The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2025-05-13
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Session summaryEditor-reviewed
On May 13, a Portland City Council work session was convened, repurposing committee time to brief the full body on the Portland Children's Levy's large grant funding round ahead of anticipated council action on May 21. Presenters described the levy's mission, governance structure, and community engagement process, including a Community Council, volunteer application readers, and funding priorities developed with community input. Discussion covered a revenue decline alongside an increase in applications, though the exact figures were stated inconsistently across speakers. Presenters explained scoring criteria blending application scores, community priorities, and other factors, and addressed the treatment of equity, diversity, and inclusion within scoring alongside program effectiveness. Extended discussion addressed prioritization of smaller and newer organizations versus continuity for established grantees, administrative overhead caps, geographic distribution of services including District 4, and programs serving LGBTQ, houseless, and other priority populations. A point of order clarified that the levy operates as a restricted funding source separate from general fund constraints. It was noted that council's options regarding the funding recommendations are limited to approval or remand by category, without authority to substitute its own decisions. No votes were taken during this session; any future votes and their outcomes would be reflected in the vote ledger. The session closed with plans for staff to follow up on outstanding questions.
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0 Good morning. I am going to call us into work session. It is 931 on Tuesday, may 13th. Counselors. Much like yesterday, we had an issue that committee leadership thought the whole council needed to have the opportunity to get briefed on. So we are turning a committee time into a work session. Again, a reminder that if any of the rest of you have items in your committee that you'd like to have the whole council weigh in on, this is absolutely something that we can figure out for your committees as well. Just work through my office and council operations. Today we are going to hear about the awards for the children's levy or from the children's levy, I guess I should say. And the process that led to the things that will come before full council. There's been an extensive volunteer profit process, and I think we'll hear a little bit about that. And then some information about what the award recommendations are. Councilor Ryan is both one of the co-chairs for arts and economy, which this would have otherwise gone through. And also our bodies representative to the children's levy group. And so councilor, I'd love to give you the opportunity to say a little bit about what we're doing today or the process that led here, if you'd like.
1 Thank you, madam president. Good morning, colleagues. Good morning to the children's levy team. Who's here this morning. More. You'll be up here soon. I've been in this role since 2020, fall of 2020, and I was asked if I could stay in this role for at least the first year in this transition. And also, I led the effort in 2022 to get this passed again. It was pretty tough to pass in 2022, we were told, and there was a lot of, as you can recall, that, that the town wasn't very happy at that moment in time. And it was the kids were just getting back into school, coming out of COVID, and I couldn't think of a more important time for Portland to show up for our children. And they did. And they did once again at 70%. And they knew that we had to get those evening, summer and after after school, evening and summer programs back in motion and watching the team at the children's levy work with the nonprofit partners to get them back into those habits of connection again was a lot. And so I really observed the staff doing the best they could in the off season, if you will, to help them get their numbers back up. And I just wanted to start by giving you a little bit of that information. It's been a it's been a lot over the last four and a half years for anyone that's working with children and families. And I know teacher Tiffany has a lot of context on that. So before we get started, I just want to say a few more words. The Portland children's levy does great work providing grants to community based organizations that support children and families in our city, and the pcl model is also the best practice for grant making, and we're often seen as a leader here in the city. I remember when pcf was getting started, they really looked to the children's levy to give them some grounding context, and I've seen that evolve. It's data driven, everything is transparent, and the levy staff work to incorporate what they also heard from a community engagement over the years, especially through an evaluation that was done by Portland state university. That gave us some tough. And that's a good word here. Recommendations, including starting a community advisory board. And that took place over the last couple of years. And it's humming to better incorporate community voices. So it's not just the five allocation committee members and the city council, but this very thorough community board that came together. They also, in that evaluation, thought it would be important to start a small grants fund for small organizations because we needed more equitable opportunities to access these grants. A lot of nonprofits felt shut out from being engaged in this, and it's been wonderful to see the small grants program take off. I'm excited for my fellow city councilors to learn more about the children's levy. Today, the large grants allocation committee recently approved the funding that are now up for the council approval, and I am grateful to co-chair Green that we decided that we could repurpose this meeting time for this. We didn't want it to come to the council without an opportunity to ask questions, because it's very complex, and they went through a lot of process. And fortunately, the big factor impacting this year's awards is, is really catch this 21% drop in revenue. And that's just in a year. When the RFP went out, the forecast was one way. And what we the reality was a 21% drop. And that's because property taxes revenues are down. That's because the compression of all the competing of the competing taxes out there has caused this. And so instantly, even before the volunteers sat down to do all the reading, before all these decisions could be made, we were dealing with a 21% cut. As such, the reality of competitive grant process means that we regretfully can't fund all the community organizations doing good work serving children and families. And the allocation committee took these recommendations, and we had a lot of tough conversations to get to these difficult choices. I really want to recognize the time and thoughtful consideration my fellow committee members put into making these difficult decisions. I asked if they could come at the last minute. I see charity kreider out there. Hi charity, thanks for being here and the others I know are tuning in, but I hope you all will come away today with a better understanding of the Portland children's levy, the large grant making process, and the benefits and impacts that will come from this round of giving. I want to also just take a moment to really acknowledge those 90. How many volunteers was it you gave me? The 91 volunteers started this process off by reading each grant anonymously. They had no idea what organization it was, so we had 91 readers. And so to those anonymous 91 readers out there, thank you. And I will now turn it over to the amazing staff led by director lisa pellegrino. If you could please come up and her team today will give us a update on what this all means in advance of the council meeting on may 21st, in which the city council will vote on this allocation committee package. Please note today is not a vote. It's a work session. It's about listening to understand and asking clarifying questions. Thank you so much lisa and your team. Take it away.
2 Point of order, councilor Ryan. Mentioned that. So this will inform what we vote on on the 21st. Of this as a budget work session. Then it's.
3 A lock box. So it has zero impact on our budget. So it's a work session. I don't know if I understand the question. I don't think of it as a budget work session.
4 I mean.
5 Before we start our budget work on the 21st, we'll have a very brief council meeting to move forward. Some agenda items. And the hope is that this will be part of that agenda on the 21st.
6 Thank you.
7 For the question.
8 Madam president. Point of order. This does have an impact because we took 10% of their budget, did a 10% constraint. The mayor, the mayor did in his budget. So it it does have an impact. I mean, we could actually put those dollars back if we wanted to. The 10% cut that was taken out.
9 I'm going to let our presenters speak to any constraints on their budget. I know that much of this comes from the levy, so there are some differences in how their budget is treated. But I'll let our speakers get to that point. And councilors, we're going to hear an overview of the children's levy. We'll pause for any clarifying questions and then move into some information about some of the grant funding rounds, and then have time for more questions and conversation at the end of that second part of the discussion. Anything else folks need before our guests get started?
10 Okay.
11 I hope that we will get a read on the budget question, because this is special in terms of it being a lock box, and it's one of those restricted accounts. It's an agreement and a contract we have with the voters and the taxpayers anyway.
