fighting. So ignore that background noise. But I've been talking about having these priorities, and I think this is right in the right direction. So, number one, I say yes. Number two, I'm a little bit with Councilmember Van Grack on the answer there. not really for any other reason other than I think it's probably too soon to drill down into these areas and which ones should be funded. I think we need some more data to look at that and then prioritize the areas. So I think we need another year or two to actually prioritize the focus areas. I also had a little question and this is for Nick or maybe the city manager, but are we taking care that we, in an attempt to put parameters in place and make it easier for grantees to understand what we're asking for, Are we in fact making it harder and will there be assistance for them to navigate this new process?

I appreciate that question very much. Thank you. Yes, we definitely want to make sure that not only do we provide that assistance through the application instructions and our technical sessions, which will provide over a number of different options and days as well as recorded so they can be accessed after the technical sessions. But we want to provide that support, especially to anyone who might be Returning and encountering a different process. Also, the materials that Sarah has prepared, I think, do a really good job of showing how the application as it is currently designed, where the nonprofits are identifying a service area really connects to the impact focus areas. So we're trying to do our due diligence to show that this isn't a completely new requirement. It's asking them to make that connection between their current program, their current services, and the outcomes that they're proposing so that we can see how it maps to one of these five impact areas. So we hope that it will be both a very straightforward change and we're planning for how to support the organizations as they navigate the new application.

All right. No, that's perfect. Thank you. So the question on number three, you know, what and maybe you addressed it in your presentation. I just want to go back to it for a second. It's what is a high performing grant or program?

Thank you for that question. So we currently have our quarterly reports that our nonprofits provide. They show us in those quarterly reports if they're on track to reach their program metrics. These are metrics that they propose in their application when the city awards them a grant. If it's, for instance, less than the amount requested, they have an opportunity to adjust those metrics, but they tell us what they will be tracking this year. And each quarter they tell us if they're on track to reach those metrics. We also have some qualitative questions where they can provide a narrative of what's going well, what are some challenges they've encountered, and if they need any assistance or support. So we do that through each of the quarterly reports. And during the site visits, we actually have a virtual or in-person site visit where we dive deeper into those program outcomes. And if they're on track, Or if they're not, and what they're doing to adjust so that they can meet the goals of their grant, and they can serve residents in the way that they said they would. So, we've currently already been doing that. What we haven't done in the past is assigned a way of telling the organizations if they're meeting those metrics and. than letting them know overall how they've done. It's been more of a, yes, thank you for your report. It meets the goals. Thank you for the site visit. It meets the requirements. What we would do in the year ahead is create a threshold so that we could tell nonprofit organizations, for example, if you're reaching 80% or more of your metrics and you're in compliance with the grant requirements, then you can qualify as a high-performing program. So we look to use the current process that's in place and just establish more of a feedback to the nonprofit throughout the year so they know where they're at and then have that actually be a concrete way to provide a streamlined renewal.

No, well, thank you. And honestly, I think that these high-performing programs, this streamlined renewal pathway is a really great thing. And so I thank you for actually thinking about how to improve the grant process, which I think is going to do a lot of good for the city as well as for, obviously, the nonprofits who don't have to take their time and energy applying year after year when they're actually doing everything right. And I think you, too, I've heard from various nonprofits who you've already kind of streamlined it or taken away some of the requirements for reporting that were just extraneous. And I think that that's really helpful to just boil it down to the meat of what they're trying to do rather than measuring results. statistics or other things that really were kind of on the periphery. So I know that there's been progress already. So thank you for that. But thank you for these as well. And then just a couple of other questions. The community empowering matching program under $10,000. And I know I talked to the city manager about it. So maybe, Jeff, this is a question for you. Does that take the place of what is in your office for small grants for like neighborhood associations or moon bounces or little things like that. Would those go through the community empowerment, the mini grant program that we're setting up now, or is this still in your shop for those little, little grants?

Yeah, there's still two different grants. The mini grants that we're talking about are the ones less than $10,000. But the small neighborhood grants that we're talking about, less than $1,000. Yeah, those are still be a separate process, very streamlined, quick ask, they get the money up front, simple reporting process.

Thank you. Perfect. Thank you so much for just clarifying that. I think this under $10,000 is great. And so one final question, and I know I've talked about it with the city manager, but I want to just bring it up again because I just noticed it as I was looking through the presentation. So the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival. So what is it that we do? have an MOU or that we do with the F. Scott Fitzgerald. And I'm not picking on them. It could be a number of things, but I just want to just bear with me for a second and let me know, what is it that we actually contract for the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Trustful for?

Nick, I think you have a complete answer. Go ahead.

Yeah, sure. So yeah, Council Member Jackson, the F. Scott Literary Festival or some of these other similar grants that provide like a one-time event, we currently have a grant agreement and it contracts with them according to what they put in their application. So for instance, with the F. Scott Literary Festival, they propose that they'll host their weekend festival, that they'll provide a certain number of workshops. And scholarships as part of their short story contest, and that is still all encompassed in 1 single grant agreement. The major shift in pulling them into the 10,000 dollar and less grant threshold is that we are not going to ask them to do a quarterly report. They will not have to do an annual site visit. Once the grant agreement is signed, notarized, and returned, once we've got it on our end completed, we can provide them with their full grant up front. And then very similar to those former neighborhood projects that you were talking about, the community empowerment matching grants, there'll just be one single end of project report. So this really streamlines it for F. Scott Fitzgerald as an example.

No, and that's perfect. What I was really getting at, and thank you for the answer and for clarifying what it is and what it isn't, is I just wanted to make sure that any others that really are like events or sponsorships should not go through the grant process, but are separate. And I think I've talked to the city manager about that as well, and that we're setting up a separate program and process, and I won't go into that. But no, thank you so much for all your work. And that's it for my questions. And I turn back over to you, Mayor.

Thank you very much. I appreciate all the comments and questions of my colleagues. I wanted to turn back to Council Member Shaw.

Thank you. I wanted to echo my... There's still a very strong echo. Could you just circle back again?

