Anchorage Assembly: 6 4 26 Anchorage Womens Commission Meeting

Right, so we are calling the meeting to order at 4:33 PM. Uh, good to see everybody.

We will start with our Pledges of Allegiance.

Say it again.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

All right.

Hopefully you've all had a chance to look at the agenda. Um, I'll open the floor for a motion to approve. Do we have a second? I'll second. Second.

Okay, to the new business discussion.

Okay, did you all hear that?

Um, yes, I would like to add to new business discussion of meeting time.

All right, so we're voting on that. That's a motion, uh, a motion to add that item. So somebody just needs to second it.

Motion. All right, any opposed to that motion? Motion carries. Um, all right, so we'll go back to the agenda itself. Does anybody have any other motions for the agenda, or are we ready to— all right, anybody opposed to this agenda?

Nobody. All right, agenda approved. All right, um, myself. And then I am going to have to defer to you because the next item says disability insurance. Yeah, it's supposed to be something, uh, so I can speak about this.

We updated the agenda to more appropriately reflect, uh, the principles and what we need them as. And, uh, disclosures are if there's anything on the agenda that we wish to disclose as a conflict. When we, uh, when we join, you fill out the ethics form and write in a different part permanent disclosures. I think based off what we have But what we're discussing at this time, it's unlikely that anybody has any disclosures, but it's good point of order for us to just make sure that if something were to come up, say we were making a specific recommendation about, uh, homelessness through the assembly, probably would be good to disclose if somebody worked for MC, right? So this doesn't mean you can't vote on it.

There's a discussion with the chair, but it's just we should be doing this as part of our practice. And 99.99, I imagine, I would just say no disclosures. Okay, so now that we know what it is, any disclosures for today's activities? I see none. We'll move along to the main minutes.

I'll open the floor on that. I'll motion to approve the minutes. Any discussion? Second.

Any second? Second again. Yeah. Discussion? I have one item, and that's just to change it from March 5th to the May dates.

That's the only correction I see.

All right, with that correction, um, do we have anyone opposed to approving the May minutes?

All right, May minutes approved.

Committee reports.

Ari's going to try and share screen for something for the infrastructure.

Sorry, excuse me.

If somebody else wants to go first. Okay, yeah, let's come back to you. Thank you. Sharon, do you have update from— okay, the last one. Yeah, all right, so we've lost one, but we can continue having discussions.

We're not able to take any actions. Um, so strategic planning, no update. Then, all right, that's— oh yeah.

We can see, uh, the infrastructure committee met and has, and has been working on, uh, creating an onboarding document and just kind of a point for something to be able to share with incoming people, future people. So we have just a little welcome, basic admission information, and I can send this as a PDF to the staff. We can send it out or one of our admins if we want to run all this. But I, you know, I have stuff that I need to fill in here, but it is essentially just my, you know, like What do we do? How do we do it?

That way, you know, if, uh, I like to go with the, if I got to buy a bus tomorrow, uh, profile, who would take over and sit up. Um, and also a little bit about like where we are. And obviously like as the, uh, Commission updates, you know, new committees or whatever, this would— some of this might change. But so just a kind of whole lesson in itself. Um, that I have a letter.

About, like she said, copy of the sample resolution. That way it would be copy of the format. And then another thing that Leslie and I spoke about in our committee meeting was, uh, kind of just our own experience as we're coming on this board and not having a lot of support and not having a lot of support— great support from staff, not a lot of support from like the mayor's office. And as like a volunteer organization, well, we're supposed to be doing all this was prevent their— a lack of work training, um, a lack of funding for staff. And so I think one thing we in the future would like to recommend, for instance, onboarding documents a little more fleshed out, is some sort of resolution to this body to go out in general, uh, to the mayor's office, that the mayor's office be more to support clinicians and lawyers in general especially as we see that actions are primarily able to— the seats are primarily able to be qualified over by female, um, people.

Like, there's no capacity for people who are not being able to adjust. There's no capacity for, um, kind of all the issues that we run into. It does mean that the city has to commit to better support for its volunteers so that the volunteers can better serve the city. I mean, we're just not really seeing that in our own structure and then like, uh, in our own— so, um, that's something we like talked about, but we don't think we'll be presenting in 6 months. Um, but I'm happy to share this and then get feedback from the rest of the commissioners.

Again, it's very much a working document. I can't like share the Google Doc with you because that would violate federal But I can send you the longer document you can send back, adding a few words, just other ideas if you've not done stuff. I don't know, what did you need to know is super helpful. Like, you don't know what you don't know, so let me know what you didn't know, and then I'll correct it. And then as we're like learning, we'll need to know like, I want to put stuff about the Facebook, what did you learn about that?

