Civic Engagement Commission Meeting 4.27.21 
>> Hi Francis.
>> We are still waiting for one more Commissioner to have a quorum.  Actually he just came into the room, so we officially have quorum.
>> Amazing.  Thank you.  So we will go ahead and get started.  Welcome everyone.  Good morning, thank you so much for joining us today and I'm going to call the meeting to order and as we usually do, for the folks who are new, and for all of us who may need reminders I'm just going to start off with a couple technical assistance instructions from the slides that we'll go over.  Basically, as you know we enable audio for all the Commissioners and we do ask however to have you put yourself on mute when your not speaking to avoid background noise and either click on the raised hand icon or unmute yourself if you would like to make a comment.
to everyone else, all participants are muted upon entry and we'll be enabling audience participants during the comments of this hearing.  I wanted to ask if anyone has signed up for the comments at this point?
>> No, not yet.
so we will call on participants in the order that they've registered for public comment and since we have no one registered thus far, we will have the floor open for people to register to offer public comment by 12 p.m..  You can do that either by using the chat option to say that you would like to make a comment in the last half hour of this meeting.  Also if you're on the phone and you do not have access to the chat option you may text your name and affiliation to 646, 763, 2189 to indicate that you would like to offer a comment.  Francis who is the meeting host will enable the audio and call on the participant by name once we get through all the folks who indicated in the chat and then we'll call on the people who texted their name and affiliation.
you can also enable, we do have captioning services with us today, you can enable closed captioning by selecting more options, which is accessible through the icon with the ellipse dot dot dot, and you should see option for closed caption and you can select that.  And before we begin I guess I would like to just ask if everyone received materials for today's meeting?  Okay.  Assuming everyone got it.  So we are going to begin with attendance.  And I did want to put the agenda into the chat just in case anyone didn't get it.  
So we're going to start with attendance.  If you could just say here when I call your name, Chuck Apelian.
>>:  Here.
>>:  Okay.  Murad Awewdeh.
>>:  Here.
>>:  Awesome. Eve Baron.
>>:  Here.  
>>:  Holly Bonner. 
>>:  Here.
>>:  Amy Breedlove. 
>>:  Here.
>>:  Mark Diller. 
>>:  Here.
>>:  Lori Fiorito.  Donna Gill.
>>:  I'm here.
>>:  Anthony Harmon.  Jose Hernandez.  Michael Nussbaum.
>>:  Here.
>>:  Lilliam Perez.  Annetta Seecherran.
>>:  Here.
>>:  Anastasia Somoza. 
>>:  I'm here.  
>>:  Okay.  Sorry that I need to go one‑by‑one because I can't see everyone on my screen at the same time.  So just for the record, my name is Sarah Sayeed and I'm one of the 15 Commissioners who make up the Civic Engagement Commission, and also honored to serve as Chair and Executive Director.  
So our next item on the agenda is just to approve the minutes from the March 23rd meeting which showed that we have voted to approve the submission and publishing of the CEC language access plan.  And I remember that last time there was a question about how we're doing minutes and that has come up at different points so, why don't we just approve the minutes and if anyone wants to bring that up we can.  Are there any additions or corrections to the minutes presented?
>> Motion to approve as is.
>> Second.
>> All in favor of approve ‑‑ of the approving the minutes, would you say aye
>> Aye
>>
>> Any opposed say nay.  Okay, hearing none opposed the minutes for our March 23rd meeting are approved.  So yeah, I think it was chuck who might have posted in the chat that our minutes or the last meeting that we approved were very sparse and I just wanted to remind ourselves again that we've been advised to just put very basic information, particularly items that are voted on, in our minutes and so that's what we have chosen to do in accordance with advice from the law department.  And we are fortunate in that all of our meetings are recorded so and there's transcripts available, so anyone who wants to really dive in does have access to the material.  So I don't know if anyone wants to make any comment about that right now.
>> This is Mark Diller, I'll jump in on that.  My preference is to have a better record of what it is that we discuss for future reference so that if someone among other things, if someone comes along and says you made a decision without considering X, we can look back at the minutes without having to re‑watch an entire two hour video to say, oh sure, we considered X, we just disagree with you on it and this is how we voted.  I think there's utility on that.  But I also think there's utility in doing minutes the way that if minute taker chooses to do so, so I would not impose my view on others I simply will go on record as saying that I think there is virtue or value in a different approach.
