back to advisory board

County of Volusia
Children and Families Advisory Board
Planning Workshop
Monday, November 01, 2007 9:00 am
Volusia County Health Department
1845 Holsonback Drive
Daytona Beach, Florida

MINUTES

Attendees: Gail Camputaro – Council on Aging
Jorge Amaro – Hope Center
Victoria Stark – Early Learning Coalition

Carrie Baird chaired the meeting. She stated the purpose: to assure that everybody who comes to the workshop on the 19th feels that their time is well used and that a process is in place that is fair and objective and provides an opportunity to speak about the issues.

She then elaborated on the goals that were discussed at the last meeting, i.e., beginning a process where we look at refining and improving the funding process for the county, including setting priorities for funding, garnering input from stakeholders including currently funded agencies and agencies that may come before the county for funding.

Ms. Baird reviewed the purpose of CFAB per the resolution: we do planning, we set goals, we set priorities, we determine the kind of outcomes we want to see with the funding the county provides, and we act in an advisory role to the County Council.

The upcoming workshop should structure facilitated discussion around the survey that was sent out to providers who applied last year for funding and are currently funded. The proposed agenda should include:

• Review the agenda and the process
• Briefly go over purpose of Children and Families Advisory Board
• Provide an overview of why we’re holding this workshop and what the CFAB sees as their next steps – at the last 3 meetings we have had discussions on how the processes can be improved, how we think we might be able to get a “bigger bang out of our buck”
• Put together a concept paper that talks about things we think can be improved and our desire to do some strategic planning, provide an overview of the survey results.

Discussion then focused on the application form and timelines-

• Timeframe in question: is it too long? too short?
• Deleting duplications
• County staff will meet with United Way (both have same application). United Way already has a group that has been tweaking the application. We’ll try to merge those two things together. What’s interesting is that it’s the same application, but uses different scoring criteria. Applicants are filling out the same form, but have to think of two sets of criteria, at some point we need to think of a better way to do that.
• 2nd section scoring and allocation process- scoring matrix with calculations. No current priorities are based on this information.
• 3rd finding out from providers how they determine need and how they suggest the county prioritize funding. Criteria we can fall back on when we have potential revenue cuts -- a plan that’s in place.
• Prioritizing critical needs in the community. Perhaps target populations, particular types of services, underserved geographic areas or communities
• How the providers would suggest we go through that process. Combine it, go through a process, What process might we go through?

Jorge Amaro spoke - Sounds like you are trying to coordinate with one of the other major funding sources; for most of us that’s United Way. Are you also going to be involving them on how to go through the process? Everyone is has their own idea on what deserves county need is the thrust of your effort to pull it all together.

Diana Phillips answered Mr. Amaro’s question. The county doesn’t have the staff resources to do something by ourselves, all on our own. We have to build on what’s already there, and get the best of the best from all the different sources. I can’t speak on what UW will do, but I do think philosophically there’s a difference between the county tax dollars and United Way and the revenues that they have. Their job is to effectively use donor dollars as donors want them to. The county’s role is to use tax dollars in the most efficient way to deal with priority issues, not spread money around so everyone gets a little, or keep funding agencies just because we always have.

Mr. Amaro-You mentioned earlier about developing a strategic plan, but what about identifying targets too? For example, this year we want to have 10 new applications funded.

Carrie Baird stated that —my personal feeling is that every applicant every year should be looked at equally…for example, I think we should consider fully funding every proposal that meets our priorities and that adequately communicates their capacity and effectiveness

David Kerr -That’s more the key if we establish what the priorities or the needs are and what areas are going to be funded. Possibly there are several ways to look at it, when you look at the total numbers and the overhead that is involved and geographic areas that are under-served. That’s the intent of the workshop -- to find a better way and maybe create new opportunities for other agencies depending on their ability to apply that need.