I want to put stuff about the email, what did you learn about email? Just kind of fill that one out, and then hopefully that will see what's done. Staff to be able to hand off as there's changeover. To make it super simple, we have the expectation that staff should just know everything that all the sites— you have to have some sort of onboarding documents that support different staff for its vacancies. Oh, this is great, this is—.

Well, because I remember when we were live jamming or jamming. Yeah. Nothing, nothing, nothing. You guys have had the same experience to a certain extent. The more that we can appropriately onboard new commissioners, I think the more comfortable they're going to feel and the more quickly we can all get through.

Yeah, Phyllis might give you hints for some of this. Oh, good. When she started, I actually had some of it written out and put that out there. So Hopefully now I can talk a little less overwhelming than I'm giving you all now. How long has this session been?

Yes. Yeah. No, thank you for getting this, doing this work. And thanks to Leslie too. Okay.

Any thoughts or questions or anything for Ari on this onboarding document? Um, just a huge appreciation for the work that you put into that. That's amazing. I think, like, obviously I'd love to kind of dive into it and review it a little bit more closely, um, but I think having had nothing at the beginning, this is something, and that something is awesome. So thank you for your work on that.

Oh, and I guess we should also thank Kayla for being the guinea pig for pieces of it. So your feedback is going to be really great too on how helpful was it. No, I'm good with that.

All right, um, who is this?

Yes, I guess, you know, we should probably provide an update on them.

So we found out that, so a while back ago, Cindy had thought for personal reasons that she needed to leave the Commission and had sent in her resignation, but then found that she could stay. It turns out that resignation actually went all the way through. So Cindy is not officially on the commission, and staff has been working to figure out what our next steps are, um, because Cindy does want to stay on the commission. So we'll just keep you posted. It does mean that we're down, um, to 7 commissioners now, which makes— it's going to make formal— But, um, speaking on this topic again, let me ask staff, have we gotten any updates on other applications?

Not really anymore.

Cindy saying that it actually did. Okay, all right. There's one other real quick question, which is, you know, Christina, about the scope or the social media, that we would need something. Yeah, so this county and post for you on the municipality's page as long as everything is in compliance with what you want to— was there any requirements about the, like, or if, if you can check and send out to all the commissioners after there was any requirements for graphic settings?

Uh, Michelle also is like, yeah, I know she can make edits to have it on there, but like the last one she has to get Is anybody from the communications part of this group today? Kayla, actually. Yes. Kayla, do you think you could reach out to the rest of your committee after today and follow up about starting a graphic now that we are down to commissioners. I mean, if Cindy— she could reapply potentially, but based off of the previous attendance, I think we should go ahead and keep trying to just get new commissioners.

And also, like, at any point anyone else could roll off, so I don't think it's a bad thing to get that out there. So, uh, are you able to follow up with that new information about us being able to post on socials with that mention? And then Um, maybe you guys can drop something that we can start to send out.

Starting with— I have to try and get information or some posts on socials. Yeah, since I'm just cutting in and out, so I want to make sure that I'm Michelle sent back was that when the Commission can use AHP social media when requesting public comment, advertising open Commission seats. A couple of Commissioners have done that similar for public comment, and she tries to do a monthly roundup of when each Commission is Please have them send graphics and draft text for each post to me, and then she may have to remind your audience, but then prepping the content is very helpful. Okay, I'm already drafting, so I'll put— I don't have it right now. I'll do that and put that so that I can tag, and, um, when we see that from her staff, then you guys can just take that and run.

And then there's a couple other suggestions and places we can to do, but, um, just thinking about like in the next couple months people might be applying for stuff for availability in the fall. I know everybody's in the house, but like get a commissioner on board and then be able to, you know, describe something. Yep. Okay. Um, new business.

So we have 2 items. One is future speakers. So we discussed last time, and Sharon did reach out. I don't know if we have gotten a response about having the mayor come and just have an open discussion with us at the— we were targeting the September meeting, but it did get me thinking also, we have the ability to invite in whatever speakers that we want on topics relevant to our mission purpose. We can invite in other commissions to find out more about what they're doing if it's relevant to our topic.

And I wanted to know from you all if you had thoughts so that during this couple months break, We have an opportunity to start reaching out to some folks and maybe slating in for the fall. But just open it up for you guys' thoughts on those topics.

I wonder, since we already have the public staff, if one of our like, on-duty reports, maybe like a general update from the health department about things affecting city. And it could be work you're already doing, like, ideally it's not extra work, maybe it's reporting you're already doing to someone else, but you just like work— you're allowed to get Health Department, it would make sense to just kind of hear directly. And that would, um, you know, would be for like estuary jobs in the Health Department, have something for anything Setting the program, maybe. Yeah, we're like, on like, creating for outreach or projects for things that like, you know, it's worth doing on stuff. I think really what, in revenue from, since our role is a policy advisory role, Right, the things that we would be looking to hear from you are things that may have policy impact, or that you need policy on, or policy change on this problem to facilitate better, or whatever, services to women.