>> Thank you for that, anyone else?
>> The only thing I would add is it might be helpful to put the agenda for the meeting in the minutes just to have a record of all of the items that were discussed that day whether you choose to flesh them out or not at least there's a record of what was discussed that day.
>> Okay.
>> Great idea.
>> Yeah.
>> Sarah, that's what I was kind of saying, mark echoed it today.  It seemed on the last go around, the way it was written was that we did nothing for two hours and then we voted on one item.  There was a huge gap and it made it seem like a disconnect.  Obviously we're not providing a transcript.  There's a difference between minutes and transcript and yes there is a certain amount of latitude on how deep you go into minutes.  My only thought last time and I guess we're getting some support is that there should be a little more so that when you do go back, even today going back to what we did a month ago, yeah, that's what we did, that sounds right, yep, that sounds good.  Versus we just, we only recorded the voted issue and the record of the recorded issue, not anything of the discussion and that's what I think you had mentioned to me in the chat was that we're only required to record our vote and then at that point there's a huge disconnect.  So there probably should be something in between that could give us something rather than going to the full depth of a transcript.
>> If I may jump in, on the transcript my understanding of the governor's suspension of the open meetings law allow us to hold these meetings virtually rather than in person require there to be a transcript in addition to a recording.  Which is one of the reasons why my computer is slow because I have the transcripts as well as the recordings of all the community board meetings since lar March sitting on my poor little hard disk.  I assume we're doing that for these meetings as well.  If not, perhaps the staff needs to chat with the law department about that, executive order 201.36 or something, I am pretty sure that's a requirement of anybody who is subject to the opening meetings law, not just community boards, so anyway, chuck raised the point about transcripts so I wanted to just jump in on that.
>> Thank you, I think I remember I was working on transcripts and I'm assuming that we are but we will double‑check that unless flan sis you have a comment here.
>> All our meetings are recorded and there is a transcript, there is a record of transcript on our website.  So meeting law, we have about 72 hours to post both the recording and the transcript and all of those are available on our website under meetings.
>> Thanks Francis okay.  So does anyone else have a comment or suggestion on the agenda to figure out how to integrate the agenda piece into it.  Have you seen any minutes recorded like that before?
>> I have actually, it's just a record of what was discussed that day at that meeting.
>> Okay.
>> Would it be useful if I share different community board meetings that are in a different format.
>> Yes, that would be great to see.
>> How detailed are your community boards, we end up with anywhere from 8 to 10 pages and it's not a transcript but it pretty much will identify speakers, identify in context what they said, Q and As, like that, so there is a running flow to follow the meeting, so we don't ‑‑ I don't know what's required so I'm asking.
>> I don't know that there's, I think what we do here at CEC is what is required.  We in Manhattan do what you apparently do, sometimes we consolidate, if there are 15 speakers all who said the same thing, we'll say, mark chuck and Amy said these following five points and Sarah and Guggan said these, but there is a synopsis of the arguments made for and against whatever it is.  I'll dig out a good example and share.
>> I was advised when running a board to not have the minutes include discussion.  To do as the CEC is doing which is just to have the motion, the vote, and one thing to add too if you want, who puts the motion forward, what the motion was, who seconded and then the approval rate, whether it is unanimous, or ‑‑ that could be included in the minutes as well as a record.
>> Who was your advice on that?
>> I had legal advice on that.  Because it's not supposed to be a record of the meeting in terms of the discussion but a record of the meeting in terms of the motion and votes and decisions that the board is making or in this case the commission.
>> I think that was the intent of the law department when they advised us to keep it simple.  This is all super helpful.  So I'll continue to work with you all on that.  And I wanted to actually now that we've ‑‑ I'm going to turn us to the next part of the agenda so we can try to stay on track.  Which is, that today in preparing for the meeting today I was remembering that nearly two years ago the CEC was launched in April and I want, I thought it would be good for us to spend a little time looking back on these two years and talk about some of our accomplishments through the pandemic.  