12 Carry on lisa, go right ahead. Thank you.
13 Thank you president. Good morning. Councilors. As commissioner Ryan said, I'm lisa pellegrino, I'm the director at the children's levy. And I use she and her pronouns. We're here today to provide you some more information about the Portland children's levy, which we'll abbreviate in the presentation as pcl, our large grant funding round, and the funding decisions made by the levy's governing body that the city council will soon be considering for approval. This has been a two year process to conduct community engagement, develop and implement the funding round, recruit community volunteers to review and score the applications to develop the funding recommendations and more, all while incorporating community voices and embedding equity, diversity and inclusion throughout. It's not been an easy process. As councilor Ryan has alluded to. Pcl's governing body, which is called the allocation committee, had to make difficult choices in a funding round where we have 21% less money for the next round of grants, while seeing a 45% increase in the number of applications received. I'll start today by providing an overview of pcl and a summary of the community members that we serve and our outcomes. Then we'll dive into the large grant funding round, culminating in the funding decisions made by the levy's allocation committee. Joining me in this presentation is the children's levy team. And they'll introduce themselves when they begin to speak. I'll over to my right here. So pcl is a local option property tax measure that grew out of a need to increase opportunities for all portland's children and youth voters first approved the levy in 2002 and have overwhelmingly renewed it four times since. Levy generates approximately $23 million annually to invest in proven programs. Currently, the levy is funding 85 programs serving children from birth through age 24, in the six program areas that are required by the ballot measure, and those program areas are after school child abuse prevention and intervention, early childhood foster care, hunger relief, and mentoring. The 85 current grants include 77 large grants, seven small grants, and one special initiative that crosses program areas. Pcl started that small grants fund about five years ago in response to community feedback, to provide grants to grassroots organizations that were interested in building capacity to apply for pcl. Large grants. A new small grants funding round will launch later this year. Administrative costs for the levy are limited to 5%, and pcl is annually audited for compliance. The mission of the children's levy is to provide opportunities that improve outcomes for children and youth navigating poverty and children and youth of color by supporting community based programs to prepare children for school. Support them to be successful inside and outside of school, and eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in children's outcomes. Pcl, authorizing legislation which includes the council resolution and act and the ballot measure language, governs our operations. It requires oversight by a five member allocation committee composed of a city councilor, a county commissioner, two citizens with knowledge and experience related to children's services, and a representative of the business community. It also requires that city council approve allocation committee funding decisions or remand those decisions by funding category. The authority to remand by funding category means that council may send the allocation committee decisions in an entire program area back to the allocation committee for reconsideration. If those decisions were not made based on application scores and other community conditions. To foster a balanced and integrated citywide system of services. City council, as the remanding body, does not have the authority to substitute its own decisions for the decisions made by the allocation committee. Grants are monitored by staff ongoing to ensure programs reach their intended populations, a risk to communities, and achieve positive outcomes for children and their caregivers. We monitor performance according to metrics, and that includes the number of people served, the level of service provided, the program participation, goals and outcomes. Our current allocation committee members are councilor Ryan, as you heard from today, who serves as the chair of the committee. Commissioner megan moyer, who is the county elected representative. Charity krieder, who's in the audience and was introduced today. That's the city's citizen appointee, felicia folsom, which is the county citizen appointee, and Dan floyd, who is the representative of the business community. And they're pictured on the slide. The act requires that at least 90% of available resources be allocated through competitive processes, and allows up to 10% of available resources to be allocated non-competitively for special initiatives that cross pcl program areas. The act also requires that resources be allocated to each program area, with a maximum of 35% of available resources allocated to any single program area. Large and small grants are made through competitive funding processes. Later in the presentation, we'll describe the large grants funding process and the allocation committee funding decisions that were recently made. As I mentioned before, pcl currently funds 85 programs for children birth through age 24, and it also includes those 85. Grants include one special initiative for the community child care initiative. This grant provides child care subsidies to working families to support access to high quality child care for children from birth through age 12. Because this program serves children birth through age 12, it crosses two pcl program areas early childhood, which provides programing five, and after scho, which provides programing for children in the k-12 grades. Currently, funded programs provide a range of services based on top priority needs that were identified through the community engagement process that was conducted before the current grants were awarded in 2020. Examples of the services that are funded currently are home visiting for young children and their parents, therapeutic classrooms, and respite care for stressed families, after school tutoring and enrichment, caring adult mentorship, college and career transition support for foster youth, and daily access to nutritious food. The 85 grants that we're currently funding supports 49 community based agencies, large and small, and also supports approximately 500 jobs, either partially or fully, at those community based agencies. Many of the agencies provide first employment experiences for parents and youth who were once program participants. Okay, I'm going to pause there and pass it to my colleague joel.
14 Okay. Good morning. Councilors. My name is joel broussard. I use he him pronouns. I am the grant manager for the child abuse prevention, intervention and foster care program areas. Demographic data here reflects data collected in fiscal fiscal year 2324. The most recent fiscal year. Data on programs where participants enroll in services is reported separately from hunger relief data. Because many hunger relief programs don't require enrollment, are not relationship based, and may be used as needed for shorter periods of time, over 9500 children were served in early childhood. Child abuse prevention, foster care, after school, and mentoring programs. 77% of children served identified as black, indigenous, or child youth of color, 44% lived or went to school in east Portland, defined as east of 82nd, 37% came from homes where the primary language spoken is not english. 90% of children were from families with an income of 185% of the federal poverty level, or less. Over 12,000 children and their families received hunger relief services, 65% identified as black, indigenous, or child youth of color, 14% of those did not report this data, 60% lived or went to school in east Portland, defined as east of 82nd, 10% of the. That 12,000 did not report this data, and 33% came from homes where the primary language is spoken, is not english, and 44% of that 12,000 did not report this data. Levy program support our children's most vulnerable children and families. This pie chart shows the racial ethnic identity of children served in fiscal year 2024 and the five program areas providing relationship based services, after school child abuse prevention, intervention, early childhood foster care and mentoring. It does not include data on children served in the hunger relief program area. The data in this pie chart shows the primary languages spoken in the homes of children served in levy program. The language is displayed in the chart are those that the city requests bureaus track and report. In addition, grantees reported over 50 other primary languages spoken in the homes of participating children. This chart does not include children served in the hunger relief program. This slide looks more closely at the geography of the more than 9500 children served in relationship based programing, this map does not include children served in hunger relief programing. The map shows the concentration of children served by pcl based on the zip code of where they live or where they attend school. The darker colors show the greatest number of children served in the lighter colors show the least number of children served. This map also includes overlays of city councilors, new district boundaries using the white lines. The map illustrates the zip codes in north and east Portland had the highest concentration of children served by pcl, where zip codes closest to downtown had the fewest. These. Results are not surprising because higher concentrations of lower income, pcl funded programs are focused on reaching those children and families. This map does not show the number of homeless children served by pcl, which was 3% of the children served. This slide shows data collected on outcomes and results in each program area and for the community child care initiative grantees report outcomes on participants that meet the participation goal for the program and where that were assessed for the outcome. Grantees report on many more program specific outcomes than are shown here, and annual results are posted in a report on the pcl website. Overall, children and families had positive results and these results are similar to results achieved by programs in past years. Before we move on to discussing the large grant funding round, I'll pause for any questions on the overview of the Portland children's levy.
15 Councilor.
16 Is any clarifying or technical questions on the levy itself? Before we talk about this year's grantees? Councilor Novick.
17 Thank you, madam president. So I'm curious this these programs serve 9000 children. How many children are there in the city that you think could need programs like these?
18 It's a good question. I don't have the data at my fingertips, and I would probably want to look at the most recent acs data before I answered the question. Do you? I'm thinking like.
19 I mean, when.
20 I think of were around 45,000 children, but that doesn't count early childhood. Correct. And that does not specifically focus on low income children of color, which would be a different number than the full number of children in the city. Do you have any? Would you hazard a guess based on your most recent data?
21 That would be my best guess. I'd have to think about our collective school districts in the city and their enrollment figures last year, and think about how to model or apportion their enrollment compared to your question, commissioner Novick. And then to think about children under the age of five.
22 I mean, and I do not at all question the work of the children's levy, the organizations, but I just government normally tries to provide universal services. And it kind of seems to me that we have something here that serves a limited number of children with a limited amount of money, who happen to be addressed by a group of nonprofits, and that just is more a comment than a question, but that this has always seemed odd to me. A question is how much to what? What's the interaction between the early childhood programs and preschool for all? Did we used to spend much more money on early childhood programs? We're scaling that back because of preschool for all. Or are we planning to spend less in the future because of preschool for all?
23 The answer to that is yes and yes. The grants that you will hear about soon do not include preschool classroom services. So prior to preschool for all, the levy provided funding in early childhood for preschool based services, particularly to expand access to head start for children ages 3 to 5. But with the passage for preschool for all levy funded early childhood services are focusing more on infants and toddlers.
24 So how much? How much money do we used to spend on categories that are now covered by preschool for all? Like if you go back ten years?
25 Oh, off the top of my head, I couldn't project the ten year total.
26 Roughly, we were apportioning about 30% of resources to early childhood overall that that funded more than just preschool services, though. Steve, I'd have to go back and actually chart that out to give you that answer.
27 Okay. Thank you.
28 Councilor Ryan has some context.
29 I appreciate that question. Councilor. Novick. It was actually a pretty robust dialog between myself and the allocation committee member on the on the county commission at the time, jessica vega peterson. And we had a spirited, healthy dialog that allowed for that transition to take place. I was asking for more investments going to 18 to 24 year olds, which is often the youth that we invest in the least in our society. And so we do see some of those trends today. Because of the passage of pre-k for all, we were able to enhance that. Does that make sense?
30 It does. But I just want to sort of raise the point that one might have thought about scaling back the children's levy with the advent of preschool for all, or perhaps folding the arts tax into this children's levy with the advent of preschool for all, instead of just assuming that because we have less need in one category, we continue with the same tax raising the same amount of money?
31 Yeah, I think what we did is we chose to look at this as the pie, and there's the mentoring. And the services for 18 to 24 year olds has always been a vast underinvestment. So we had an opportunity to have a fuel, a few more funds towards that. As we scaled down the pre-k investments. I hear what you're saying. That would have been the next boiling ocean conversation, but we did take care of the confines of this system that we had to expand investments in another area.
32 Sounds like.
33 Some data to potentially follow up on and some questions for the next time. This is up for renewal about prioritization. I don't see anybody else in the queue. So lisa, if your team would like to keep going to tell us about this year's grantees, that would be great.