Yeah, and it would be—. The city is great, but I think you're right, residents need a house as well. So one of our, like, purpose is to recognize legislative, legislative actions on the legislature. So just generally, um, you see what's being worked on, we want to slice it into— we can write resolutions of support for stuff. There's some writing stuff, and can open a library.

So if there's just like a lot of you guys are working on And when you say regular, I'd actually like to suggest that it be no more than a quarter, only because I have a suspicion, given the staff that we work with, but even if you say use other reporting that you already have to do, there's still going to be some— Yeah, let's just—. Yeah, this is something that I'm going to send out. A supervisor level and see what comes down. We don't have a whole lot of— House of Giving, something that I feel like it responds to the most people, like funding homelessness. We have our Divine Battles from Against Poverty situation.

Just our informal conversation talking about the impacts of federal level changes for WIC. Like, that is helpful information for us to have because maybe there's something that the Commission decides it wants to raise awareness about or speak it to the Assembly to say, right, this is This is how it's— here's actually suggestions.

And then like funding, that's like target. So those would be— I'm actually just sad, right? There's Yes, there's two. Looking at Celeste and Kayla, like, we're still— still need to do the survey in the community and those types of things, but you're being signed Where do you feel like the Commission should be educating itself on the topics that we know are going to come back from community input as well?

And I don't know if this helps, but we do have a municipal focus, right? So we're to advise the, like, mayor of the center specifically. So I love hearing about state stuff.

Departments or programs granting RC-based work. Yeah, so I'll bring one up and it's a little close or top of mind for me because I just got this summit last week, but we're talking about missing and murdered indigenous persons. That is a significant problem even though it's statewide, right? We could ask activists who work on that issue to speak with us. There's the MMIWG2S working group, and I'm sure they would— and they work at a policy level as well statewide, but they speak to some of the Anchorage specifics there.

Yeah, um, we also could ask somebody from the police department to come in, um, just because there has been— everyone has different feelings about things, but they could probably provide us with more information about process, um, that we might want to know so that we can talk in Polish. Many of you have a policy recommendations you make at the city level. Um, that was a topic that had hit my head, and I also know the mayor has been in Ponton to kind of find out what works, do not work. She's been twice now, and she's going for the third bit. So obviously that's an issue there that topic learning from her as well.

We're looking for brainstorm, and I guess we probably should have warned you a little bit so that you could give more thought to it. But, oh well, you can always follow up with me. I'll direct you if you have an idea. All right, nobody has anything? Then let's move on to the next.

Actually, one more thing. Kayla, you can speak on this a little bit, but when we met informally, we talked about connecting with Juan Decker. So maybe there's somebody, um, who, uh, is like a equivalent on Jaden where they're like working with women's issues there, and there would be some sort of joint conversation. And, you know, if that's not a thing that exists, that's fine, but I would just be curious. About how we could connect with our nursing folks and maybe bridge some of the things that we know exist.

All right.

I heard you for the most part. Yeah, I think something like that would either probably be like their housing office or like whoever runs the childcare. Or something like that, because that's a huge— as we say, people love to post on Facebook. That's a huge thing that's posted that not a lot of people know about, things that are like off base and things like that too that have a huge impact. I think, um, care and family wellness or family readiness.

Yeah, it's usually the department that— and I can't remember what it's called for the Army, but they have a department like that. Usually that's where they have some counselor services, some financial stuff, some job help stuff for spouses, and also there's sexual assault and domestic violence advocates, but they have a lot more programming than that. That might be a place to touch base with, but usually there's also Officers' Spouses Club, we used to call it an Officers' Wives Club, or an MCO Wives Club or Spouses Club. Oh, we have a hand up in the corner. JBER Connect.

If you have access to JBER Connect, let's set that up, right? Um, it's the app that JBER uses to advertise all of their events, services, all that good stuff. They reach out to us every month, uh, to get advertisements for OnBase and OnBase activities. So I would say that should be your starting point. My— however, PCS is small, so I have not met any person at this point, but that would be a good starting point.

That's really helpful. I mean, I just think my— don't worry, Even if it, even if it's just that, hi, hello, and they join online and there's something we mentioned, like there's something, sure, we talk. Sometimes it's just like starting the conversation and the introductions so that they can come to us when they have something they actually have to.

Okay. All right, I'm gonna move forward. Just email me any other thoughts that you have. And we can— I'll just start pulling from this list to bring in some speakers for after September so that we can educate ourselves and then do the same with our meeting time discussion. So we don't have forum, we're not taking a vote on this.