If you remember, we were actually not even one‑year‑old when COVID‑19 hit the world.  And I wanted to say this morning that I feel just incredibly grateful to each of you and to all of the CEC team and to all of our partners for everything that we've been able to accomplish during this really difficult time and also in spite of it being all remotely done.  And some of the things we were remarkably able to do over the last year really is that we approved our final methodology for pulse language assistance, promulgated rules for minimum standards in training requirements for interpreter assistance.  We stood up our first cycle of the Poll Site language assistance program in a major election for our country.  We ran ads on our programs in our meetings in over 30 community and media outlets.  We created, I haven't gotten to the numbers of the slide yet but we created an approved and agency access plan, launched the first ever in America in the United States our resident engagement platform Decidim.  That was the first American launch of Decidim.  
We ran a youth‑led participatory budgeting project first in New York City.  Ran trainings for community board members, and during that time and during the past year in partnership with DCLA the Department of Cultural Affairs, we also launched our public artist in residency to bring creativity and imagination to our work and reviving democracy and strengthening trust in New York City.  And we also received a grant from NYC service to build CEC volunteer capacity, and as we discussed in our last meeting CEC is working on a program to strengthen recovery and resilience through coalition building in the neighborhoods hit hardest by the pandemic.  
So in September, September 30th, 2021 we are actually required to submit our first agency report to the mayor and the council.  So I thought I would get us started on thinking about that by looking at some of the numbers that we have hit.  And I think I'm pretty proud of them, I hope you will be too.  So we we're charter mandated to have a language assistance advisory committee and we have 23 members represented on that advisory committee from 11 language communities, 77 Poll Sites served during a pandemic and consequential election, 11, 1,146 New Yorkers live in a much more proficient New Yorkers reached 144 language assistance hired.  And for participatory budgeting we hired a mandate to have a budgeting advise committee and there are 27 members of that.  We launched as a I mentioned the platform and we had over 3,000 people who created accounts, 49 community based organizations submitted proposals as part of that youth led participatory budget program that we ran, over 2,000 youth voted on projects casting over 8,000 votes and we had a participant survey for those who got involved in that youth‑led program and almost half of the people, 931 young people filled out a survey which is great.
for community boards, 405 members trained in parliamentary procedures including motions and amendments, nominations and elections and secretary trainings and 146 on conflict resolution and cultural humility.
next slide Francis.  And we've really thought and put a lot of effort into building partnerships with a variety of stakeholders.  That is also parted of the charter language for how we are to do our work and really grateful for support, for taking care of us in terms of a lot of our administrative needs, the law department has been incredibly helpful.  Department of youth and community development, young men's initiative, this list that I put here is not exhaustive, these are some of the partners we've been working with over the last two years and then interGov also really making a I think a very mindful, having a mindful approach towards the relationship with the Board of Elections who are a really important partner for us on the ground in terms of a finance board, getting to know more City Council members and of course the community boards borough presidents, elected officials from the state and more recently we started to reach out to the New York State committee on open government to see how we could potentially bring more training for community boards on open law.
it's been really exciting to develop CBO partnerships, some of the CBOs who participated are now youth led PB program, rang choice voter education are listed here and through the artists in residency just meeting a lot more cultural institutions, Queens museum, the museum of ice cream, IDEO which is a graphic design firm, we hit a great convening with Columbia University that brought together people who had a lot of experience in online virtual direct democracy, and more recently we started talking with people at the Manhattan justice center about potential partnerships with them and getting ready to do a lot more work on the ground in the 33 neighborhoods over the coming months.
so it's really wonderful to look back at all this work that's happened this year and I wanted to now turn it over to members of the team to take us through the next couple of slides, we care a lot about rank choice voting so I wanted to provide an update on that as well as some updating in the community boards space before we turn ‑‑ to share their on the community needs statements.  So I'm going to turn to ‑‑ sorry, Francis will talk about the capacity building, so Guggan Francis and Andy.