Sounds okay now. last part of what you said if you want to proceed that goes really loud in the rooms so i can't okay okay all right sounds good well then that would be uh my turn then i will go um So I just wanted to thank staff again where I began and echo the comments of my colleagues. I have a few questions and I did get some feedback from grantees and I want to honor the feedback that I've heard as well. I'll start with some of my questions though. One is just trying to understand your first question, adopt the five proposed impact focus areas. I think this is spot on to try to help people understand what are the strategic areas that we as a mayor and council And the city is trying to advance, you know, there's, there's a lot to be done in the world and we're trying to make sure that we're providing support where it's needed most. but also that we're advancing the strategic priorities of our city. So I do have a few questions about these categories, if that's okay. One is I'm trying to figure out, as we look at housing stability, economic mobility, youth and family success, service access and navigation, and community enrichment and belonging. I appreciate, Ms. Shiskel, what you said is that sometimes people can fit into one or the other. I do feel like we did nicely call out housing, but there are two other important areas that have been part of our grant program, which are the food services, because there has been food insecurity through COVID. There was food insecurity as a result of some of the federal changes. So that is a big area. We've also been very strong on supporting health services. So are you thinking that would fall under household stability? Should that be called community stability or housing? Would that go under the service and access navigation? I think that's interesting that we include one sort of social determinative health name and not the other two, which I understand you're trying to streamline, but I just want to be sensitive to that because sometimes people, if they don't see themselves and where they squarely fit, it's a challenge.

Yeah, I so appreciate that question. Thank you. I have just flipped over to 1 of the previous slides to, I think, hopefully illustrate where food services or health services might fit and where those would it would be possible to evaluate them in more than 1 way. So, to your point about household stability, we have, for instance, 1 of the preferred strategies could be basic needs access. So, looking at food or health care, or even utilities. Um, under household stability, and some of our grantees that provide food, for instance, really look at, um, and measure the number of households that they're serving. They're looking at particular zip codes, um, targeting disparity zones. So they're looking at. really more of the basic needs access as an example. Whereas some of our healthcare grantees have really focused more on case management and helping the clients as they might get access to one kind of healthcare to connect with a case manager who helps them to navigate kind of a more holistic approach to healthcare. Both of those I think can have a lot of connection to our Human services needs assessments to the, as you mentioned, the rising need that we see in the community and our hope is that the evaluation criteria and the application would allow organizations to really tell us how are they measuring success. So are they measuring it because they're looking at household stability and they're really measuring each individual customer, how that household is benefiting from getting access to food? Or maybe they're measuring more the effect of like a health care fair and how they're helping connect clients to more services as they're continuing to engage with the same client. And I hope that maybe that example would illustrate where we we see them still fitting into this framework.

Yeah, because I did hear a shorthand from household stability to housing stability, and I could see that happening. But if you look under here, because when I was reading it, I thought health care was included in that, but then I heard housing stability. So I'm wondering, should the name be community stability, or are we really calling out one area of the social determinants of health that you're trying to support for stability? So that did give me pause, because I did hear that shorthand used. and maybe it is broader so that that food and healthcare does stand out a bit more. That's just one of the areas that I wanted to flag, because I did hear that focus narrow down a little bit in some of the commentary. The other thing I wanted to ask about is, are these areas used for criteria? So for example, I heard from a grantee that said, well, Do I have to hit X number of these focus areas to be able to make my application stronger? I don't think that's what's intended. You're allowing people to pick one. They may have an overlap, but that's not like... going to be a challenge for them. For example, if the Science Center is really focusing on community enrichment and belonging, they're not going to be dinged necessarily because they're not doing economic mobility, for example, which it might. But I just wanted to get that clarity for nonprofits who may be watching.

Yes, that's correct. In the evaluation criteria, it would not give more points for achieving more impact focus areas. It would measure how well it aligns with one or more.

Okay, thank you. And what is your thought on the naming for household stability? I think what you mean is the whole family, food secure, housing secure. Should that be community stability? Or do you really mean to say housing stability? Because I think there's housing stability in community stability, but I just want to make sure that we're not

inadvertently turning people away from that category because they don't see themselves fitting in that i mean it's really up to the body if you guys want to change it that's the recommendation that we came up with we think it's holistic enough here but it's up to the body if you guys want us to change the the focus areas that's that's certainly your prerogative thank you

Thank you. Yeah, I did hear it narrowed down. So I just, I think either we have to be very clear in our description or make it more about community. Because I do want the food support that we've been providing is huge as well as the healthcare in addition to the housing. So I do like economic mobility. I like the categories. I just, that's the only one that was maybe I didn't see as inclusive as some of the stability and safety areas we previously funded. In terms of prioritizing one of the impact focus areas. So one of the things that has come to that I was thinking about is in the past, we did separate out caregiver from non caregiver grants. I do think that we've seen social service needs grow and we have, you know, we have increased funding to nonprofits to try to be responsive to the needs of our community and the caregiver without trying to say we don't support arts and culture. So I think we've been balancing, say we're going to continue to support these important programmatic areas that are vital for our community to thrive. We have sometimes expanded pots in the caregiver area because of social safety needs that we have seen have needed to be increased. So that's the one that gives me pause because we have responded to issues that are happening in our society. And I wouldn't want to hurt one or the other. But at times, we have said, my gosh, there's something going on here in the universe to help our community. We have at times put some more funding in caregivers. So I do like the way we had it separated in a way so that we had some pots to be able to work with. without hurting the ongoing needs we need for programs in arts and culture. The comments of my colleagues saying that we should go in this direction because I wouldn't want those ongoing programs that we do need to support to get impacted. But we may want to say, as we increase funding, we're going to put some additional in caregiver. It's not saying that we're prioritizing, but I think we have a prerogative to say caregiver, may need additional support at times, given what's going on in society. And I really appreciate the streamlined renewal pathway that you've been talking about for the high performing programs. Some of those high performing programs are really hitting core areas. And, you know, as you said, it takes more than one year to see the results. So, I think that would really help with the burden of the application process, but still having the accountability and still having science staff go in and do the site visits to make sure that we're having high outcome programs. I had a couple other questions, so we have youth and family services. 1 thing I'm hoping that we can convey just because there is a special need and I know we're going to have a work session on this in the future is services for at risk youth. We haven't seen as many grants coming forward to support risk who are at who are underrepresented or at risk or experiencing disparities in an area. So, I'm hopeful that as you look at the program descriptions, we can specifically call that out so that we can make sure that people are seeing this is an area that we are trying to elevate. Is there already a plan to do that? Or is that something you need direction from us on?