34 Great. Thanks, katrina.
35 I'm just waiting for the. Yeah, there we go. Okay. So good morning, counselors. My name is katrina peterson. I use she her pronouns and I'm the community engagement coordinator here at the levy. So at this point in the presentation, we're going to walk you through the process that we use to reach our funding, large grants, funding decisions. And you're going to see this graphic before you repeated throughout the slideshow as we explain each step. And so before we get into the details, I wanted to give you some big picture context about how we got here. As lisa shared, we spent more than two years on this project and both our decision making body, who's the allocation committee as well as our advisory body, who's the community council, have been thought partners throughout this process. The community council met 13 times to advise staff on policy process and funding recommendation questions. In addition, we engaged 760 community members during the community engagement process and we involved 91 community volunteers to read and score all of the grant applications. So we are excited to be here today to share the details of this process with you. So our large grants process began with community engagement and the development of funding priorities. And that began with the launch of this community council, who you can see before you. So it's a new 13 member body that was launched in 2023. And they were formed in response to feedback that we had received from the previous funding round in 2019 and 2020. Their purpose is to advise pcl on policy and processes and to strengthen our accountability to community priorities. Staff recruited community members with lived and professional experiences reflective of the communities that pcl serves. So staff worked with the council to design an eight month long engagement process with those who are most affected by our investments. The purpose of the process was to identify community needs and strategies to meet those needs, and based on the council design, pcl contracted with camille grammer consulting and pcc's internationals community engagement liaisons to conduct the engagement. So they use three tools. They use surveys, focus groups and interviews to engage 596 community members and 164 service. Across Portland. Engagement was conducted in more than 25 responded to the community survey. 80% identified as black, indigenous, or people of color, 62% lived in households earning less than $50,000 a year, 52% had a preferred language other than english, 40% were immigrants or refugees, 10% identified as lgbtqia to plus, 9% had disabilities, 7% were involved in the foster care system, and 7% had experienced houselessness. So staff worked with the community council and our allocation committee to take the community engagement results and shape them into funding priorities in each of our six program areas. So funding priorities are the types of direct services for children and families that the levy will fund in this round, and each applicant was required to address at least one funding priority. Each program area has 5 to 7 funding priorities, and I'll just run through a couple of examples. So an after school, the highest of five funding priorities was providing activities such as arts, sports, science, technology, education or recreation and hunger relief. The top two of five funding priorities were community based and school based food pantries. Foster care had seven funding priorities, and their top priority was supporting older foster youth to enter college, the workforce, or to transition to independent living. The highest of six funding priorities in mentoring was offering activities that increased social connection, reduce isolation and affirm identities among youth with similar identities. So these are just a few examples. And in the memo that we provided you for this work session, the last page lists all of our funding priorities and shows how many submitted and recommended applications address each. So the community council identified and the allocation committee affirmed pcl's priority populations in this funding round, which include black and indigenous children and children and families of color, children with disabilities, youth who identify as LGBTQ, a two plus immigrant and refugee children and families, families earning low incomes, and children and families who reside in east and north Portland. And so while the application for the large grants funding process launched last fall and work on the grant review process as well, all of this work actually began a year prior in the fall of 2023. So we worked closely with our community council to shape application questions and scoring criteria. Applications and scoring criteria focus on an applicant's skills and experience on program design and their ability to address pcl funding and community priorities on their ability to advance equity, diversity and inclusion, and on program budget justification. As a result of the community council's work, approximately 70% of the available points focused on issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion on an application, and after incorporating the community council's feedback, the draft application scoring criteria were sent to potential applicants, including current grantees and other organizations serving children and families in pcl's program areas for additional feedback, and then after that feedback was incorporated, the final draft was reviewed and approved by our allocation committee in June of 2024. Staff published the application in the city's web grants, online application and grants management system last September, and we publicized the grant opportunity through emails, newsletters, social media and other channels. We hosted two information sessions to answer questions from potential applicants and to review the funding process prior to the application due date. Applicants were invited to submit questions in writing to pcl. Staff and staff replied to questions individually, and posted a searchable weekly digest of all questions and all answers on the levees website to ensure that all applicants had access to the same information. And then finally, for the community volunteer review process, the community council actually recommended that pcl continue to engage community volunteers to read and score applications. And so last fall, staff recruited and trained 96 community volunteers with lived and professional experience in our program areas priority populations and equity, diversity and inclusion. And this was actually 50% more reviewers than our last funding round in 2019 2020. Some of the reviewers, due to unexpected family emergencies. So it was 91 reviewers in total who completed all of the reviews for reviewers read and scored each application, and the application score is the median of four scores. Reviewers. Four reviewer scores. In March 2025, pcl staff sent each applicant a summary of their score forms, along with reviewer comments.
36 Good morning counselors. My name is brian smedinghoff. I'm the grant manager for the after school portfolio and he him pronouns. Before erica walks you through the funding recommendation process, we want to share some important context about the overall applicant pool, the funding demands, and the financial constraints in the large grant funding round. So current annual budgets for large grants totaled $27.2 million. The average annual budget for large grants over the next three fiscal years will total $21.56 million. This means, on an annual basis, total funds available for large grants will decline approximately 21% next year. The decline is the result of pcl spending down a fund balance that was invested in grants over the past five years. Combined with the decrease in projected property tax revenue over the next three years, at the same time that pcl has declining funds, we saw an increased demand for our grants. Pcl received 168 total applications this time, which is a 45% increase over the last funding round in 20 19 2020, $223 million of total funding was requested over three years, which is nearly double the amount requested. In 2019. We received more than $3 in requests for every $1 of grant funding that's available and the number of applications from organizations without pcl grants tripled compared to 2019. I also want to share some information about the application pool. For context, this slide summarizes the distribution of all applications by organization, size, and recent pcl funding status. The size of the organization is based on annual revenues. In the last fiscal year. The blue bars show the number of applicants applications from current grantee organizations, which means they currently receive pcl funding, and the gray bars show the number of applications from organizations without pcl funds. These data illustrate that applicants without pcl funds tend to be smaller. Organizations and applications with pcl grants tend to be larger organizations after school, and mentoring had proportionally far more small applicants and applicants currently without pcl funding compared to our other four program areas. This slide shows the median score for applications based on recent pcl funding status and size of organization. Applications from grantee organizations had a higher median score than applications from organizations without pcl funding. Similarly, applications from large organizations had a higher median score than applications from small organizations. These results aren't surprising. Organizations with pcl history tend to be larger organizations. They have experience with past pcl grant application processes, and in general, larger organizations do tend to have more grant writing capacity and experience compared to smaller organizations.
37 Good morning councilors. My name is erika bridgman. I use she her pronouns and I'm the grant manager for mentoring and pcl small grants fund. Now that you have the context that brian shared on the financial resources for this funding round and the context on the applicant pool, we will return to process pcl staff created funding recommendations using these three factors application score, community council priorities, and other criteria published in the funding application last fall. Earlier, we discussed how an application score was the median of four community volunteer reviews. In these next slides, we will cover the community council's priorities and other criteria used by staff. We know using application score only for decision making has its shortcomings. For example, some applications score highly due to strong grant writing, as brian mentioned, but the proposed program may have performance challenges. Similarly, some applications score low due to lack of grant writing experience, though they may deliver effective programing and services. Staff worked with the community council to prioritize, prioritize application characteristics and relationship to score by discussing and responding to three questions at a high level, council prioritized applications that focus on black and indigenous children and families, and children of families of color, along with a range of other priority populations such as LGBTQ to immigrant and refugee and disability from small organizations or organizations without pcl funding that focus on serving 1 to 2 specific racial ethnic, ethnic priority populations and or 1 to 2 other pcl priority populations, such as houseless or LGBTQ. Council prioritized applications from large applications. Oh council deprioritized applications from large organizations. Programs that serve general priority populations with no specific focus, and from grantee organizations for a program that we do not currently fund. At no point in the process did the community council receive or discuss lists of organizations or programs that apply for funding, while making those priorities. In addition to community council priorities, staff used the criteria published in last fall's application to make funding recommendations. These criteria include prioritizing high scoring applications, addressing pcl funding priorities and priority populations, supporting a diversity of organizations to serve the community, balancing support between currently funded programs and programs not currently funded by the levy. Considering the scale and the feasibility of the proposed program and the context of the amount of funds requested, the experience and expertise of the program or agency considering the program cost per participant in the context of the level of service provided to participants. Also considering program performance if their current grantee performance is evaluated based on how well grantees met goals over time. For the number of people served for the service. Activities provided for program participation by the youth or parents, and outcomes staff meets semiannually with grantees to discuss reports and performance, and provide annual performance assessments based on grant agreement goals. Using this approach, staff looked at annual performance of grants compared to their key goals given recovery from the pandemic. Pcl staff focused the performance assessments on the program's past two years of fy 23 and fy 24, plus their mid-year progress report and the current fy 25 staff looked at types of goals met or missed each year, degree to which goals were missed, and whether a program is on track at mid-year to meet annual goals. Staff also looked at whether grant budgets were under spent and to what degree they were. Over the past two years and at mid-year. Recommended funding amounts for current grantees taken into account performance trends, including the severity and persistence of any performance concerns, spending history, and the need to balance investments to ensure all or as many priority populations as possible receive a range. A levy funded services programs with persistent and significant performance concerns were not recommended for continued funding in recommending programs currently without pcl funding, staff prioritize applications from organizations that are small that scored at or above median, that add services for priority populations, especially those underserved in a program area, and had few or no feasibility concerns. Recommended funding amounts taken to account. The proposed scale and budget. Whether all program components are recommended for funding, and the need to balance investments to ensure all or as many priority populations as possible receive pcl funds. Staff also considered specific policy lenses and creating recommendations in each program area. The policy choices were informed by the community engagement process and past pcl grant performance. In after school, we prioritized adding services with a strong track record of youth engagement and limited transportation barriers in child abuse prevention and intervention. We prioritize continuing and adding services with therapeutic elements to support family mental health. In early childhood. We prioritize services for families with infants and toddlers, including prenatal supports. Since other local resources for children aged 3 to 5 have increased with the passage of preschool for all in foster care, we prioritize services supporting mental health for foster youth. In hunger relief, we prioritize adding services focused on serving black children and families who have been underserved in this program area and in mentoring. We prioritized adding services for 18 to 24 year olds. Due to the expansion of the eligible service population in this area. Staff created two portfolios of funding recommendations based on these characteristics, the community council considered the characteristics of the two portfolios, which was the total number of grants in each resources allocated to each program. Area, score, focus, population, organization, size, current pcl funding status, and recommended one portfolio for funding to the allocation committee. For the allocation committee to consider. Staff released funding recommendations in early March, after which applicants were invited to submit testimony for the allocation committee to review before funding decisions were made. Each applicant had the option to submit testimony in support of the application. Between March 7th and April 4th, applicants could submit one of the following a three minute video or audio recording, or up to 400 words of written testimony. Testimony was accepted in languages other than english, and pcl worked with city of Portland language services vendors to translate them. Testimony was submitted in support of 111 applications. Out of the 168 total applications between September 2024 and may 2025, applicants were not permitted to contact allocation committee or community council members with the intent of influencing the outcome of the funding process. Pcl staff compiled all submitted testimony and provided it to each allocation committee member on April. Yeah, on April 8th.