>> Thank you so much Dr. Sayeed.  Hope you've all been well, as you folks know, the CEC has been building relationships with community partners through our various program lanes and deepening relationships with others.  We've been working with City partners including democracy NYC and finance board to host the fall workshops on ranked choice voting.  We hosted one with college and ethnic media, with center Liz Krueger, we hosted a training and partnership with Queens BP office providing access to community boards in Queens and we had I think over 100 folks attend that workshop.  We organized in partnership with Apna Brooklyn community center a ranked choice voting workshop in Urdu.  It invited in the media and has been viewed over1200 times on Facebook.  In honor of women's history month Civic Engagement Commission partnered with NYC and focusing on what is had stake for women in this upcoming election.  We also created a tool kit which I'll post in the chat in a few seconds and upcoming we have a workshop in partnership with yes, ma'am any American ‑‑ triple ANY, with some and for African women and the workshop will be hosted in predominantly Arabic with the last piece being in Arabic and English and the dates that we're looking at for that will be after Ramadan, around May 19th through the 21st but we'll share details with you all once that is finalized.  And we are also as you folks know we're creating multilingual materials.  Ranked choice voting try to bridge the gap in any materials that are not accessible, those materials will be hosted on our Decidim page, which will be accessible in the 10 languages that we ‑‑ 30 in addition to Italian and Yiddish which are program languages.
really quickly, I wanted to share something fun with you all, women creating change, a ballot, sorry, the link we will, I think Dr. Sayeed shared a link for the rank choice voting game, on our platform RCV game, making their own iteration of this ballot to belter understand a ranked ballot.  Created a bank rating the best Pakistani Good food.  This ballot that Dr. Sayeed shares ranks parks named after historic figures, more specifically women, so you can rank which park you think is your favorite and if your organization or other organizations are interested in creating a mock ballot let us know, the platform has been translate into 14 languages, once you try it out at the end it explains what ranked choice voting is and all of that has been translated into 14 languages.  That's exciting.  Let us know what you think about that piece.
We've been working with the Civic Engagement Commission we were thinking through creative materials that exist around ranked choice voting and the piece that we were hearing from community members is a desire for focus on how to do ranked choice voting and what is at stake for the upcoming election.  We worked on this palm card which will be translated into ‑‑ we worked on this fun ballot ‑‑ ranked choice voting collateral with the front part of it, are the three steps when filling out your ballot.  We tried to keep it very simple and to use as little language as possible.  And we also wanted to have a palm card that showed more than five choices to indicate that you rank five within a pool of more folks.  In the back is some key dates for the June primary and what folks have been highlighting as what's at stake in this really critical election.
We will be translating these palm cards and we are also getting them printed and thinking through distribution as well.  So if there are, if you would like physical palm cards in certain languages let us know because we can add that to our distribution plan and use them to share with your members and constituents as well.  That's it.
>> Thank you.  Are there questions on the.
>> When will those cards be available?
>> We have around 2,000 printed right now in English.  We're getting the palm card translated into our program languages right now.  Hopefully we'll have those ready by next week.  And then we'll be printing in the additional languages.  The goal is to print many, not 2,000 but looking closer to 20K to get them out to folks. of course we'll update you Amy.
>> I have a question around the plan for distribution.  I'm wondering if we have any intention with partnering with religious institutions to get these out?  CBOs are certainly the low hanging fruit in terms of support with distribution but I also think that again, I feel like I consistently say, religious institutions reach folks that none of us ever get to.
>> That's a really critical point especially, I come from a community that accesses all of their resources through spaces and not necessarily CBOs so that comment definitely resonates and we will be working in partnership with the faith, sorry, the faith outreach team and Department of Health in addition to the faith and community partnership team at the mayor's community affairs unit as well, but Dr. Sayeed you were ‑‑
>> I was just going to thank you Annetta for saying that, we have an intern working with us this summer through Princeton University, it's a paid internship and I will be asking that intern to focus specifically on helping us create a faith engagement strategy for the CEC, so if anyone has thoughts on that or wants to get involved in that conversation please do let us know.  That's really vital for us to do that.
>> I'd be happy to support that initiative.
>> Thank you.
>> The Board of Elections just sent out a mailing, I assume City wide educating people about ranked choice voting, as well as early voting, could we verify the proper languages were on that.  Because they did a massive print job that probably ran into millions with the mail and were we involved in any of that over site?