I think I hear what you're saying. And I think of all the categories, that's absolutely where we would put it. Nick, if you disagree, let me know. But Mayor, I think you foreshadowed something. We're going to start working on doing an assessment of at-risk youth programs in the region and just see where those gaps are. And once we identify those gaps, then in future grant cycles, that's absolutely an area that we could highlight more. But as of right now, I think where you've identified it is where we would do. Thank you. Nick, do you have anything to add?

No, thank you.

Thank you, Mayor.

Thank you. So I believe looking at the brief book that arts and culture would go under community enrichment belonging. Is that right?

Yeah, I think importantly, this allows the organization to make that connection to where they see the impact of their program. We do anticipate many of our arts and cultural programs would see themselves in community enrichment and belonging. I will note, for example, on this chart, we think that given what we have seen many of those programs measure and where we've seen needs assessments identify need, having arts and cultural programs that increase belonging, that reduce social isolation, that improve access for Rockville residents, those are likely to align with community enrichment and belonging. But I do want to note that some of our arts and culture grantees, For instance, they are really thoughtful about tying resource fairs into their events or programs. So they may also highlight that they have an impact on service access and navigation. Crucially, it'll be up to them to say whether or not that's something they're going to measure as an outcome for their program. But yes, we do anticipate that arts and culture programs should see themselves at minimum in the community enrichment and belonging category.

Thank you for that background. You reminded me of another question about the categories that we have. So as an applicant, and I've known this, I know that I've worked on a couple of federal programs, people are trying to say, where am I most likely to have success? You're not dividing the funding by these categories, correct? So they're not, if there's a lot of applications in this area, I'm going to try to make my application in the other area. That's not the focus. Is that correct?

You were correct. That is not the focus.

Okay. So I want to make sure that nonprofit, cause I have actually heard that question. Um, and as people were looking at our, uh, brief material, so thank you for clarifying that in terms of arts and culture, I would say arts history and culture. Uh, I, I do, um, have some feedback that in terms of the application process on that one. Um, so some of our arts and culture events, arts history and culture events, I'm thinking about, for instance, the rest goes. I'm thinking about Rockville Sister City. Part of the goal of some of those programs is to be a draw for our Rockville residents, but also they bring in people from the outside into Rockville. It supports our tourism, our community. For instance, the Taiwan Bubble Tea Festival brings in 12,000 people. into our talent center, which is fantastic. But the application process itself really focuses on how many, because it's focused in a caregiver lens on how many Rockville residents do you serve versus how many are you bringing into our community to support other arts and culture and tourism needs. So I was just curious about if you're thinking also about the application and how you collect data, because I do want to know And I think my colleagues would be interested in how many Rockville residents you are serving for sure. But also that bigger number is important for some of those events that are designed to be draws. The F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival is another one of those.

Yeah, I really appreciate this question. It's 1 of the things that Sarah and I have done a lot of thinking about in terms of how to really measure the community enrichment impact of those programs. So, our hope is in some of the application materials, we've provided some examples of logic models that show the impact. of these kinds of festivals, these kinds of events. And our hope would be that organizations that are seeking funding, where they may already be telling us in the application that they're reaching this many people at the festival, that they would also identify an outcome. For instance, as one of their major impacts might be tourism, or it might be connecting with businesses in the vicinity of the event. Or it might be welcoming organizations to come to that festival. And those are things, importantly, that can be in the application and they can measure those. They can submit that as a sign of program success that can be evaluated by the community panels. So our hope is that there will be more opportunities for them to identify what the impact is of those kind of programs and to include it in the application. I saw Sarah is going to chime in. The only thing I wanted to say too is that our current application and our reporting has a space for nonprofits that receive grants to tell us how many people overall they're reaching as well. So it is true that we asked them to tell us how many Rockville residents they're reaching, but it's another metric that they provide of how many people they're reaching overall. Sarah, please. Yeah.

Thank you, Nick. Yeah, I just wanted to reiterate and echo what Nick was saying, but I think throughout all of the work that Nick and I were thinking about in this grant restructuring, something that we've really pride ourselves in with working with all the nonprofits that are incoming, especially with the metrics piece, is the importance of just like data telling stories, not just for the city of Rockville, but to in an effort to help these organizations, um, seek funding outside of the city as well. Um, and how important it is for an organization to have metrics for their organization period to have logic models for their programs and how that can really be a, um, trajectory into a whole other opportunity of funding opportunities. So I just wanted to echo that piece.

Thank you. And the total number of participants would be both in the application, anticipated, both in the application and reporting, correct? That's correct. Excellent. Thank you for clarifying that. The other thing I was looking at our current grants on about, I was looking at some of the services we were funding and disability service has been a part of that. I know they would be able to pick the category. I just wanted to note that as we're looking at at-risk youth and immigrant communities, that somewhere on our page, they can see that we're continuing to support disability services as one of the sub areas of support. I know that Rockville has continued to grow to be seen as a place where people with differing abilities can grow and thrive here. And I just wanted to didn't want to signal that we're backing away from that. We're actually leaning in and doing more. And I also want to thank you for raising the importance of helping people understand that we do have a Jedi strategic plan and we're asking people to help align services with that to meet those needs. I had a couple other comments now shifting to the, um. Uh, from from people I've gotten feedback from the fire safety, the public safety work that we've been doing with the fire department. Do you see that that would fit in 1 of these categories? Would that be. I just want to make sure that we're not losing anybody and what we put together here.

Yeah, thank you for that question. I want to answer both that question and also echo something that was said earlier. So, 1 is that even if we do adopt these 5 proposed impact focus areas, the evaluation criteria will continue to measure more than just alignment with these 5. So, part of the hope with these impact focus areas is that it will help those applications to be most competitive, but it would not exclude any application that did not align. As long as the application is eligible to be reviewed, there'll be other criteria that we have included in our evaluation, and we do believe that it will be possible for other applications to Qualify for funding and for the community panel to identify grants that might not align with 1 of these 5. so we wanted to make sure there was still room in the evaluation for it to be flexible enough to go beyond these 5 specifically to the question of public safety of fire safety. We definitely see service access as being 1 of their ways that they could identify. and demonstrate a need there. Also many of our public safety applicants, I think do look at family success and household stability, but we think service access would still encompass those most clearly.