38 Good morning. Councilors. My name is meg mcelroy. I use she her pronouns. I'm the assistant director with the children's levy and a grants manager for early childhood and hunger relief. Before we dive a little bit further into the results of the process, I want to take us back a minute to June of 2024. Before this funding round began, the allocation committee allocated the resources that would be available for these large grants. The estimated resources available for the large grants competitive funding round, as well as for a special initiative, are approximately 71 million over three years. That includes projected revenue from the tax levy, projected fund balance, and it is minus our projected expenses to cover our current small grants and continuing the small grants fund. The training provided to grantees as well as personnel, internal and external materials, supplies and reserves. During the June 2024 meeting, the committee allocated 6 million over three years to continue funding the community childcare initiative, or what we call cci. Cci is a child care subsidy initiative initiative that helps working families earning low incomes afford high quality child care. It supplements the state's employment related daycare subsidy and ensures that costs for families are covered in full. This allocation addresses the top funding priority from our community engagement process in the early childhood program area, and it addresses a high priority in the after school program area because it serves children birth through age 12, including before and after school care. Staff reviewed cci performance in more depth with the committee in February of 2025, and shared results of a family of family survey and childcare provider survey, indicating that the program has successfully increased access to high quality care and that both families and providers are highly satisfied with the program. Currently, all subsidies are being used and there is a wait list. Now we'll turn our attention to the 64.7 million that were allocated in this large grants funding process. During its June 2024 meeting, the allocation committee allocated projected resources for large grants among each of pcl's program areas. The committee chose to allocate program area funding as a range of available resources. The funding range allocated for each program area was based on the committee's policy priorities and historical demand. In each program area. The table on this slide shows you the number of applications the levy received for each program area. The three year funding amount that was requested by the applications in that program area. The range of funds that the committee originally allocated in June and then based on their funding decisions, the three year total funding amount and number of applications that would receive grants. As you can see, the allocation committee ultimately decided to approve an amount beyond the high end of its original allocation in mentoring near the high end of the range for after school, at the low end of the range for early childhood hunger relief and foster care, and under the low end of the range for child abuse prevention intervention. This approach helps address the relative demand among the program areas, as well as the community council's priorities for small organizations and programs that hadn't received levy funding, which are concentrated in the mentoring and after-school program areas, the allocation committee funding decisions total 65 million. A current pcl grant unexpectedly ended in December of 2024, and it's unspent balance was allocated in this funding round. Given the increased number of allocation applications that the levy received and the scale of requests in combination with the decrease in pcl available resources, most funding amounts for individual grants are substantially less than what the applicants requested. As staff, we understand the applicants receiving less funding than requested will not be able to provide the same scale of services that they had proposed in their applications, and we will negotiate with applicants for delivery of services commensurate with funds granted. For the 94 applications. Just approved for funding by the allocation committee. Most of the applications, 73% of them scored at or the median or higher in their program areas. 27% of the applications approved for funding scored below the median. They were approved because they met community council priorities, and they balanced the type of services available and populations to be served in each of the levy's program areas. Of the 94 applications approved by the allocation committee, this slide shows you how many applications would focus on different populations. The population is counted each time it was listed as a focus in the application. Some applications indicated having a specific focus on only a few racial and ethnic populations or other priority populations. Some applications indicated having a focus on many black, indigenous, and people of color, populations and other priority populations, and some applications indicated that they didn't have a focus and generally seek to reach all of the levy's priority populations. So on the previous slide, you saw the number of applications approved by the committee that would address, excuse me, that would focus on different populations. And this slide shows the distribution of the 94 applications grouped by their degree of focus. The largest group, 41% of applications approved, proposed to focus specifically on 1 to 2 racial and ethnic populations and or a few other priority populations. Additionally, 30% proposed to focus on multiple black, indigenous, and people of color populations and other priority populations. Taken together, the two blue sections of this bar show that 71% of the applications approved for funding by the committee indicate that they are focused primarily on serving black, indigenous, and children of color. The remaining 29% of applications indicated that they do not have a specific focus within priority populations. I also want to remind everyone that regardless of an intended focus, all pcl funded services are open to any child and family. This slide shows the distribution of the 94 applications approved by the allocation committee by size of organization, according to their annual revenues, 37% of the applications are from organizations with annual revenues over 18 million. 26% of the approved applications are from medium size organizations, with annual revenues between 6 to 18,000,035% of the approved applications are from small organizations, with annual revenues under 6 million. This slide shows the distribution of the 94 applications according to their status as a current pcl grantee. 65% of the applications are from organizations that have a current pcl grant to continue funding that same set of program services, 6% of the applications are from organizations with a pcl grant, but to fund a different program than what current than what pcl currently funds, and 29% of the applications are from organizations without any current pcl funding. I also want to note that across the 94 applications, all funding priorities identified in community engagement and explained earlier in this presentation were addressed by multiple applications approved by the allocation committee. In other words, the funding priorities are well addressed by the applications approved. And you can refer to the last page of the memo we provided in preparation for this meeting to see how many applications address each funding priority in the program areas. This concludes our presentation of process and results of the large grant funding round, and the allocation committee's funding decisions. And before we take questions, we'll review one more time the role of city council in this process. The act that governs pcl operations requires that city council approve allocation committee funding decisions or remand by funding category. The authority to remand by funding category means that council may send the allocation committee decisions in an entire program area back to the allocation committee for reconsideration. If those decisions were not made, were not made based on application score and other community conditions. To foster a balanced and integrated citywide system of services. City council, as the remanding body, does not have authority to substitute its own decisions for the decisions made by the allocation committee. Also, just one reminder all pcl current grants expire June 30th, 2025. Remanding funding decisions will delay grant funding from starting July 1st while the allocation committee reconsiders funding decisions. With that, we'll open it to questions.
39 Thank you so much for the really thorough presentation. And you ended right on time. I'm very impressed. So, councilors, we have two options when this comes before council to approve or to remand. And this is really the opportunity to make sure that any questions that you have about the process, to know which path forward you'd like to take when this comes before council, as we saw in that last slide, there are some consequences to remand. But if you have questions, concerns, clarifications, now is the chance. Councilor Novick.
40 Thank you, madam president. You said that 70% of the points in the evaluation are related to diversity, equity and inclusion. How does how is how many points do you get for program effectiveness?
41 Can you clarify the last part of your question? I'm sorry I didn't hear.
42 Is there is that separate from the points you get for the effectiveness of your program?
43 No. It's included. Being effective with the population that you serve was part of how we defined being effective. And it's also part of an equity, diversity and inclusion perspective.
44 So what are the other what are the other 30%.
45 Off the top of my head, I would have to have our application in front of us, but I will go through sort of a bigger picture framework of how we set up the application. The first set of questions was based on the organization that's applying. So their mission, their action and work in diversity, equity and inclusion, their staffing, their board, their impact in community and their fiscal responsibility. And then we had a section, a set of questions that was based on the program that the applicant was proposing to operate. So the question was who they were planning to serve, how they were planning to address the funding priorities in community engagement with the population they plan to serve their experience and effectiveness serving that population, their intended outcomes with the population, their barriers for outreach and engagement and how they address them. And I feel like I'm missing access for folks with disabilities. And then the final set of questions was around the proposed budget for the application. So a big chunk of that 30% commission or councilor Novick is for budget.
