As most of you know, it is going to be a very tough budget year for the City and County and our continued advocacy on behalf of human services funding is going to be crucial. I attended the budget workshop on January 26^th and was encouraged by the strong support human services funding received from several Commissioners including Commissioner Dailey, Commissioner Proctor, and Commissioner Thaell. I am scheduling meetings with all the Commissioners over the next month in order to encourage them to hold all human services funding harmless again this year. I will be working with the Advocacy Committee to develop a concise message and strategy.

UPHS hosted its first training of the fiscal year on November 10^th. This training, Successfully Thinking Outside the Box was conducted by Dr. Sue Ebbers. We only had 6 people in attendance so I was disappointed with the turnout but the attendees did give very positive feedback.

 

Our next training is Accounting Essentials, March 4^th, with Mark Payne and other members of the JMCO staff.

In October, our board participated in a strategic planning meeting. I compiled the notes of this meeting and created a work plan for our organization. I encourage you to take a look at the work plan so you can keep track of what we are doing as an organization.

 

I have been participating in the Community Organizations Active in Disaster along with several other board members. This is a great way to raise awareness for our organization and has provided me with some great networking opportunities.

 

The Complete Count Community Organizations Sub-Committee, which I chair, will be hosting four weekend social events during the month of April to help raise awareness of Census 2010 in our hardest to count areas. I encourage you to promote these events to your clients as April approaches. I will bring marketing materials with me to our next board meeting. 

I have been working on several grants/grant ideas over the past couple months. The first of which is a grant through New Voices for a new media campaign for our local human service organizations. I have spoken with Margie Menzel of WFSU, Michele Bono from City Matters, and Alyce Lee Stansbury about the idea of collaborating on the development of short podcasts or radio spots to promote the good work our members are doing.

 

A sustainable food project is idea that came out of our Strategic Planning Meeting. I have met with Susan Pourciau and Barby Francis about partnering with them on this project. They are currently involved in a community garden project which may have the potential to expand into something bigger. I have been invited to join the community garden project and will work with them on the feasibility of expanding into a full-scale sustainable food project.

 

I have also recently applied for Non-profit staffing support through Workforce Plus. I am looking for support staff to help with the conference, data collection, and general administrative help.

 

Early this week, I spoke with Ralph Brower from FSU’s Askew School of Public Administration and Policy about having students placed in both UPHS and our member agencies. These are students that need internships and/or have class projects on nonprofit organizations. I have offered to host two MPA or PhD students to conduct research for UPHS. Specifically, I proposed that these student collect data on the number of clients being served, the number of services being added/deleted and the amount of funding gained/lost since the beginning of the recession.

Conference planning is going well thanks to the Conference Committee. We have sent out a save the date flyer, have secured most of our funding, and have been putting a lot of work into creating a fantastic program for this year. Unlike in years past, we have invited a Leadership Tallahassee Board member to sit on our committee in order to better coordinate our conference and the Building Better Boards event. This representative is Ben Graybar. 

The website has been slowly evolving since going live in September. I have received a few requests to post notices of events making our Home Page more dynamic. I have also included a Job Opportunities page for the posting of positions available by our member organizations. The latest piece I have been working on is getting the online registration up and running for the conference. We now have an active PayPal account that has been successfully linked to our website. The City and County Commission calendars are also available on our Events page. There is a lot to see so please visit our page often.

 

UPHS has finally moved into the world of social media! I have recently created a Facebook page and Twitter account for our organization. The Facebook page will hopefully give us more exposure and be another mechanism for promoting our conferences, trainings, and advocacy efforts. I encourage anyone with a Facebook page to become a fan of UPHS and begin using this page to spur discussion.

 

Prior to the last County Budget Workshop, I created a Twitter account in order to provide our members with live updates of the meetings. Throughout the meeting, I sent numerous tweets detailing comments made by Commissioners, suggestions made by County staff, and actions taken by the group. If you can’t attend the commission meetings, I encourage you to follow UPHS on Twitter. This account will only be used to update folks on important human services news.

 

 

The following is a list of people I have met with and meetings I have attended over the past two months. This list excludes UPHS Board Committee meetings.

 

Commissioner Bryan Desloge (Multi-year funding for CHSP), Commissioner Andrew Gillum (Multi-year funding for CHSP and Teen Center), Susan Pourciau (Sustainable Food Project), Barby Francis (Sustainable Food Project), Meeting on Homelessness, Melinda Piller (Grant with Lee’s Place), Health and Human Service Target Issues Meeting, City Commission Meeting, County Commission Meeting, County Budget Workshop.