Okay. And how would the grant committee, these are one of the ones that I think the mayor and council have said, we're trying to stay within this range so that we don't necessarily drop support to some. There are some that are standard grants and there are other ones that are sort of ongoing. Programmatic areas that we're trying to support as a city, for example, we give the fire department a donation for water. We're not going to backtrack on that, but the committee may not know that. So, how, how is that being communicated to the review committee?

I can answer that. Yeah. So we have in. The years past, our grantees have asked for either reimbursements of city services, or sometimes there's an intro fund transfer of a city service. These have been included in applications. We actually proposed earlier this year to CMO and finance and made sure that it would be okay for us to. Move forward in this way, we want to take those requests for city service funding and have actually a specific community panel that understands a little bit more what those needs are, what those processes are to evaluate those. So we would actually pull those specific requests out of this evaluation framework and look at them more from sort of a, are they eligible or not criteria? So they would still have to apply through the application process and we would still have community. A panel to review those applications, but to your point, because they are a bit of outliers, and we do need to have a different kind of criteria to evaluate them. We've specifically pulled them out and are planning to have a more tailored panel evaluate those requests.

Excellent Thank you. I know we do water and we've also helped support. Um, new safety trucks, because it is a volunteer department, they've been relying on donations and collaborations with the city on that. So I appreciate that. You're looking at that somewhat differently. Okay, and then the other thing related to the, um. The, I think the returning grants that you're the high impact grants would cover some of the feedback that I've shared via the city manager on the application process, because that would streamline it and it would help them on on. Being able to move forward. but also making sure there's accountability. On the reporting side, I was hearing that there's quarterly reports plus six month reports. And those are just some of the feedback we're getting. I know that I trust that the team is going to make sure that city dollars are being used wisely. But is there any other feedback like that or things that you might be streamlining to address some of the feedback we've received?

Yeah, we do definitely continue Plan to continue to listen to organizations as they give us suggestions and feedback on how we can streamline importantly. We're also looking at the city's other processes. We collaborate with finance and procurement on payments. So some of the processes are from outside of our department that we align with in particular with reporting. That one might be worth us following up with any organization that you've heard that from. We would want to just clarify for them that the six-month report is the quarter two report. So there's four, just four quarterly reports that they participate in. But I hope that that answers the question.

It does. Thank you. And then it notes that the, another piece of feedback, the grant agreements require that they submit the final quarterly Report on June 30th, but they have to expand the grant through June 30th. So they feel like the deadline is challenging since only the end of a quarter. And they don't have all the expenses and receipts talent yet. I'm so I'm assuming that there's a way that you've addressed this with other grantees, but just wanted to share that as well.

Sorry, was there a question there that you right?

So, if we're telling them, they have to submit the final quarter report on June 30th, which is the end of. That cycle, and they don't have receipts yet. Is there a way that they can comply? They feel like that that deadline can be challenging. I don't know if we're making any changes to that process as you're streamlining.

Yeah, thank you for that question. So the end of your financial deadlines actually come to us from the city this year. For instance, the deadline to reimburse organizations is August 5th. The end of your reports were actually due July 7th. We, we make sure that we don't have the report due at the very end of the grant period. And then we ask organizations. I think this year it was probably early June. Sarah might correct me to give us a heads up if they need an extension. So several of our organizations did let us know in advance they would be submitting their materials July 15th. But we are a bit constrained by just the city's kind of reimbursement deadlines. But hopefully that organization that might have thought that they had to have everything turned in by June 30th, hopefully they worked with us to have it in by July 15th.

Excellent. And I think you're going to be doing some education as you roll all of this out, because some of these groups are fairly large and longstanding organizations, but they're still having some challenges with understanding how they want to comply because they're doing everything right. So I appreciate that you're going to be having sessions and webinars to help people understand what's this new approach and how we're going to make this work. And I will also say, I won't belabor this, but I have heard that the payment process changed in the past few years, which I know did not come out of DHCD, but I've been hearing that some feedback on that, especially given some of the nonprofits who have not received timely funding related to food insecurity, health services and housing in particular have been challenging for them. And I know you've worked with organizations. So I'll just say, if you are a nonprofit listening, please feel free to reach out to your, you know, your program manager for help if needed.

Okay.

Thank you so much for this. I think we have answered these questions. But if once we're done going through the line, if you have any additional questions for me in terms of the feedback I provided, I'd be open to it. I'm going to now move to Councilman Valeri.

Councilmember Shaw.

I think she may need more time. Are you ready Councilmember Shaw? Okay, perfect.

Thank you to IT for doing that. And also I just want to echo my colleagues and thank you for this presentation. This is a very thoughtful redesign and I appreciate all the work that has gone into this. So I do have a few questions. When you shared about the community panel that does the evaluation and makes the selection, can you share more about who is that? How many people? Are these real community folks? Like, can you share some more details on that?

Yeah, thank you for this question. So, yes, the community panel is a really important part of the evaluation for both of these grant programs, the mini grant program and the community services and enrichment grant program. We put out a call each year to both city employees, the commissions and boards, and then to the community at large, asking for interested people to serve as panel reviewers. This past year, I believe, and I can follow up to make sure that this number is correct. I believe we had 28 panel members that reviewed something like 51 applications. And as I mentioned, 48 of the applications were selected for funding those community members. Um, they typically are a mix of city staff from across different departments about half of the 28 from across departments. And then the rest are Rockville residents, some who serve on boards and commissions, and some who are just serving as volunteers from the community. We do ask them to make sure that we don't have any conflicts of interest. They're not, for instance, board members of a nonprofit that's asking for funding. We provide a training for them, and then they lead this process. They each do an individual review of every application. They come together in panels to discuss those reviews and reach consensus, and then they make recommendations on which grants should be funded. And we make an effort to recruit people who have lived experience in some of these services and backgrounds, as well as people with maybe professional expertise or direct expertise in the services as well. you share a bit more on how you are ensuring um that the residents that are making the decisions on on these grants um have the lived experience yeah we can share a copy of the interest form it actually asks them to identify why do they want to be a volunteer on the panel do they have lived experience in one or more of the areas do they have a background with professional expertise. So we can certainly share the interest form that asks those questions. And then it's really just a screening. We let people, as they are interested, we want them to volunteer. We let them volunteer, but we just want to make sure that we're screening for, like I said, those conflicts of interest to make sure that the panel members are participating in that way.