46 Would it be possible to redesign a system where it's saying that every applicant has to meet basic minimum standards for diversity, equity and inclusion, and then you judge the specific applications based on effectiveness or likely effectiveness. It just seems it seems it seems odd to me to say that 70% of the points coming from diversity, equity, inclusion, as opposed to that just being kind of a baseline.
47 I think it's maybe we're looking at it two different ways. We infuse diversity, equity, inclusion across multiple aspects of the organization's capacity and experience, as well as the proposed program. So we weren't looking at it as a standalone thing that needed a baseline. We were looking at as integral to how the organization and the program proposed to do their work.
48 Okay.
49 For example, commissioner, if I can jump in, I would say, like, for example, we're looking at effective practices for outreach for the particular populations that you're aiming to serve. And so we are looking for equitable and inclusive outreach methods. And then results of those outreach outreach method. How effective are you in actually bringing in the folks that you intend to bring in for your population? So they're wound up together. They're not separated. There are parts of the same question. So I guess I didn't mean to mislead by saying 70% because they are they are bound up together in effectiveness.
50 Thank you. I have to say that my questions are partly informed by when the when PCEF started their criteria for approving grants was mostly about the demographics of the applicants and very little about the projected effectiveness. So I'm glad to hear that's not the case here. I also have a question about the decision to expand grants to more small organizations. That worries me for two reasons. One, the. Because of the 5% limitation on administration, you guys have a really small staff, and the idea that you've got to oversee more and more organizations worries me. But it also worries me because every one of those organizations has overhead. And it seems to me that the more organizations you give money to, the higher the actual overhead cost of the program is, because you're paying for the overhead of all these organizations. And finally, I'm just not sure of the logic of it's kind of sounds like the committee made a decision that, well, the goal is to give more money to a larger number of organizations, and that I don't understand intuitively how that reflects effective is bound up with effectiveness.
51 In in previous in the previous funding round, from 2019 to 2020, we had received feedback. I think it was from the PSU grant making report, where one of the big recommendations that came out of that grant making report was that there was a need to have a fund, or that there was a need for smaller organizations to be able to access the resources at the levy, and so that was like one of the what that is one of the factors that was in consideration. And then in addition to that, they also recommended the institution of a community advisory body to help ground staff's work in community priorities. And one of the priorities that came out of the community council's work that we recently set up, which is a 13 member, all volunteer advisory body, was to prioritize smaller organizations and organizations that haven't received our funding. So as a part of making funding recommendations, that was one of many considerations that weighed into staff crafting the recommendations.
52 But why are we prioritizing small organizations just because they're small?
53 Just because they're small or councilor? Novick, I think it was also coming from a place of feeling like sometimes smaller organizations are serving particular communities, sometimes segmented or small communities, that larger organizations aren't as effective in reaching. And so there was a feeling from community that we wanted we should be funding a diversity of size of organizations. And I just want to remind folks that small in this context, means annual revenues of 6 million or less, but not down to 750. So it's within a band. It's not. It depends on how you think of small. So I just want to make sure you're thinking of it in that context. So that's where the impulse, I think, coming from community that we heard was to make sure that we're being responsive to all parts of our community, and they are served by different kinds and sizes of organizations.
54 Councilor Novick I would like to, as the grant manager for the small grants fund, I'd also like to address the question, if I may. Thank you. So yes, as katrina addressed, we had heard from community members multiple times that they felt that it was hard for smaller organizations and certain communities to get access to levy funds, like priority population communities who had not been able to access funds before in 2020. Well, I was hired in 2019 to launch the small grants fund, and we did launch that in 2020 with really an emphasis on building capacity in those organizations as well, as that was our first time really launching an emphasis for disability inclusion. Out of the seven current small grantees, all but all but one. So six applied in this round and four were recommended for funding, which means that their revenues and their capacity grew during the time they were in the small grants fund, as well as the fact that if they were recommended for funding, it shows that they had solid grant grant performance in that. So they were able to actually grow and expand as organizations through their involvement in that small grants fund and now are able to compete in the large grants fund. So in that way, we've considered it quite successful in terms of how smaller organizations are looked at. Here. Again, it is that we've received feedback from the community over through multiple ways and multiple community engagement processes that we needed to expand and create more openings for organizations to be able to apply, including smaller ones that our previous application rounds have been quite extensive. It's harder if you have less. If you have program staff writing the grant applications, you don't have specific development staff so that those organizations were experiencing multiple barriers.
55 What about the overhead concern? Isn't it true that the smaller the organization, the larger the share of their costs or overhead, and that we're building capacity in those organizations? We're paying for overhead.
56 So oh go ahead. Okay. So the we cap our overhead expenses at 15% of a grant. So whether we're funding a small organization with a certain amount of money or larger organization with a much larger amount of money, 15% is the maximum of their overall grant award is the maximum they can charge their administrative expenses. So of our total pool of funding, no additional money would be going to more overhead in that context of that situation.
57 Thank you. That is reassuring.
58 Sorry.
59 And most of the grantees were budgeting under the 15% allowable so that they could put all of their funds into programing.
60 And just to be clear, this road that we're coming to you to ask for approval on the allocation committee decisions is just the large grants. Small grants funding is going to happen later. So I just want to clarify that we're not coming to you without approval at this moment. To clarify on that piece. There are small organizations who have received large grants. Small grants is the capacity building that's different from, I think, the councilors question about small organizations in this pool?
61 Exactly. I just wanted to be clear. How we're small is defined in this pool. So small in this pool means $6 million in annual revenues or less, and small and small grants fund means $750,000 a year in revenues or less. So it's a different level of small, I guess is the best way to say that.
62 Councilor Smith.
63 Thank you, madam president. Thank you all for the presentation. And I want to say that I think the Portland children's levy is outstanding and amazing in the work that you do and the families that you help, because if our intent is to make sure that our young people, that they have places to go to eat and that they have after school programing and that head start programing, you all have hit the mark. I have a question. Page six says that organizations that don't currently receive pcl funding were prioritized and on the same page, among additional criteria mentioned, it suggests that consideration was given to program performance as a current pcl grantee, if applicable. Now, wouldn't this mean that previous performance could only impact an applicant negatively when compared to organizations with no previous pcl performance data to evaluate?
64 Organizations that applied for continuing programing and were performing well, were generally recommended for continuing funding.
65 Okay, so how much consideration was given to continuity of programs for the program? Stated priority populations.
66 Continuity of programs? I'm not sure what you mean by that.
67 Yes. No, no. How much consideration was given to continuity of programs for the programs stated priority populations.
68 Can I understand.
69 Yes, I think, I think I want to reflect back what I think you're asking, trying to understand to the extent that we to the extent that the allocation committee decided to continue funding grants, that we were, that the levy was already funding, you kind of want to understand.
70 I guess what I'm saying, if culturally based programs were previously funded, but new applications were not accepted in favor of new programs, was there any analysis around transplanting youth from one program to a newly funded program, and from a coming from a bipoc community? And I noticed there were like 69, if I'm not mistaken, programs that said they served african-american youth. I think that was 69. And. The intersectionality of where people go is, is a complicated ecosystem. And just because you check that you serve black youth in their families and you compare to another organization who has a long history in working with black families, I can tell you they don't understand the funding mechanis. Just because you funded this program over here doesn't mean that all these kids who were being served at a program that has historically performed and been effective at a higher rate, it does not mean that they're going to go over to this program because everything is relational, right? And so when you come up with these new processes on how to fund and score organizations, you also have to keep in mind you can't you can't use that as a shield and say, oh, well, but we funded 69 organizations that serve black folks. Black folks are not going over there. They're going to where they have relationships at, where they know and they know the people. So I, I kind of get a sense that, that you trying to solve one problem or getting new people in which I totally support you, have created a bigger problem. And that bigger problem is you're making the assumption that people are going to cross the street to go to a program instead of saying, look, we have long standing programs that we funded for years, and if we take their funding away, particularly in the mentoring department, and that's their book of business in a long standing program, does not get those resources. That seems like it's off balance that we're we're going to have to figure out a way to fix it. So I guess that's what I'm the question what I was trying to ask is, how do you how do you prevent something like that from happening? I know there's a lot of unintended consequences when you put new rules into place, but the rules have to really be able to be fair. And when a grantee looks at their score and they say, I got a higher score than the person who had no experience or effectiveness, but yet they serve black families and children. How are they supposed to reconcile that and process? It's hard for me to process it right now that I know that there's some programs that have higher scores. And these new programs were prioritized without being prioritized with effectiveness or history. So that's what I'm, I'm, I'm speaking to.
