Attending:
Sharron Kelley, Joan Pasco, Carol Cole, Charlotte Dorsey, Dennis Donin, Jeff Beiswenger, Diane Peterson, Bryan Holt, Zeke Smith, Rebecca Teasdale, Claudia King, Don King, Shelley Kowalski, Brett Walker

Carol Cole chaired the meeting.

Distribution of Application:
Sharron reviewed the application document with the committee, and discussed the importance of everyone having a copy on file to use as a working reference document. Jeff also briefly discussed some of the late hour revisions that were made to the Community Policing and Law Enforcement section. During this revision process, Jeff worked very closely with the Gresham Police Dept., so their ideas and interests are well represented in these two sections of the application.

Website Update:
Charlotte updated the committee on the progress of the statewide site, and said that most of the significant content has come from the Rockwood project. She is trying to get other sites more actively involved in information sharing via the website, and she said that Cascade Locks is beginning to share some of their information. Jeff suggested that we get the Weed and Seed site linked to the City of Gresham & Multnomah County homepages.

Sharron reiterated that the intent of the website is to allow Weed and Seed sites statewide to learn from one another, share information, and discuss best practices. Competition and mistrust between the various neighborhoods has made this difficult thus far. One of the sources of that competition is the fact that DOJ has declared that there can be no more than three Weed and Seed sites in a given jurisdiction. Due to the fact that there are already two currently operating sites in Multnomah County, we have proceeded for the last year under the assumption that we were in competition with a North Portland group that was also applying for Official Recognition to be the third and final designated site in the County. However, DOJ has recently clarified their position, and they have defined "jurisdiction" as being equal to a city. The result is that we are no longer in competition with the North Portland group. Hopefully this can alleviate some of the competition & mistrust that have existed thus far.

Shelley suggested that we include a hit counter on the website, so that we can monitor our progress in terms of getting other neighborhoods involved.

Evaluation of Process:
Shelley has been working on an evaluation of the process by which we created our application document as part of the original grant the ECOS received to pursue the Weed and Seed project. Shelley defined two basic goals that we had when we initiated the Weed and Seed application process: 1) bring community members together, and 2) create a grant application that will ultimately qualify for grant dollars. She is having a panel of reviewers go over the document we created, and she also asked steering committee members to fill out a short survey. She will be emailing a copy of the survey to those steering committee members who were unable to attend.

Next Steps:
Diane gave the committee an update on where were are, and what we can expect in the next few months. The grant application was sent to DOJ on October 30, but she is not sure if they have received it yet due to the stop in US Mail in many federal offices as a result of the recent anthrax scare. She believed that by mid-January DOJ will have read, reviewed, and made decisions on the applications they received, so we should know if we have received Official Recognition (OR) by the end of January.

In late February there will be a grant writing workshop in Indianapolis for sites that recently received OR. This workshop will deal with budget and fiscal issues, and Diane recommended that we send someone who will have day to day involvement in the fiscal issues of our site. She also said that the funding application deadlines are staggered, and thought that ours would probably be sometime around May. If this is the case, we can expect to hear about whether or not we are receiving funding in mid-summer, and will actually receive the funds on October 1.

Joan asked what percentage of applications actually receive OR, and Diane responded by saying that the vast majority of well done applications become Weed and Seed sites. She thinks we have a good chance, and said she will communicate with us when she knows more.

Finally, Diane said that while we are waiting to hear about OR, we can get going on some of our more developed programs.

Organizational Issues:
Four major organizational issues were discussed:
1) Development of By-Laws
2) Election of Officers
3) Grant Seeking
4) Further Development

By-Laws:
Lorena Campbell, Jeff Howes, and Claudia are going to serve as an ad-hoc committee that will review the by-laws from ECOS, the Lents Weed and Seed Site, and the Albina Weed and Seed Site. After reviewing these documents, the ad-hoc committee will bring recommendations to the Steering Committee regarding how we should structure our by-laws. This will occur at the January or February Steering Committee meeting.

Election of Officers:
It was generally recognized that electing a chairperson was the most important undertaking, and Jeff suggested that the leadership of the Steering Committee needs to be a grassroots type person. Joan suggested that we follow the ECOS model of having two co-chairs, and volunteered Jeff to be one the co-chairs. Don followed up on this suggestion, and offered that the two co-chairs could begin pursuing greater community involvement. Kathy Minden and Polly Burton were both recommended as community leaders who may be willing to take on the responsibility of being a co-chair.

Jeff revised the co-chair idea slightly, and offered instead to be a permanent vice-chair, while acting as the interim chair until a community person can de identified.

A motion was made, seconded, and approved to elect Jeff vice-chair (and interim chair).

Sharron will contact Kathy and Polly to see if they are interested in serving as chair.

Grant Seeking:
Sharron discussed the fact that some aspects of our application are very social service oriented, and thus may not be eligible for DOJ funds. She suggested that we identify these areas immediately, and begin seeking additional funding to address them. She offered to serve as a writer on these mini-grants.

Jeff suggested that we create working group - possibly consisting of Shelley Parini, Sharron, and Joan - to look specifically at grant resource identification.

Diane said that a lot of sites have resource subcommittees to address funding sustainability issues.

Joan said that currently ECOS is looking at applying for a Regional Investment Board (RIB) grant in the ballpark of $30,000, and she needed ideas relating to economic development that would best fit RIB criteria. The grant will need to be in a specific target area, and focused on economic development, job creation, or upward mobility in the workforce. It will be strengthened significantly if it fits in with the Weed and Seed strategic plan.

She continued on to discuss some of the major problems that the Rockwood area business community/workforce experiences, such as integrating non-native English speakers and ex-offenders into the workforce. She also noted, though, that we need to be careful with how broad we get, as the RIB may not be as sensitive to social issues. With that in mind, she said we need to stay focused on economic issues. She also said the grant needs to have specific, measurable outcomes.

There was some discussion of linking the grant application, which will be targeted in Rockwood, to issues that are impacting the workforce in general, such as the current nursing shortage. Joan thought that getting people into ancillary positions in the medical field might be a good way to address this, and suggested the possibility of offering medically specific ESL training. Carol said that she knows of a large church in the area that is looking to do some ESL training.

Don suggested focusing on the Latino population, and Jeff suggested the possibility of linking this grant to some of the incubator business work that OAME and Shelley Parini are working on.

Carol suggested that this RIB grant may be a way to leverage CDBG funds. Joan said she would look into this, but is somewhat wary of using the RIB grant to leverage other funds due to the specific performance measures.

Joan asked the Steering Committee to think about this issue for January's meeting, and reminded everyone that ECOS will need to present the RIB with a very tangible product.

Further Development:
This issue was not discussed in great detail, but it was mentioned that there are some sections of our application document that need a significant amount of further development. This is something that the Steering Committee membership will undertake over the course of the next several months.

Additionally, the fact that we are currently lacking significant community involvement was discussed. Recruitment and involvement of community members was also identified as a long term project and goal.

Next Meeting:
The next meeting will be held Wednesday, January 9th at 7:00 PM at the Rockwood Library. The Steering Committee decided that meetings will be held every second Wednesday of the month at the Rockwood Library or an alternate location in the target area.