>> Great question, Michael.  We can double‑check that with our colleagues at the board of election, we were not involved in production of that material since campaign finance board and Board of Elections are the two lead agencies on the ranked choice voting front.
>> I just wanted to see if we have some oversight to make sure language compliance was done and they didn't miss anything.
>> Michael, I believe that was all printed in the languages that they are required to print in.  Which is only, what is it five or I forget how many.
>> It's limited.
>> Right, it's limited and then we cover languages that are not covered under those BOE languages.
>> That is correct but we can touch base with our colleagues to even review and look at the materials but like Amy said, the Board of Elections is required to make materials accessible in the Voting Rights Act language, Bangla, Chinese, Korean and Spanish and Hindi and ‑‑ we can confirm that piece.
>> Mark, you have your hand raised?
>> Yeah, the palm card that you got here obviously 20,000 is not going to get to even my whole district and this is a really concise as well as attractive and engaging presentation, which if it were a digital file that could be shared would be easy to put up on a community board website or community education council website.  So I'm wondering if the file can be shared, I think the previous screen had the two pages front and back as one page on a screen, can that be shared as a PDF or some other format that can be used?
>> Of course and in our follow up e‑mail with the commissioners we will include both the front and back and also this fire version that you're seeing as well.  As we get materials translated we'll share those with you all as well.
>> That would be great, thanks so much.
>> We should, Holly, also put into the chat, talking with MLPD about braille.  So we need to have a more detailed conversation about MLPD and what resources they may be planning and how we can partner with them.
>> Thank you for that.
>> I'm sorry, my hand signal is not working today with the screen reader.  I didn't want to speak if anyone else was speaking.  Even myself, nothing is being picked up in the technology that I use in the PowerPoint, so having some type of accessible file and working with MLPD to make it accessible for New Yorkers with disabilities, I think would be essential.  And I would also love to help with the faith‑based initiatives avenue that you're going to go, so please send me an e‑mail about that.
>> Will do.
>> If there are no more questions on ranked choice voting we're going to move onto talking a little bit about our volunteer program.
My name is Francis Urroz.  I'm the civic engagement support specialist.  We received a grant from New York State service which we've been using to think through how we can engage more volunteers both in person and now that the restrictions are more flexible for in‑person engagement but also looking to engage our volunteers virtually.  We've engaged 457 volunteers that includes our volunteers that help participate in 32 PB sessions to engage youth, we facilitated three volunteer trainings that are more geared to informing volunteers about our programmatic, advisory committees, upcoming projects, especially primaries how volunteers can plug into language assistance program, we are a small team of seven so thinking through how we can build volunteer capacity is very important to us.  We're thinking specifically in the next two months how we can pull in volunteers for the primaries specifically for language assistance program, to get the word out in the ZIP codes where we have Poll Sites, for phone banking so we've been working closely with Democracy NYC using the volunteer network that were created through the census to one, connect to volunteers who are interested in speaking engagements and also just have a wider reach for our phone banking events that will happen throughout May and June.  
We're also really thinking into how we can insure that our volunteers are getting the right training so we will be, we provide digital engagement best practices for our volunteers, also language access best practice as well as competent engagement, how do we do that.  Throughout this month we'll continue providing trainings and engaging volunteers.  Any questions?  No?  If there are no questions we'll move onto the next part.  Andy?
>> Good morning, thank you Francis, good morning Commissioners and guests.  I'm super excited to share we finally locked in some dates for the community boards on two fronts on community board workshops.  One, it's going to be HPD is going to host a workshop on Monday May 10th on the definition of affordable housing in the City of New York.  This is something that HPD has been working for the last couple months to upgrade their workshops around this content.  Not only are they going to provide a clear definition of what is affordable housing but they're also going to tackle the history of affordable housing in the City of New York and the battles and policy making around affordable housing in the City.  They're also going to discuss financing structures of affordable housing in New York City.
They're also going to provide a clear explanation of how area median income is calculated and how pretty much dictates what, the rents in the City of New York, so there will be an explanation of AMI.  And also the relationship between the federal government, the state, and the City, and how those three major entities interplay in the affordable housing piece as well.  There will be other discussions as well.  So we will be discussion Section 8 and some of the other supplemental voucher programs that falls under the purview of affordable housing, but those are the main snapshots of what HPD is looking to explain to the community boards.  