71 I think I'll let others speak more to the, the data. But I do want to say a couple of things. And one is that continued priority for current grantees was part of it. If they were a current grantee for a current program in mentoring, there was only one bipoc current grantee that wasn't recommended for continued funding, and that program did not offer half of their program last year due to staffing challenges and had not met goals for multiple years. So part of what we're looking at when we're prioritizing continued funding is, are the services being offered, and then also are the participants in mentoring those participants our youth. But in other program areas, it could be parents, but are the participants actually engaging with the program? So just just to offer that piece about mentoring.
72 And one last question, how did reviewers quantify values for non score based priorities, including program areas and organization size, and applicant and applicant status and focus of population? How did that how did you.
73 Reviewers weren't didn't have those factors in their mind when they were reviewing the application? We published the application with the scoring criteria for applicants to know what they would be evaluated against when they were answering their questions, and reviewers were reviewing based on the scoring criteria. It was later in the process, when staff were analyzing the applicants and the data that came in, that we wanted to be able to talk about the applicant pool without sharing, identifying information with the community council. So we did a lot of data analysis to be able to tell a big picture, higher level story that anonymized the data about who the applicant pool was and then to help them parse through to weigh the different considerations about what types of applications should be prioritized or deprioritized in relation to score.
74 So it was it was community council. It wasn't the reviewers who were scoring the applications. So just to be clear, we were taking into account the score and also those other factors and the other factors included the community council priorities. And that was done because people said they wanted more community input on how the funding decisions would get made. So the council had an opportunity to inject their priorities into how we balance the portfolio of services.
75 And that's what I'm getting to lisa. I'm getting to the point that some of this stuff was subjective. It wasn't just based on the applicant. You all had some way in there to stir the pot a bit about and to sway the reviewers on how they should be looking at this. If I'm listening to what.
76 The reviewers are different from the community council.
77 Okay, from the community council, so that that's why it's so confusing and. Let me say this, I like what you all are doing. I think it's great and it's wonderful. But I think as we go forward, we need to figure out some ways in which organizations can who have been effective in the community that they that they have an opportunity to maintain their funding to a level that is appropriate. And with this new administration, on a federal level, we're seeing a lot of programs that are getting defunded. And I was looking at your numbers. You have I think it's like $33 million. That was 33 million that was taken in. And I know you have to it was about 400,000 less of what you got the previous fiscal year for 24, 25, 21. That's what I was looking.
78 At.
79 21%, 4.3 million.
80 Yeah. So did the mayor take any of your funding? Did you have any constraint at all on any of your funding at all.
81 Constraint on any of our funding.
82 Right.
83 Which constraint from the federal government?
84 No, from.
85 From from the mayor. Did the mayor.
86 Our city bureaus had a 5 to 8% cut that they were put through. Did your program go through that exercise there?
87 We there's a contingency put in our budget for some level of cut currently.
88 Yeah, that's.
89 What I'm asking.
90 But not 5 to 10%. No.
91 The contingency that exists is only $36,000 I believe in the current budget. So our funding is essentially. Solely based on the tax revenue that's projected.
92 But what I'm asking you, what did you what was your constraint. What was that number that you were constrained.
93 It was there was not a constraint. It was it's a decrease in revenues that is causing the less money. Does that make sense? So it was not a budget constraint. It was that you will have less revenue coming in. And the combination of that and then spending down fund balance, that was.
94 Because you had a you had a contingency that you had to spend down.
95 Not contingency, just a fund balance. So your fund balance accumulates. If there's underspending, there was underspending during the pandemic because people couldn't deliver programs, right. And so there was some balance that was allocated over the remainder of the of the last levy period.
96 Okay, okay.
97 I appreciate the work that you all have done. I want you to continue to do great work and help our families because as I was trying to say earlier, our federal government there, they're keeping a lot of funding, billions of dollars in funding from the state of Oregon, which I don't like, and to be able to continue to have this levy to help a specific population, which is our youth and our children, it's so important because I don't think many communities have this kind of option and levy in their in their local system. So you are definitely filling the gap in places where we may have or we may be in such a terrible by the end of this fiscal year, in a terrible situation where they're not going to be able to meet their other, you know, goals. So this you're definitely filling a gap in making sure that we serve all of our children. But I would like to have some further conversation with you offline, lisa. And on some other concerns that I'm I'm concerned about. But thank you. And thank you for the work that you do.
98 Thanks for your questions.
99 Before we.
100 Move on, I think councilor Ryan had some answers about some of the budget questions that were raised that he wanted to add.
101 Yes, I wanted to confirm what I thought was true. And that is there's no general fund constraint. They're not subject to general fund constraint at the children's levy. The authority to the children's levy is to the voters and the taxpayers who approved it. It's a lock box.
102 Councilor Zimmerman.
103 Thanks. I want to I think my question is related to the dialog we just had with councilor Smith and councilor Novick. This idea about a binary, which is, is there a way to certify that an proposal is or is not meeting the standards of being an equitable proposal so that instead of 70% being how they're graded on the amount of equity or diversity that they have in the program, but 70% perhaps is on their effectiveness. I'm just wondering what it would take to make a change with that 70% idea, because the effectiveness of program seems to be front of mind to me in this conversation.
104 Yeah, I think we're not maybe doing the best job trying to communicate to you. All that effectiveness was integrated throughout all of those integrated effectiveness, including with equity, diversity and inclusion. So their effectiveness as an organization and their impact was a substantial part of their points in the organization section of the application. The effectiveness of the proposed program that they want the levy to contribute funding toward was part of the score that the reviewers were asked to look at, and so applicants had to answer questions about their the applicant's experience of doing that program or similar programs with that particular population. They had to answer questions about outcomes that they have achieved, either with that program or similar program, or with that population. They had to answer questions about their ability to engage the population. Can they, you know, really get kids to enroll and engage in the services or families? So when we say 70% was for equity, diversity and inclusion, I think it's really important to think that that includes effectiveness. And if you wanted us to go through and also quantify the percentage of points within that that are for effectiveness and different aspects of effectiveness, I know that we can.
105 Be helpful for me to share some examples of the types of questions we were asking, and kind of showing how they're intertwined.
106 Let me go through a couple other questions, just in a sense of time, but I appreciate that offer a lot. The you mentioned that PSU, I think you said it was a study or somebody said that having access for the smaller groups was important, and I want to just expand that to what end? Why why is that prioritized over a nonprofit provider who has a larger footprint in the community, which has generally, in my experience, meant that they've got some longer, deeper roots. And so I'm not understanding why we've prioritized that. That has not come off yet in this understanding. And I and I say that relative to. You're not you don't exist alone in this community, in this world, which is we've got which is having a similar conversation, cfs having a similar conversation. And our our levies moving themselves into the nonprofit make work process instead of the outcomes based process. And that is a concern for me when I'm in other rooms as well. And so I don't understand the drive to go to the startup instead of the drive to the one whose parents were in the program, and they're in the program, and the program has roots.
107 Well, I mean, I think it's both. And to be honest, and like I said, I think that the drive toward making sure we do a better job of including smaller organizations and again, keeping in mind that smaller is 6 million or less in annual revenue. So we are not talking tiny or necessarily coming right out of the grassroots. There usually have developed, you know, a while to get to that point, to that level of revenue. And it's about responsiveness, again, to try to make sure that smaller organizations that are growing up out of community and might be closer to the communities that they engage and might also focus on smaller segments of populations, can sometimes be more responsive and be better at engaging youth. And what we have seen after the pandemic is sometimes the larger organizations have struggled to keep engagement of youth in the ways that they had before the pandemic. And so I think it was perhaps even more of a of an urgent sense post-pandemic was to make sure that we were going to get programs that were really good at engaging kids and getting them to come, in particular, kids and parents both. I saw a lot of other folks wanting to say something here. Is there other responses you wanted to highlight?
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108 Well, I just wanted to jump in from the after school portfolio perspective. When we looked at the smaller organizations that were applying that we potentially wanted to lift up, we really drove to effectiveness as the key for, you know, are they effectively engaging the population and do they have the capacity to do it? Are they already doing the service well? And is the community already responding well to the service. And that was sort of the small organization. So I just I wanted to share that in the sense it wasn't necessarily like, oh, let's fund this new startup thing. It was much more let's find these organizations that already have enthusiastic engagement from the community to bring them to the funding table. Right? So that we're both funding large and small organizations that all have capacity to engage their community. Well, does that make sense?