I appreciate that process. I think there are some barriers to engagement that may prevent some folks that have a lot of lived experience to even be able to know about this type of opportunity, especially if they are self-selecting. And so I think it's important to just think about equity in that sense. And that would be one area where I would like to just learn a lot more. I won't take up the meeting to do that. But I think being able to just make sure that this opportunity is shared with a broad, diverse amount of people. And it's usually our boards and commissions, the volunteers, they're very, very engaged and will usually be the first to respond. and just making sure that we can also make sure that there is diversity among the lived experience that is shared or provide opportunity. The third question I had, so I see youth and family success, and I also know that And I saw senior services lower down on one of the continued areas that we're focusing on. And I'm just wondering if we could look at adding seniors to the youth, seniors and family success. And why I would say this is because I know that seniors are among one of the growing homeless populations, food insecurity, Also, it's a growing renter population as well that, you know, there's a lot of growing needs among seniors. And when we say family, I'm not sure if, you know, that would cover. But I would say since we are calling out youth for a lot of the same reasons, I would also just suggest also calling out seniors, so youth, seniors, and family. And I know that is an area we are certainly continuing to work on, but just projecting the needs of seniors, it's just a really growing issue that I think that we should further invest in or at least call out and identify here. My fourth question is, I know in the briefing book we talked about the Urban Institute, the framework that the Urban Institute uses. Can you share some more details on that in terms of mobility and the approach using that?

Yes. So this is the Urban Institute's Economic Mobility, or I'm sorry, Upward Mobility Framework. Is that what you're referring to? Yeah, sure. Yeah, I can share a little bit more about that in the staff report too. There's a little bit more information about the upward mobility framework. But this is, as you noted, something that was developed through research with the Urban Institute. It's an evidence-based foundation that's identifying strategies that have been shown to support upward mobility and racial equality. the city has been participating in a few different regional efforts that are aiming to align us with the Upward Mobility Framework, including there's been work through the, I'm sorry, I'm thinking in acronyms right now, and I usually try to spell those out, but COG and GEAR, and maybe someone could jump in and provide the more inclusive, longer definitions of those two. But the upward mobility framework is that evidence-based framework that's trying to identify specific strategies and predictors that are showing upward mobility. Okay.

Okay. Yeah, I would maybe at a later point would just like to understand how that's being applied to the decision making. I understand generally what it is and the concept, but I would just like to learn how is it actually being implemented and applied? What are the results that you're getting? How is it influencing the decisions that you're making? Just some more detail on the implementation. And then I noticed that just like one of my colleagues had stated, I noticed that household stability was being used and then housing stability was being used. And so I wondered a little bit about the terminology and I saw that household stability I know that housing stability, the way that we have defined it in previous work sessions was one way. And then I noticed household stability was used here, which includes utilities, includes food, some of the examples that were provided. And so I got the sense that household stability was used like financial stability for our households. And I do think that community stability is a great term. I would, seeing here that we use community enrichment and community belonging as well. So I just wonder if there would be I think household stability is a very clear word in terms of household finances. I would just wonder if there would be some confusion between community stability and community enrichment and belonging. And I think from... community members oftentimes seeing community belonging connecting to their housing stability. Like if you can't afford to live here, if you're being priced out in a lot of ways, it's making folks feel like they don't belong and being pushed out here in a broader sense. So I know there is some confusion around that. But I would like to hear more about the terminology around household stability. But I did notice it was used interchangeably with housing stability. You may want to, well, could you give more details on housing stability or why you decided to originally use that term?

Nick, maybe you could put up the chart that kind of shows the modifiers underneath it. I think that would be the best way to walk through it if you don't mind me suggesting that.

Yeah, definitely. So thank you for this question, Council Member Shaw. You are correct that housing stability and household stability, we are trying to differentiate the two here. For us, housing stability is one of the strategies that could support household stability. As we look at this chart, though, not just housing policies or housing services. So not just pre-eviction or foreclosure support or rapid rehousing, but also financial assistance, for example, or basic needs access. So when we look, for example, at what the city is doing around housing programs and housing services, we have some goals around housing stability that are very specific to affordable housing, housing access, housing development. And then when we would think about the impact focus area and we think about household stability, I believe when we selected this term, we were trying to look at what our nonprofit organizations are frequently already measuring and what are they Connecting to other regional efforts to measure and so they often measure these financial assistance or basic needs assistance. They often measure it in households and then have some of their own performance measures around household stability. So, our hope with this was to align it with what some of our current providers and nonprofit partners are kind of already measuring and reporting on across the region. I'm hoping that that would be more recognizable to them. And then, as you know, housing stability itself is kind of a more specific strategy that is encompassed in this. I hope that answers that question.

Yes, that is very helpful. So the household stability is more of like an industry term used within the nonprofit sector?

And I wonder if Sarah could comment on this at all. She works a lot with our organizations on identifying those metrics. And as she noted, we're trying to help ensure that what we measure in our grants at the city, wherever possible, it's connecting to things across the region. So, for instance, with food, I know that like the Montgomery County Office of Food Resilience and the Montgomery County Food Systems, that's kind of a coalition of food providers. they're measuring a lot in terms of household served, household stability, household access. Sarah, did you want to speak to that any further?

Um, no, not really. I think like you covered it, but, um, yeah, I think household stability is like just a word like we use that I think encompasses a lot of these things we've talked about, but, uh, I think there is flexibility to maybe be a little bit more encompassing. I don't know.

Or, as we're hearing, perhaps making sure we, we definitely define these in our application and help materials.