Gail Camputaro -Have you looked at best practices across the state? Because I know in the launch they had a pretty good combination of United Way and the county and they had a lot of the same issues come up

Carrie Baird -I don’t think we have. I know, wearing my other hat “One Voice for Volusia” and the community agenda, we’ve looked at funding models. Jacksonville has a consolidated thing where they put all of their DCF money, DJJ workforce development, and elder services, -- they put it together and have a similar process. Donna DeMarsh and I went to Brevard County, they have an interesting model. Marion County has an interesting model, I don’t think we’re there yet. We have a list of different service areas that we use that I think has been around for like 10 years. I think we’re starting over. Not saying that we don’t have a foundation, but I think we need to look at what the issues are before we look at how we’re going to fund them.

Gail Camputaro -Because I think each of us, in our own area, has a lot of research-based information. We could be talking forever.

Carrie Baird -The answer is collaboration and not duplicating services, if you encourage that. For example, if we really want to have after school programs in every quadrant of the county we need to work together, not everyone doing their own thing, and what’s the best model and what’s the best geographic area and what’s the best for boys or girls and who can best provide that model efficiently and effectively?

Gail Camputaro -and then the other thing that you keyed in on this year is spreading ourselves out to all of Volusia County/ Flagler County. People think that they’re being treated unfairly. Just because you don’t have a building in a city doesn’t mean you are not providing services.

David Kerr -That was an old idea that the county used to feel that you had to physically be in one of their quadrants or their target areas for community development.

Susan Caplan arrives and receives a summary of the meeting thus far.

Susan Caplan -This is a lot to read and can open up a lot of dialogue. I was kind of wondering, can you kind of summarize? Instead of putting all these points, we can put 4 or 5 of the major points. That way we can expedite and help focus and really get some information. “The major concerns are as follows….”

“ or you may not want to go into survey results you may just want to say we conducted a survey and compiled the results we’ve found that the issues occur within the application form and timeline category, within the scoring and allocation processes and within prioritizing needs within the county” and leave it at that and if anyone wants the full survey we can provide them that.

You need to start looking at the level of professionalism the county would like to see and part of these meetings go on and on and drives the county council crazy. I think that if you can help focus your audience you can keep them within that framework, that’s all I was suggesting.

The other thing I was going to ask was if there was any way to keep it from degenerating into “emotional selling” of their agencies, because I’ve seen meetings just fall apart with that.

It’s hard because even with some of these questions people just talk about their agencies, they didn’t talk about what they knew. Hopefully, every agency exists because they saw a need -- not just because “I really just want to provide this service for a living.”

Gail Camputaro -What’s the ultimate goal for this meeting?

Carrie Baird -Our goal I think is that we have kind of an idea of where we want to go as a board and we want to get input from our current and potential providers about how they feel about that and what their ideas are, because our next step is to go in front of the County Council to say this is what we want to do and we want you to either say yay or nay. So that’s why we’re doing this we thought we’d have a better presentation to the council if we had a workshop with all of our providers to get their input. .

Gail Camputaro -So the input consolidated from this next meeting will give you the presentation you need to go before County Council and say “ we need to have a strategic plan, we need to have so on and so forth.”

Jorge Amaro -As a first time person going through this process and a first time agency listening to this, I think it’s exactly where you want to be. We as a first time organization would love to see and hear a strategic plan we can be a part of, say ok here’s where we fit into, rather that saying hey can you fit into what our strategic plan is and give us the money to do what we need to do. It makes a lot of sense to me.

Diana Phillips -Are we clear on the boards role because I wanted to sort of send an email out to the board prior to the workshop just to say here’s the agenda Carrie would be the facilitator?

David Kerr -I would think Susan hit on this too, I think you should be the facilitator and any of us could do bad cop or whatever you want to call it.

Carrie Baird –The form out of the meeting is that we’re having a facilitated discussion and board member participation will be limited to questions for clarification -- follow up questions.

Gail Camputaro -Well I have to commend you all for asking those of us that are on the recipient end for some input. I think that’s a democratic way to do it and certainly the way the County Council would want you to handle it.

Carrie Baird -Anything else for the good of the order? I will reformat the ordinance and email it to you.

Meeting is adjourned.

back to advisory board

 

Comments or questions?
E-mail the