109 It does. I weigh that with the consideration for the for the administrative and overhead. I think you started with 5% was your cap, but then we have 15%. But I just think about what it takes to provide health care benefits to an organization and the buying power that exists with bigger organizations versus smaller organizations. And every nonprofit I've encountered has a development director and editor or an admin who are not direct service providers. And I just I start to I do I'll just say I have some concerns that in this model that has taken over our community with a variety of our levies in, I appreciate that we're not talking necessarily just startup in the way you described the 6 million, and so that's helpful. But at the same time, I, I'm not sure I've bought hook, line and sinker the PSU idea that this is something that we should be always pursuing. I want to shift a little bit to I just have some curiosities as a person who at one point was a young gay kid, when we talk about a children's program that is lgbt focused, what does that what kind of programs are we seeing in terms of. And the reason I'm, I'm bringing this up is thinking back to younger Eric, who certainly didn't know that he was a part of that community as a very young person and had some ideas of perhaps I was a part of that community in high school. But most of all, you look to play sports or do plays or be in band just like all your peers. Most of all, you want to make sure that you don't get made fun of or put in a locker, but at the end of the day, my experience as a eight year old, as a 12 year old, and then as an 18 year old is quite similar to my straight friends because they all had the same concerns. So where does an lgbt focused children's group go? What are we talking about? Because this conversation seems to be happening, and I and I recognize we live in a society now who is generally safer for a kid to come up with those with those conclusions or come out earlier than it was for myself or my colleagues. But at the same time, we're also in a space where kids are still learning. And I don't know that anyone puts a period at the end of that sentence until maybe after high school. So I'm trying to understand what did these programs focus mean? Because sometimes as a member of this community, I feel like I get talked about by a lot of straight parents about what could have been, should have been, but they have no damn idea.
110 I'd like to take that question, counselor Zimmerman, I and I want to say, I think it's addressed in a few ways. So one, there are examples like there is a program that has been recommended for funding that is a new program, not smaller organization, but new program that is specifically for transgender youth and their parents, both of whom get support services. And that and we know that that's a population that has experienced a lot of the attacks that Loretta Smith was discussing earlier. Councilor Smith discusses discussing earlier from the federal level. And so there are some specific programs that specifically address vulnerable populations in terms of the most vulnerable LGBTQ populations. There are a couple of houseless serving programs that are also new to mentoring that specifically focus on LGBTQ youth who are experiencing houselessness, or bipoc youth who are experiencing houselessness. In addition to that, in terms of the more the experience that you were addressing, I saw in multiple applications, including culturally specific bipoc programs, applications addressing how they train their staff on on supporting LGBTQ youth, and in order to help them to include them in their programing with youth who do not identify in that way. And so there's been a lot of efforts from organizations that are running programs that are not specific to that population to make sure that their staff are able to be welcoming and affirming in their programs. And that's something that we looked for as well.
111 Okay, I appreciate that. I think in this era of trying to be inclusive and in this era of. And truly being more inclusive, we are also at times finding the need to slap a label on a kid's experience, younger and younger. And I would I would say that so many kids go through a variety of, of how they perceive themselves. And that's part of the of growing up. And that there is affirming and welcoming. And then there is let's make sure we label everybody a certain way. And those are that's a really delicate balance. And I don't have the right answer. But I look at that in reflecting in the, you know, the kids that are in my life and around and around my family and a number of classroom experiences, just thinking about the where this conversation now finds itself and how programs can be supportive but not segmenting. And I just try to think through that. I, I, I guess I offer it more as a thought balloon where this is an area where I feel like a lot of do gooders in the community seem to get a lot of space, but not a lot of the youth or the people who are part of the community seem to really be able to share our own experience for what what this seems like. I'm kind of glad I didn't grow up as a young gay kid in this era, because I feel like a label may have been slapped on me a lot earlier than I was ready for. And so I'm very cautious around these programs because I think there's a there can be an overreach in our in, in how we how we circle a community around every child to make sure that they're accepted, make sure that they have the same access to all the sports and activities and academics. So anyway, I will pause there, but I appreciate you guys in your questions. And also perhaps, maybe in another time, we can look at some of the examples of the other questions relative to the outcomes piece. And thank you for your presentation.
112 Point of order, madam president. May I ask a question of my colleague?
113 Is it a question of your colleague who has just.
114 For clarification. Yeah, yeah. Well, first, I really appreciate councilor Zimmermann. You sharing your own experience. I think that's very brave and helpful for us to hear about. I'm wondering if you have any specific mentoring programs or any of these that were shared with us that you. I don't see anything on here that's actually labeling. It's a program for lgbtqia+. I saw it in one of the slides that it's a priority population. But I'm curious, are you specific about any program? I don't see any programs that are a labeled program.
115 Since it's I'm talking about since it's listed as one of the populations. I wonder what that means. And that's that's where my concern goes. No, no particular program. And I'm not calling out any, any program. But the fact that I think there are the rest of this list and this is a great question. So the rest of this list, right. So when I read down focus population and application, American indian, alaska, native, asian, southeast asian, black, african, latino, pacific islander, we go through and then toward the very bottom we get to immigrant, refugee, disability, LGBTQ, single parent, teen parent and houseless. And so the those at the bottom, I would say are those are not things a person is or is not right. And so I have curiosity around it. And since I'm part of the LGBTQ, that's where my questions went. Given that you to look at a child, you can't answer that question. But but you can on the on on the ones above. And so I just think that's an interesting for me as I go through this work. And I think about as an elected official and one of one of the few openly gay elected officials in the state of Oregon who or who has sat on this dais, I am the I am a person who sits on. The shoulders of a lot of experience of other people before me and. And I and I think that my ability or being able to understand how a young gay kids experience today differs from what mine was in the 90s is helpful for me in my policymaking. And part of that is knowing how our programs reach into a program, into schools, into community, into neighborhoods, because times do change, right? There are. So it's more of a fact finding question. So I appreciate that.
116 Can I actually speak to your your point, mr. Zimmerman, as a former as a current queer person who is a former youth who actually was houseless due to familial rejection, right, like back in the day, you know, when it I found my experience through the arts kind of like what you were referencing through music. And that's what sort of carried me to college and through my and sort of saved my life in that context. And I think a lot of the providers that we are working with have a similar perspective where if they check the box that said, you know, we're serving LGBTQ youth, it's about saying we're an inclusive environment. You know, we're allowing them to be safe and be welcomed and be comfortable. And we focused on them as far as a part of who we serve. But I don't think for most of our applicants, I think trans active is sort of a separate example because it's specific for trans kiddos and their families. But for most of our programs, these are about providers that are saying we want to create a welcoming space for these kids when they need it, right? So I think and actually in our community assessment, we even heard from queer families and parents of queer kids that said, you know, queer specific programs were not really their top priority. It was more about the engagement around arts and recreation activities, similar to your point. So I think what you're actually saying is really reflected in the recommendations that we've made around who folks are serving and how they're embracing kids from the community as they as they come. Right. Meeting people where they are.
117 I would add. So in mentoring, there are two that specifically mentioned that. And again, there I would consider the most vulnerable out of that group, which is outside in specifically for LGBTQ houseless youth. And most of those are houseless because of rejection of their identities, which they felt that they could not change. And the other emphasis that outside in has is also on bipoc houseless youth and then trans active, which is for transgender youth and their parents, again, in the hope that those transgender youth do not become houseless youth by being able to support their parents with understanding their identities in community engagement. We did have a focus group that was specifically for LGBTQ youth, and as brian said, in terms of after school activities that were site based after school, they did not want those as much. They do prioritize those being specifically around their identity, but in off site programs, they did want to be able to engage in those. They just didn't want that to happen as part of their school community.
118 That's a great thank you for that. That's a great response, and it's really helpful to frame it up. And I say that as. You know, a kid wants to go through a school experience as as normal as any other kid in their classroom, and having the ability to have that one social interaction that you go to on a certain day of the week or that that maybe just you and a couple of other friends, maybe it doesn't have anybody in your classroom, even with it is also really important for that. I'll say it, the mental survivability of school and the toughness that comes with that. So thanks for that example of on site, off site and those differences. That's that is helpful. Thank you.
119 Yes. And I would add I would like to see a Portland in which being LGBTQ or of color or any other status is considered part of the normal experience.
120 Just councilor Koyama Lane.
121 Thank you, madam president. Thank you so much for being here with us today. I'd like to acknowledge this program's commitment to accountability and transparency. I appreciate this information with the specifics. I hear many of us asking in different meetings for line items, for things to be broken down like this. It's very helpful. Thank you. I also appreciate the efforts to give access to smaller and newer organizations serving refugee and immigrant communities. I think that's extremely important, especially right now. This makes me want to ask and thinking about these smaller groups, what percentage of an organization's total budget can they receive from Portland children's levy funds?
122 30%.
123 That's a great number. I was worried I, I know we don't want that to be too large and to make sure that these orgs aren't relying too much on this funding. Thank you.
124 Councilor Green.
125 Thank you, madam president. And thank you, councilor Ryan, for suggesting that we use this space to talk through this. I think we all had questions and this has been really, really helpful discussion so far. I do have a question for the panel. And thank you so much for all your work. When you look at the economic indicators as part of the scoring, are you looking what measures specifically are you? Is it just annual average household income, or are there broader range of measures.
126 So economic do you mean of who.
127 I'm not. So when you when you think about prioritizing people to serve, there's a sort of economic aspect to this. Right.