I think that is actually really helpful in this new design to think about. Um. our partners and the terminology that they're using and we're reflecting that in our process, I think that helps to streamline it. So, I'm really happy that you are taking some of the terms that our partners are using and it's reflected here. The last point that I would say is just going back to evaluation. It would be helpful for us to get just some of the broader data, like, for example, economic stability or household stability. I know pre-eviction services was one of the items, but also for us to think about this in terms of um just the general data in in rockville like for example i know that evictions have increased for rockville or um and to get some of the background information just like the general data for that air for that particular topic area i think is helpful for us to make um decisions around the nonprofits that we're giving grants to and just to evaluate the work and the services in general. And I'm not saying nonprofits should be able to fix all of our problems because that won't happen. But just to have some of that broader context just for us to make decisions. But this is fantastic and thank you.

Thank you. Council Member, I just wanted to flag. I know Mr. Mihalik asked us to speak to these three areas. I assume that you are, based on your feedback, good with one, but you want people to look at the same titles.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. And if it's okay, I would like to also hear from my colleagues because I know that they may have some questions and I can be a bit more informed if it's okay to circle back. I'd appreciate sure.

Yes, I think he's also looking for answers. Yes or no to 2 or 3 just when we circle back.

Thank you.

Okay. Council member Larry.

A massive thank you to Ms. Shushka and Ms. Maisel. I know as somebody working in the nonprofit sector and has only ever worked in the nonprofit sector, exactly how challenging it is. and also as liaison to the Human Services Advisory Commission. I hear firsthand from so many of our community service providers. I hear about their challenges and their struggles, and I really appreciate all the work that the two of you do on a daily basis, not only on what you're looking at, what we're looking at here, but as a whole, I think that our nonprofits and yourselves are some of our unsung heroes. So I want to say thank you sincerely. I have a whole lot to ask, to say, to comments. I will hopefully get to these three. But if not, I'm sure Madam Mayor will do another like, hey, if you haven't answered the three, go around the horn. I wanna first note that I think that this is a significant enough topic that I don't wanna preclude forward progress, but I think that it does deserve a second work session. We don't have all of our colleagues here and one of our colleagues joined a little bit into the discussion. I think that whether we have it as part of our strategic planning session, Mr. City Manager, I think that this is significant enough that we should consider a second work session. I do wanna, just to Council Member Schaaf's point, yes, household is a term that the nonprofit sector uses, an all encompassing term when you're looking at different levels of service. You have community needs, but you have household needs as well. So it's very easily identifiable by the nonprofit or NGO, non-governmental organization. Community. Well, on that point, I throw out an idea. And this also goes to something that actually you said, Ms. Shishkoff, when you very kindly answered the question again. Maybe we call it community resiliency because making sure that people have safe and stable housing access to health services, access to food. These are things that are kind of essential to resiliency. And resiliency is also part of stability. So I'm just going to throw that out there as an idea. You can run with it or you can ignore me. Either way, I'm all good. But I do like the idea of resiliency. and making sure that all of our communities can not only survive, but can thrive as well. I'm gonna take it a step back and not only for all of us, here, but for folks watching from home either now or later, can you share a little bit, how is prioritization determined as of right now? So, you know, when we go into this time period of people applying, how do we do prioritization? How does the... community panel review and selection committee, how do they define the priorities of this program right now?

Thank you for that question. The primary driver of us proposing this program design change is because we do not currently have a way of evaluating prioritization among applications. We do have standard evaluation criteria. And as we noted, we are receiving far more requests than we're able to fund. And it has been a challenge for our community panels to use the current evaluation criteria to prioritize. So we are hoping that by adopting impact focus areas and incorporating those into the evaluation criteria, it will provide a tool for our community panel to be able to look more at applications that align with outcome goals.

