Item 15: Human Services Advisory Board . This is an item that’s dragged out for months.
The city allocates $500K from the General Fund for nonprofits every year. A bunch of nonprofits apply for it. HSAB reads the applications and recommends to council who should get how much. Council takes the recommendations and then redoes it all, re-allocating money all over the place, which is what happened tonight.
The difference this year is that the first set of HSAB recommendations made everyone so mad that Council came up with new guidelines and then asked HSAB to meet again and re-do everything. So the allocations are several months behind schedule this year.
I think HSAB tried to be exceedingly objective and impartial, and ended up being rather algorithmic. What I can’t tell is:
- Does council want HSAB to go deeper than this algorithm approach, and evaluate the merits of each individual nonprofits? In other words, is Council annoyed that HSAB kept it so formulaic?
- Or does Council ultimately always want to be the ones to make the individual judgements about the merit of each nonprofit? In other words, this is exactly how it’s supposed to go, and no matter what, Council is going to re-do everything HSAB does?
Anyway, they re-do it all.
In case you’re curious, here are the recommendations from HSAB – both last December’s recs, and then revised for Tuesday’s meeting (but not necessarily what Council adopted):
“CORN” is in a big circle because that nonprofit doesn’t exist anymore. (I guess it didn’t have the juice.)(Sorry, that was corny.)(I’ll stop now.)
This discussion started during the 3 pm workshop, and then wrapped up during the official council meeting.
First, Council reduced the funding for a bunch of agencies:
Reductions:
MELJ/Iron Sharpens Iron: from $33K to $0.
HOME Center/Emergency Motel Program: from $20K to $15K.
Treasured Protégé /Protégé Program: from $13K to $0
Rough Draft/Superhero Art Program: from $3K to $0.
Communities in Schools/Counseling SMCISD: from $7K to $3.5K.
ACCEYSS: From $35K to $30K
Here are some things to note:
- Every agency has a worthwhile mission
- I am not closely tied enough to the nonprofit world to know how to tease apart the effectiveness of different nonprofits.
- But neither is most of Council.
- Except for Alyssa Garza, who is not happy about many of these reductions.
Rationales weren’t given for every reduction. Of the ones that were:
- HOME Center duplicates Southside, which has been doing emergency housing longer.
- Treasured Protégé is just one school. Not all the schools. (I can’t tell what that means from the website.)
- Rough Draft isn’t a basic need, like food and housing.
- Communities in Schools should be funded in collaboration with SMCISD.
So if my math is right, that saved them roughly $70K to dole out. (Including the CORN money.) During the 6 pm meeting, they increased funding like so:
Increases:
Hays County Food Bank: $30K to $40K
Combined Community Action/Meals on Wheels: $3K to $15K
Nosotros La Gente/”Viva Zapatos” Shoe Drive (no website): $5K to $10K
Salvation Army/Emergency Assistance: $27.5K to $35K
St. Vincent de Paul: $16.5K to $20K
School Fuel/Weekend Food: $19.5K to $24K
Youth Service Bureau: $4.4K to $10K
Southside Community Center/Specific Assistance: $4K to $16K
One last one that Jane referred to as “Emergency” to $30K . I lost track of what this was and can’t figure it out. I can’t tell if this is something that was reduced to $30K or increased to $30K.
Alyssa reiterates that she’s particularly angry about reducing MELJ/Irons to $0, and HOME Center from $20K to $15K. In my summaries above, I didn’t really convey how frustrated she was with the fickle and random shuffling of money above.
On MELJ/Iron Sharpens Iron, I agree: Council really dropped the ball. (Also, they kept calling it “MELI” instead of “MELJ”, which doesn’t instill a whole lot of trust.) Here’s the blurb from their application:
Iron Sharpens Iron uses a multi-faceted approach to address the challenges that reentry poses for nearly 40,000 individuals annually in the city of San Marcos. Iron Sharpens Iron program model assists those persons who’ve been incarcerated by determining what their needs are during the intake process that will enable them to be successful in the community in which they are living. We have support mechanisms in place that will enable this population and their family members to have somewhere to go to seek assistance with financial issues, substance abuse referrals as well as discussion of academic interests, employment and any legal situation that may have not been resolved. This includes sharing ideal strategies and best practices for living a crime free life. This particular project will have a large reach to multiple entities including those that have been or parole and their families. We’ve learned that those persons who have lived experience that are included become the best educators on social justice change as it refers to “imprisonment” and successful re-entry back into their respective communities. This project will allow us to increase awareness to corporations and municipalities to participate in inclusion of those labeled a felon-as well supportive things for the population that we are currently serving and extend more to the family members.
Council keeps saying that community safety is their highest priority, and they’re freaked out about crime. But they only seem aware of punitive, authoritarian ways to combat crime. They don’t seem to see the point of nurturing and supporting people who have committed crimes in the past. (Except Alyssa. All of this is except Alyssa.) It’s like it’s off-putting for them to consider the humanity of people who’ve been incarcerated.
First, that’s gross. You judge a society by how it treats its prisoners, not its princes.
But second, it’s impractical. If you want crime recidivism to decrease, you should do things that help people transition out of incarceration and into stable lives. Instead, we’re taking an authoritarian approach. Keep making life harder for them! The beatings will continue until morale improves, as they say.
…
One final thought, and I hope I don’t offend anyone: I feel a little weird about School Fuel. Kids get sent home with brown bags of food that is supposed to help with food insecurity over the weekend. But it puts poor kids in a weird, possibly stigmatizing position to have to get a Poor Kid’s Food Bag right in the middle of a social situation, and take it home on the bus with a bunch of other kids.
I’m not really criticizing anyone who is taking time to help others in this community. There’s a lot of need, and it’s important that a kid knows they’ve got some dependable food over the weekend. And there’s probably not that much stigma in a community that’s pretty used to widespread poverty. It’s just something that crossed my mind.
…
Updated to add: The 40K number in the MILJ application above – “nearly 40,000 individuals annually in the city of San Marcos.” – can’t possibly be right. The whole town is only around 70K. I don’t know where they got that from, but it’s nonsensical.
The San Marxist 