128 Low income. Yes.
129 Yeah. So I ask that because, you know, I did note that there's very little grantmaking happening in district four. You know, district four tends to be it does have, I think, some of the wealthiest people in the city. But I'm just going to name four different zip codes that have higher than average poverty rates in district four. So (972) 019-7201 is a 19.6% poverty rate and a 7.5% child poverty rate. And that is in my district. 97204 has a 50% poverty rate. Now, they may not have children, but they might be in the ages of. 18 to 24, 97205, has a 17.2% poverty rate and 97209, which is kind of like it's the north side, I'm sorry, the west side of the freeway, it's it picks up a little bit of the purple, but mostly it's the alphabets, a lot of renters over there. That is a 17.9% poverty rate, with a 17.4% child poverty rate. So I raise that just to say district four is not a monolith there. It has some of the widest income inequality disparities in our in our district. And so and this is from the American community survey, the five year estimates from 2023. So thank you.
130 Do you do you want us to provide any information that might help speak to those concerns?
131 Please do.
132 Yes. Yeah. So in our the allocation committee's decisions, at least one of the hunger relief grants selected is specifically for those zip codes. It's for children and families who are food insecure. And it is a mobile pantry. So it brings food to affordable housing communities that are specifically in those zip codes. In addition, many services that are funded and or that are approved for funding in early childhood and child abuse prevention, intervention and in foster care operate citywide, where location isn't necessarily definitive of whether or not a child or family can access service. It's really more about whether or not the conditions in the family are part of what that service is trying to help support. So there are definitely children living in those zip codes who've received services. So in fiscal year 24. There were over 250 children living on portland's west side, with relationships served with relationship based services and over 500 children with hunger relief services.
133 That's comforting. Is there a transportation involved if people have to get to the different locations?
134 Oh, the good news about most of those services that I described in early childhood foster care and child abuse prevention intervention is that they are services that come to people's homes.
135 I'd love to hear it. Thanks.
136 Can I just add and mentoring recommended or approved by the allocation committee for funding? We also have outside in and pair who are both in your district I believe.
137 Thank you. Thank you.
138 Councilor Kanal did you just leave the q okay. I think that leaves me then. We've had a lot of back and forth about small versus big grants, the different criteria and some changes that you made this year. And while staying blind to who the grantees are, I'm wondering if you feel like you got the mix of types of organizations and number of organizations that you were looking for, or if there are adjustments that you would make in future years. And part of what I'm looking at is this push to have some of the newer, smaller organizations following the PSU study, but still seeing that those organizations were underrepresented compared to their application rate in the pool of grantees. So also hearing on the flip side from some of my colleagues about concern going too far that way and just wondering if you think you got the balance right or not.
139 I don't know if there's a right or a wrong. I feel like we made the best accommodation that we could in a year, with constrained resources of balancing. On the one hand, to commissioner Smith's point, excellent programs that we are currently funding that we want to make sure continue, as well as making sure we let in new programs that are reaching a broader swath of the community. So it was a balancing act, and I guess I will ask if anyone else wants to contribute to that about their feelings about how well we did that job.
140 I agree, I think and mentoring, I think that it is a good balance, as good as we could get with the funds that we had available. We had so many applications and one of the smallest allocations there to be able to squeeze in any more programs or to fund at increased rate would be really challenging. But. We did manage to approve grants for a variety, a wide diversity of priority populations and sizes. So I felt that that went well.
141 Second. Thank you.
142 Councilor Kanal.
143 Thank you, madam president. Thank you to counselor Ryan for this as well. I'm going to give you some praise here. I think I've been very impressed by the level of detail here. Fiscal responsibility requires us to evaluate effectiveness, and this program is in many ways designed around diversity, equity and inclusion. It sounds like you're rejecting the binary that was offered here between dei and effectiveness. I agree with that from a values perspective. And it also sounds like you're implementing that by evaluating effectiveness through the lens of how a program serves a community, which it seeks to serve. And that community is defined by which community it is, and therefore dei. That makes sense to me, and I agree with it from a practical implementation perspective, it also required. It also requires us. Fiscal responsibility also requires us to have options. Having a bigger crop of potential grantees makes it easier to identify which applications are the cream of the crop. And so over the long term, cultivating organizations that are new to help them grow creates a reference point through a competing application that evaluators can compare against the long established groups that have been funded for years. And that will, I think, show that most of those we've been funding forever deserve it. And they're getting those decisions year after year because they are the trusted partners in the community and do so in a way that because there was competition, helps build trust with the broader community. It will also, I think, show that maybe one of those long standing partners in a given situation, maybe two, is funded primarily because there was no other option and we needed to do the work imperfectly or less effectively rather than not do it at all. And so cultivating new partners, serving the same communities helps to avoid a different binary do the work when maybe a small percentage of cbos are not perfect partners, or don't do the work by building a door number three, which is a new potential partner. And I think it also helps when new communities are coming up. In Portland, for example, in the 80s, 90s, we didn't have many organizations serving communities that just hadn't migrated here in great numbers at that time. And now we have those communities, some of which are marginalized communities that have a specific need. And so there's going to be new organizations coming up in addition to organizations evolving and expanding that can serve that. So I think the idea of cultivating new partners is a really good thing. And it sounds like you figured that out. The final thing I'll note is that these groups are very different, and I don't envy the task of the evaluators and the committee in comparing a program serving one group versus a program that serves a completely different group. And in other words, some members of marginalized communities can have a normal experience, quote unquote, without changing the rules of normalcy. Whereas for those for whom it's fairly obvious visually, that's not the case unless we change the rules of normalcy socially. And I respect that you're working within that context and that change that's happening in the broader community. So I just wanted to take the opportunity to commend you and comment on those. And I'll stop here. Thank you.
144 Thank you.
145 Thanks, councilor. Councilor Ryan, before we move on to next steps, do you have any closing words or thoughts since you brought this to us today?
146 You know, first I just want to get a little personal. I was experiencing some, you know, the conversation councilor Zimmerman, that you had was, first of all, to courage. And I appreciate that. It was a messy, important dialog to have. Not not to be say, I'm special. This probably happened to a lot of people my age. In the early 80s. I was violently gay bashed, and that was at a time where there was nowhere to go for support. So I, I held that shame for years until I could finally do some counseling around it, you know, made up a story about like I fell. I'm sure my female colleagues understand those stories. And so it was really triggering to have that dialog. And thank goodness we have resources for children and families that are going through their organic, natural process of questioning who they are in terms of their sexual identity and how they show up in their gender. So didn't know I was going to say that, but I had to get that off my chest. 45%. You know, 21% of the funds that we thought we had a year ago are now taken away. So right off the bat, we had a 21% cut, 45% increase in demand. This isn't fun. This is kind of a reality check of what a lot of us are experiencing, who are providing government services and support for children and families at this time. I thought, lisa, when you mentioned the both and holding that both and people say that you demonstrated that and that took a lot of courage, took a lot of integrity to stay strong, to bring in the, I would say, demands that have been simmering for years about it's hard to break into this pot of funds. And you did it at a time when funds were down 21%. So performing that through with all of your metrics and all the dialog and the 91 volunteers and the and the fact that each applicant was read four times anonymously and then vetted from the community council, then finally it came to us, I, I just will say that, you know, my experience was when we were asking similar questions to what I heard today, you guys were good. Like every time I would poke at you, lisa, you would have a really thorough response. And I have a pretty good bs meter and there was no bs meter going off at all because you would then provide here's the data, here's the stories, here's the evaluations. And I know that each allocation member I talked to had similar experiences while they were doing their work and listening to the testimony. And so I just want to say that I actually appreciate today's meeting. I thought it was important. It was important to get all of these questions out. We all wish that the revenue wasn't down 21%. We'd be having a different conversation. I want to end by thanking lisa, joel, katrina, brian, erica, meg, and quiet john. You're always doing a lot of work, but you're never seen. But you are tall. There he is back there. He keeps all their finances straight. And I'll just end with my hope that you continue to reach out to the staff. They're very accessible, and they've always provided me with the dialog that was necessary for me to understand why these recommendations were brought to us. It was a tough day for us to make these decisions on one hand, because again, we wanted to fund more, but it was so clean of all of you to stay in integrity and deliver the report in a way that you could stand behind all of the experiences you've had over the last year to get to this point. So thank you. I'm very proud of all of you on the children's levy team. And with that, I'll turn it back to you, madam president.
147 Thank you all for being here today. I know this was a lot and there was a lot of incoming, but I think it was important discussion for counselors to understand the process that that your team goes through. Counselors, as you heard at the beginning, we will have two options with this to approve it. Or if we do not think that the committee stuck to the criteria that they laid out to remand it back to them for further review, we don't get to substitute our own judgment for what's in there. Those are the two options that we have before us. I will take that vote at a council meeting, likely the morning of the 21st of this month, before we move into our budget work. If there are any other questions. In the meantime, I know that our colleague, counselor Ryan, is happy to be available or we have the team before us. So with that, unless you all have anything else that we need to know.
148 We'll reach back out and respond to some questions that came up today and send responses to you all.
149 Okay.
150 I will close today's work session. Thank you very much.
151 Thank you very much.