Yeah. No, thank you. I think that was very helpful. And I think that hopefully that was helpful to my colleagues as well. I want to make sure that you know, obviously we need focus. Well, we need focus and we need focus areas, right? When we're identifying the best criteria to evaluate applications and program effectiveness. But I also think that there is a part of it that could also be reflective of the mayor and council priorities. So that, you know, you have kind of set in criteria, but let's say, actually this is a great example of it. This mayor and council really wanted to, step in, provide, protect the community from the decisions of the federal government. Maybe not all, you know, mayor councils might, you know, want to do that or see it differently, but we obviously want, you know, to support that are filling a gap because of what the federal government has done right now. So I hope that maybe as part of the community panel review, just in some way, taking the discussions that we have, like our strategic priorities, we have those sessions and maybe in working with Mr. City Manager, working with that to help inform the community panel review that this is something that the mayor and council also find. These are also priorities as well. I think sometimes that's been the disconnect. I know at least for me in that I'm like, well, I thought we were prioritizing this and then this kind of comes out of nowhere. I'm trying to kind of thread the needle between here are our values these will always be our values and then you know the focus of a particular elected body and being able to kind of um nimble in that way i appreciate that you're really built in a lot of flexibility into the the process because i think that is that is um uh good indicator of a very well-designed program is that you do have that flexibility. I love a lot of stuff that you've proposed in this, a lot of things that you've proposed, including, and, you know, maybe it's just me, but I really love the I'm looking for it, sorry, that there was a section in here that would allow for the modest cost of service adjustments subject to available funding. I think that that's fantastic. again, speaking as somebody who works at a nonprofit who has submitted so many grant applications and had to explain, okay, so this is why this year I'm asking for a little bit more and it's because X, Y, and Z. There definitely has to be that kind of cost of living adjustment in terms of grants. So I really appreciate that opportunity. I also wanna note, we talked to a lot of folks, a lot of my colleagues have talked about the economic mobility portion of the impact priorities. I will say just as an FYI, I think myself and I believe Madam Mayor also met representatives from the new Maryland Department of Social and Economic Mobility. I think they're really trying. Yeah, they're some great folks. And I think that they're even closer to the community as well as than a national entity. I think the Urban Institute is fantastic, but I would love to kind of see more leaning on our state partners for their perspectives and resources. I know it's a brand new cabinet position, so like no pressure, but I think there's an opportunity there to really get some good information. I absolutely love the impact focus areas. At first, I was like, oh, this is in my mind. I'm like, oh, this is missing. This is missing. This is missing. I don't necessarily think that we need to discreetly outline everybody who makes up a family or everybody that makes up you. I think that the devil is going to be in the details of how you define each of these proposed impact focus areas and then Those kind of shared definitions will also help us to understand, I think, as well. Short of having very distinct definitions, I totally appreciate the context of the chart. That was really helpful. I think level setting that we see economic mobility as our desire to X, Y, and Z. That'll help, I think, maybe make things a little bit more clear, not only for us, but for the community and for potential grantees. I think I've said this before, but under community service and empowerment grants, If we call it senior services, can you please call it youth services? You know, some of the youth that we really want to work with, they're already pretty developed. They're probably more empathetic than a lot of adults that I know. And I think that youth services is a more expansive way of looking at their needs. I want to co-sign with my... Madam Mayor said in particular, and to what Mr. City Manager talked about, I think that we'll have a lot more information here's another great example of the cross-pollination of mayor and council priorities with our grant program is that we're going to have work sessions specifically on on youth programming in particular for at-risk youth and i'm hoping that that'll help to inform um our our grant process as well because we keep kind of getting um i think we can definitely get some maybe um not better, more grantees or potential grantees that would be in those areas if we, you know, kind of share that that's also a priority of mayor and council. None of these are questions, by the way, so you haven't missed anything. This is more off the top of my head, like I've been thinking through a lot of this. I also want to note that If we're looking at at-risk youth programming, we'll continue to hope that we, as part of community resiliency, could look at encouraging applications from folks that work with in the substance use or recovery community space, as well as in the veteran space in particular. And I know that sometimes a lot of people tend to assume, and I also defer to my colleague council member, Dr. Miles, a lot of people seem to think, oh, well, the veterans go to VA. Well, you the VA has cut back on a lot of programs right now too. So I think if there, again, if there's a way that we can provide help in any way to our veteran community here in the city, I really hope that we do. Let's see. I already mentioned that. Talked about community resiliency. So I will say I think that, I think generally, we as a city and your team, in particular Ms. Shishka and Ms. Mizell, are really good about kind of applying the equity lens because you all work so closely with the community. risk and marginalized communities but you know maybe it's a good approach for the community panel review if we had you know um our own internal city equity focus areas i tend to always look to see you know i you want programs that serve the city as a whole absolutely we have sometimes seen programs that were centered in areas that are not in need, if I can be kind about it. And so I would love, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on developing equity focus areas that would then encourage both the community panel review as well as applicants from organizations that would work in particular in the communities that are most in need. I would love to hear your thoughts on that.

Yeah, thank you for that question. I think there's a real opportunity for the grants application and evaluation. And you mentioned the community panel to align with the Jedi strategic priorities. I'm really looking forward to working with the Jedi team on that. And that recently with Jean Booth, of course, looking at what was just adopted and our year one work ahead of us. And I think there's going to be so many opportunities for us to Extend that work that we're going to do to adopt the 7 strategic priorities into our departments into our program, and then into the work that we do through nonprofit partnerships. So, I think that that is a real opportunity.

Absolutely. And thank you. I'm really looking forward to it because there's so much overlap. So yeah, to go to the questions, absolutely, we need to adopt impact focus areas. We don't have focus areas right now. We need to make it easier for our community panel reviewers to be able to effectively select from pools of applicants. I don't know how else we would do that if we don't have a way for prioritization. So for my colleagues that are not, who have shared already that they kinda wanna defer on this, I understand because at first I was the same way, but now realizing that we have no distinct prioritization matrix, then this is what this would be. So absolutely, I support number one. I think, you know, for question number two, should one or two be prioritized? I don't know why we wouldn't prioritize all of them, but I guess my answer is one or two is it works, but If these are going to help with prioritization, it would be really hard for me to determine which would be prioritized over others. I don't think that we necessarily need more data on this because we already have decades of data that fall into these categories. I do agree. We have high-performing programs. We have some of our grantees who have received grants from the city for over a decade, if not more. And it does beg the question for me, twofold, absolutely, if it's a proven program in the city, they should absolutely have a streamlined renewal pathway, checks and balances, guardrails, of course, you know, change in nonprofit leadership, ongoing site visits, kind of, I've definitely, I've experienced all of that, so I don't think any nonprofits would be upset with that, but, you know, I also sit back and I say, I think sometimes at what point do we as a city look deeper at the services the city has funded for 20 plus years, right? Like we have this ongoing relationship and are we just kind of there an extension of the city at that point? Are they serving more, less? I don't know, but we do have longstanding non-profit partners who are just providing amazing services. So I do absolutely support a streamlined renewal pathway, again, with guardrails and site visits and all that. Before I... Okay. Three last points and then I will pass it along. Two are things I've been challenged with when I've looked at the community grants. The first one is the funding of programs that are run by Montgomery County. And I'm challenged by this because the county has a much bigger budget than we do. We are absolutely supportive of county programs. Don't get me wrong. But it, to me, always seems a little odd that the county, with a lot more money than we do, is coming to us asking for a grant to help a program that they run. Obviously, Rockville residents can help. get the benefits of the program. But it's a weird imbalance in my brain. I'll take the case of I used to work for a local chapter of a nonprofit. And it would be like the national headquarters saying to the state chapter, yeah, you got to pony up some money so that we can do this across the United States. And it's like, why are you coming to me? I have no budget. So I am definitely challenged by that. The other thing, and one of my colleagues mentioned this as well. And actually, Ms. Shushka, you mentioned this too. In order to really connect a funding, an event, opportunity, I really gotta see it connect easily to Rockville businesses. I think it's great if people come to the city for something like the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival, but where is the direct connection to a Rockville business? I obviously want people to come here and spend their economic dollars and, you know, their businesses. I think we all do. But it's tough if the programs are being held in locations are not easily, I feel businesses are not easily accessible. And I think can be kind of ignored. You could kind of dip into an event and dip out. So I just wanted to share that that's one of the things that I'm challenged with. Final thing is a question and a comment. I think probably more than anything in the grant process, I've really been trying by the lack of clarity, at least to me, around grant recipients and the lobbying of the city on policy decisions or potential decisions. I think that in no way, shape or form does anybody want to eliminate free speech, that is not what I'm saying. I also know that as somebody who has been the grantee, I know that I had guardrails and there were bright lines between what I could and could not do in terms of engagement with the grantor. I think that it is distressing to me, we give essentially a general grant to ensure that a program continues or an organization continues. And that money then is turned around to lobbyists on a particular policy. And I appreciate that we have a conflict of interest in terms of the election committee. I would really like to see some ethical language, maybe from the city attorney office, something around that idea that everybody can do anything they want as a resident of Rockville, as a resident of Montgomery County. Think that the challenges when you are the head or an employee of a grantee, there are different conditions that do apply. And I would really want to see some bright lines, some guardrails, so that we know that the money that we are investing in the nonprofit is not being invested in lobbying us. And that's really my point. So I will end there. I would love to hear my colleagues' thoughts on that as well. And really wanna thank you all. I know how tough this is, so I appreciate it. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Dr. Miles.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. I wanna echo my thanks to the presenters on this. I'll keep it brief. after hearing my colleagues' comments, and thank you for those. In terms of answering your questions, question one, yes, I think that the five proposed impact focus areas should be adopted. Number two, whether or not it should be prioritized, I'm not necessarily, I think, as was mentioned by a couple of colleagues earlier, I don't think it's necessary to prioritize one or two. I think they are all important. If, however, there was movement among my colleagues, like there was a majority that they wanted to prioritize, I'm biased toward the youth family services and household stability, among others. But again, I think all of them are important. And then third, the streamlined renewal process. Yes, I think, you know, I'd like the caveats I've put in there that they must reapply for two cycles. I think larger organizations that are more seasoned and polished have oftentimes can be somewhat advantaged in applying for these programs relative to those who are smaller, perhaps with less experience. But I think the guardrails that you all have outlined make sense to me and I can support that. That's all I have. Thank you.