But we have noticed that it's a challenge for some folks to get there at 4:30. When we voted to move the meeting time to 4:30, everybody who was on the commission at that time was like, that's great, we can do that. And what it helped us do was minimize staff being here so late because they were staying 6:30 to 7, and that's just kind of A little too late to be. So we're trying to make it so it was just the one. I don't want to lose that piece.

I don't want to overburden staff. Okay, got it. She's transitioning to her phone.

But like, Kayla, does 4:30 actually work for you? Is it a problem for you?

So, it's fine for me because my job isn't like terrible to me. But like we have summer hours. So, like right now I'm of course still sitting at work because we switched to 10-hour days. But in the fall and like spring and everything, winter, I'm back to like 8 hours to work. 4:30 Is just fine.

So, like for me, I personally, I'd rather have things earlier because my evening is like my family time type vibes. So to me, it's nice to have like this in between like work and family time, if that makes sense. So I'm okay with this time. I have no complaint. I think we're going to have to put this on the agenda officially for August to bring that back.

I don't have a problem with it because I'm able to adjust my schedule. Yeah. You did not have a problem with it for the most part too. So I don't think— I think it's important to bring the topic to folks who may actually have the challenge and see what we could do. Yeah.

I just don't want us to move past it because—. Yeah, and I mean, I also think, you know, we definitely never run it with the current coverage, so My, my thought is more, what do we need to do to get healthier? I know Leslie has a hard time, she's expressed that already, um, and she makes it work. But I also want for him because otherwise it's my no. But if we're not getting for him, then it's still waiting until 5.

It's everywhere. This is why I know, like, ways of not being able to think. So Um, what's in accessible for—. So Celeste, we're looking to hear about your feelings on maybe moving the meeting, um, instead of starting at 4:30, starting at 5, but it's going to be a hard stop at 6. Sorry guys, I had to transition to my car, um, as I to go home and meet a contractor.

But I, uh, so my, my feeling is that we're thinking about changing the time on when we meet, um, just instead of at 4:30, because it's such a challenge for some folks to get here and it does impact forum. We've been here half an hour, never made forum. Um, what if we start at 5:00 but we have a hard stop at 6 is justified. And again, we're not voting, but what are your feelings on it? Yeah, I, um, I think that 4:30 is a kind of a challenging transition time, like, uh, just personally.

So I'd be totally good to like have a really tight hour. We're really productive in that 1 hour, um, and that might— I, it might alleviate some issues for some folks. I know if that was me, I would just go home a little early or just so I can meet a 5 PM start time or come over here to be in person with you all. Well, we're gonna put this on the agenda for August for sure so we can hear other voices because we want to make this where we can meet forum, we can get things done. Um, but also that we don't overburden staff, and I think we came up with a solution for that.

So, all right. Yeah, I guess if we're throwing out options there, and maybe the discussion is more in August, so happy to table it until then. But, um, I mean, I'd also be open to entertaining ideas of like doing a lunch hour meeting. I don't know, I like— there's like, there's other options than like an after-work one. Um, I know that might be harder for some people, maybe easier for others, but just throwing it out there.

Um, I have one question for staff, and I know that we have been through the like time thing, and I think it would just kind of always be an ongoing time make sure that we're doing the best for ourselves as possible. But are we able to be remote if we advertise our seats, or do we have to have in-person for certain? And we say that since we advertise the teams and allows people to join remotely, that we now have the reporting privileges to be able to do that. That should be a thing, but I think it's something that I'll throw into the group chat just to make sure I'm not missing anything else. Um, that would, that would be great because I think that too, it would potentially definitely be working Um, but they would— they have for hearing aids over our computer.

I mean, you still have to go home and log in, right? There won't be a way to be able to get reports from our I don't know if that actually helps staff though. Right, but I mean, I do think like we have to have— I think it works for everybody to meet at 6, you know, like having meetings at 4:30 where lots of people are here, you know, there's some people in these vacation and stuff, but I just want to like— sometimes we have to be late and I would like to make as many accommodations as possible to And absolutely, that's what I'm saying, is there's, there's a balance, and I don't feel that the meetings start at 6. I mean, that actually kind of defeats the purpose of staff not having to— so that's why I'm saying, like, the lunch hour, so I'm just saying something.

Yeah, all right. Um, do we have any other new business? I don't think so. So I think we can open the floor for a motion to adjourn. Never mind, we have no motions.

Um, can I ask a question for this week? Second items, why— where are the— I know you guys have that, but like, uh, we will work with you. So, okay, okay. Is there any work we can do like since we have more Yeah, not at this moment. So I have to look at the card, and that's not here, so I'm not comfortable with— No, I actually appreciate the But that's fine.

So, okay. We are good to go. Thank you, Kayla. Thank you so much for being here. And we are dark in July, so we will see everyone on August 6th.

Thank you. See you all in August.