Community Engagement Meeting Minutes
November 3, 2014
In attendance: Jane Banks, CHD, Sylvia deHaas-Phillips, United Way of Pioneer Valley, Gerry McCafferty, City of Springfield, Andrew Morehouse, Food Bank of Western MA, Pamela Schwartz, Network, Lynne Wallace, HAPHousing
Review of Simtech proposal:
We discussed and reviewed the next steps for discussion with Simtech around their response to our RFP. We agreed that Pamela will be the “project manager” and hold ultimate responsibility for supervision of the project. She will also steer the “collective impact” piece of the work while Gerry and Dave will provide the oversight and guidance for the data systems piece. Gerry articulated the fact that this work is critical to enhancing the CoC efforts, which is the basis for her time and commitment to the project.
We agreed to meet next on Friday, 11/7 at 8:30 am at UWPV to move forward with a proposed contract. Pamela will email Simtech to ask for additional clarification around the Landscape Analysis, their deliverables and their process for getting there.
Legislative Advocacy and Outreach
Pamela shared that the Secure Jobs Advisory Committee agreed to host a second annual Secure Jobs celebration. The tentative date is 2/6 and Pamela is currently reserving the Kittredge Center for the event.
Pamela raised the issue of how to balance this event which includes all of our area’s legislators with the request from Mass. Coalition for the Homeless to organize a legislative breakfast around the issue of unaccompanied homeless youth and other aspects of our agenda. We agreed that we would pursue legislators as a group for the Secure Jobs event and pursue individual meetings with key legislators to advocate for our comprehensive Network agenda.
Towards that end, we agreed that we would allocate a substantial portion of our January Leadership Council meeting to arrive at the Network’s legislative priorities for the FY16 budget (in lieu of an additional LC meeting February). Pamela would facilitate December committee meetings to include discussion of our legislative priorities in order to bring recommendations to the Leadership Council meeting.
Committee structure
We agreed we would revisit our committee structure to consider whether the community engagement mission could be a sub-set of the Steering Committee since both membership and agenda items are largely overlapping. We will take this up at our next meeting in December.
Next meeting: Monday, December 1, Northampton Senior Center