And the goal is to continue these workshops into the fall as well.  So this would be a really good primary to get community boards to think about the affordable housing world and bring those workshops to individual community boards later in the fall.  With the community land trust workshops the dates are all set.  We finally have been able to hammer down and partner with a new economy project and HPD will be part of these workshops.
There will be a City‑wide workshop where all 59 community boards can participate.  This will provide a historical background on community land trusts here in the United States and other major cities so it's a really good primer to get community boards to think about the history of community land trust and then the individual workshops for each of the particular boroughs is going to focus on community land trusts that are developing in those boroughs.  What's really exciting about these, about the borough workshops is that they're also very general.  So if a member of the Bronx can't attend the Bronx designated date they can attend the Queens workshop and still learn quite a bit about the community land trust.  So these, the borough specific workshops are also going to focus on the financing and legal structures of community land trust, how community land trusts are developing in each particular borough, they will be naming some of the CLTs.  Also they're going to focus extensively on the relationship between community land trust and community boards.  That's a major piece that they really want to focus onto make sure that community boards understand that interplay.
Also there will be a heavy emphasis on the financing of CLTs, that's something that with my discussions with many district managers that is a big piece that they really wanted to understand the financing and the legal structures around CLTs and the covenant that develops with every community land trust.
Once we have all the meeting information established and set up I will e‑mail all the Commissioners on the meeting information.  So Commissioners are all welcome to attend these workshops.  I think that's basically it.  Any questions?  Concerns, comments?
>> I have a question.  Will the workshops be recorded and ‑‑
>> Yes.
>> Will the recordings be made available?
>> Yes, they will be recorded and we are at the final stages of finishing our City share website that we're going to create for community boards and so it will be posted on the City share website for community board members who are not able to attend the workshops and then we'll share with the Commissioners once we have the link.  So we do have the permission to record.
>> Thank you.
>> If there's no more questions, concerns or comments ‑‑ yes.
>> I have a couple when you're ready.  I think I heard Donna.
>> Andy, thank you very much for doing this, this is very insightful and I think it's going to be something that the community boards as well as the community is very interested in.  My only question to this was, were you looking at any other partners besides HPD to do the presentations of the workshops?  Because I find that sometimes HPD can be a little ‑‑ not as transparent as they should be in issues like this.  So I was just wondering that.
>> What in particular, the affordable housing piece or the community land trust piece or just both?
>> Both.
>> Well, for us, for the HPD piece on affordable housing since HPD does play a major role in affordable housing in the City of New York we had reached out to them about really just for them to really explain the processes from the City's point of view on affordable housing and then on the community land trust piece, also HPD plays a major role as well on the community land trust, so they developed the partnerships with the community land trust, there's a whole financing structure that HPD helps the communed land trust on that piece as well, so for us as an agency it was very important to get HPD first.  We are always open to meeting with other organizations but it is a very costly to get outside vendors to get to do some of these workshops so right now for us in terms of cost effectiveness it was for us an opportunity to get another sister agency that has jurisdiction over affordable housing in the City of New York, so HPD was very accommodating and open to reintroducing this information.
One of the things I have to say HPD they understand as a City agency they have not interphases spaced with community boards, quite a bit around affordable phase, that leads to a lot lack of transparency, misinformation, I think us as an agency, civic engagement we can facilitate that process for better transparency and communication, with City boards and these community districts, so it is something that we will be looking forward in the future to bring other partners and bring in different perspectives and advocacies around affordable housing.
>> Thank you, that was just my point, just to see other people that are players in the game, you know, have be heard and also have us get the information from all parties and I understand HPD's role in all of this and I do appreciate the fact that these workshops will be a start of the conversation but I didn't want them to be the end of the conversation.
>> Yeah.
>> Thank you.
>> Absolutely Donna.  We've had discussions with municipal arts society, Pratt, around workshops, they're definitely in the line up and we'll hope to bring them into the fold the next fiscal year and again bring different perspectives around advocacy around these policy issues.