Thank you very much. I am just looking for additional hands, Mr city manager. I think we've answered all of your key majority of your key questions. Do you have any questions for us?

I just want to clarify. So I did hear a majority support for the five impact focus areas. I heard some interest in prioritization, maybe an ongoing discussion, but not necessarily picking two for next year. And I absolutely heard unanimous support for the streamlining of high-performing programs. So I did get the direction we needed. Thank you, Mayor.

Thank you. And I see Council Member Shaw's hand.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. I did just want to circle back.

I can't hear you, Council Member Shaw. Can you please come off mute?

Can you hear me now?

Yes, thank you.

Yeah, I did just want to circle back just as a member of the body to share my feedback. And I want to thank my colleagues for the really great questions that they asked. So should the city adopt five proposed impact focus areas? Yes. Number two, which I think was slightly touched on by one of my colleagues surrounding data, should one or two of these impact focus areas be prioritized. I still think that we should have data, and that goes back to, like if we want to talk about equity, that goes back to the equity process, where we're sharing data to figure out where the gaps are in certain populations to inform our decisions. And that data is not just for us, but it's also for the public to make sure that when we say that we are, Advancing equity that that aligns with the metrics and the data so I would just need to see more data and then number three Should the city provide a streamlined renewal pathway for high-performing programs? Yes, and I also think we need to be careful to make sure that we are also providing opportunities to support some of the smaller nonprofits and As they grow so that they can also become 1 of our high performing programs, because a lot of a lot of our high performing programs are from some of the larger nonprofits. So, thank you.

Thank you very much. I appreciate the diversity of comments and my colleagues. Thank you for answering the specific questions. I think we've given staff a lot to think about. Um, I will wrap with just in terms of next steps if you could go back to that so that we can. Take another look, I do know that, um. The timing for grants is coming up very soon. So, I believe that you're going to have some of those take our feedback and then move to open the application soon. Is that correct? That is correct. Yes. So you typically do information sessions in September. September and October, yes. Okay. And the deadline will be? October 16th.

Yes, I believe. October 16th.

Yeah. The only thing I'll say about that is given that we're making some changes, you may want to look at that a little bit just because people are going to have to revise their application significantly, want to maybe participate in one or two of the sessions that you have. Uh, we are moving from 9 categories to about 5. um, so I just wanted to note that. Um, and I'll just also say, um, I, I think that 1 of the things we saw with the last grant piece that we were trying to, um, spread a little thin. So I just, I. To the comments of my college, looking at data, looking at impact and meetings, the needs of the community is very important. So, thank you for that. And then the last thing is related to the micro grants. The schedule is slightly different for that. We'll just make sure that we don't inadvertently. Have an issue with some of the programming, right? Because I know the timing is going to shift to make sure that we, the ones we have supported, we'll still get their 27 and then we'll work to make sure that it's in time. given that that's shifting until May for the next year. I just want to take a look at that and make sure that we don't cause any issues there.

Yes, absolutely. We can definitely make sure that those dates are lining up and will support that continuity of programming.

Thank you. And I wanted to just also chime on the comments on community resiliency or that word resiliency. I do love that and I appreciate the feedback of all of my colleagues. Okay. Anything else from your end?

Okay.

Thank you very much. We appreciate it. We'll look forward to that. And I know information will be going out to our grantees end of August and September so that you can advertise those information sessions. Thank you. Okay. Pulling up my agenda here. Okay, so we had an LPT meeting this morning to review the mock agenda. So we did have a nice discussion on that. Just want to pause and see if anyone has anything else to add on mock agenda. Okay. Next, wanted to open up for old new business. Okay. Okay. I just want to note that this is our virtual meeting. Mayor and Council is on recess during the month of August. There are still things that the city is still running and we're still supporting and accessible, but please feel free to reach out to us as you need. We will not be having meetings during the month of August and thank all of our team and our staff. Hopefully some of them get to get a little bit of a break in between. We'll be back in September and continuing to move forward city business. Do we have a motion to adjourn?

Motion to adjourn.

Thank you. Do we have a second? Second. Excellent. Council Member Jackson made the motion. Council Member Van Graak seconded. All those in favor, please raise your hand and say aye. Aye. Excellent. Have a wonderful summer, everyone. Take care.

See you at National Night Out.