>> If I could jump in to follow up on what Donna was saying, my perspective from our community board is very much the same that HPD's lack of transparency is not, is strategic, it is not from a lack of will or a lack of capacity.  So they tell us what they want to tell us when they want to tell us and they don't when they don't.  So hearing from someone outside of that loop, even somebody from the former City planning if we're going to stay within City agencies, and I think this is where Donna was going but forgive me if I'm coopting her point, there are any number of non governmental agencies, CBOs who are actively involved in affordable housing who would be only too delighted to tell you how affordable housing works in our City and having their perspective either in the same presentation or in a subsequent presentation I doubt it would cost you a nickel, they might even pay you to do it and it would make for a more complete picture.
I was going to ask about the community land trust workshops, obviously that is a huge element of the blueprint for NYCHA the latest effort with respect to NYCHA to try to close the gap of all that differed maintenance and unmet need in the physical plant side of it anyway, so I'm wondering if they will be a part of this or a future presentation and there are folks who are already involved in these processes and projects.  I know there's one up in Harlem for example that might make for an interesting or more nuanced presentation.  So I just suggest that to you.
The final stupid question is, is this during the day or at night?
>> They will be at night from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. so we're going to try to shoot for that time frame.  That was the time frame that we had for the parliamentary rules and procedure workshops where we got the most attendance, so we want to try to focus on that time slot.  Again, this is something that we want to continue to do in the fall and if it works during the day, we'll definitely be open to accommodating everybody as best as we can.
>> The parliamentary procedure was on a Friday night when community boards tend not to have committee meetings.  Every single date that you have on the screen right now is a date in which my board and I'm going to assume a lot of other boards will have regularly scheduled monthly meetings of standing committees, so that will be a downward pressure for folks to attend these meetings as well.  Certainly you can't possibly schedule around everybody's meetings which is why a different time of day might be something to consider as you go forward.
>> Great.  And in regards to the NYCHA, the community land trust NYCHA wasn't involved in these discussions but it's something we'll look into.  We started relationships with NYCHA around other pieces so that's something we could definitely touch base with them to see how we can incorporate a workshop around that in the fall.  If there's no more questions or concerns or comments I would like to introduce the department of City planning.
>> Sorry, I have a quick question.  Are you going to send out this calendar and the links for the Commissioners?
>> Yes, yes.  We're going to be establishing that later this week, early next week, so once all the meeting information is all set up we'll mass e‑mail all the Commissioners.
>> Great.  And I say that Eve put it in the chat as well, I wanted to suggest the center for urban pedagogy, which does excellent work around ULURP and affordable housing and all of the land ‑‑ around New York City.  That might be a resource to look into as well.
>> Very quickly, we have met with COBB on a number of fronts and we did a massive purchase of the three guide books, what is zoning, what is ULURP and what is affordable housing, so we're going to distribute to all the 59 community boards the three guide books so they should be receiving those guide books over the summer.  We'll have a few, I think that we should get to the Commissioners if they're interested.
>> That would be great.  Thank you for doing that.
>> Next I'll pass it to the department of City planning.  As Sarah had mentioned department of City planning has been one of our major major partners from the very beginning of the establishment of Civic Engagement Commission, we meet with department of City planning monthly where we have insightful discussions on planning, how to best provide better planning resources for community boards, Sarah Goldwyn who is the director of planning coordination and her team have been extremely helpful, I can't stress that enough, so Sarah, I'll pass it to you.
>> Thank you.  Thanks for that gracious intro, Andy, and thank you Dr. Sayeed for inviting us here today.  We're delighted to be here and to see you all, albeit virtually and share the summary presentation with you and hear your feedback on it.  I'm joined here today by Chris Pollack of my team, as well as Lara who is neighborhood studies director.  And the focus of today's presentation is to share with you a view, summary view of the fiscal 22 community district needs and budget requests.  These were from community boards around the City last year.  As Andy mentioned we had worked closely with the CEC team in engaging with the boards and through today's presentation we hope you get both the summary view of these perspectives and get a better understanding of how we use these to inform our own agencies planning and engage with other public stakeholders to share these perspectives to elevate them.
I'll be going through these slides, Chris will be advancing the materials and I may also call on him to share additional information.  I'll move through the materials and then be happy to take questions at the end of the presentation.
Without further adieu, here is an overview of what we'll share with you today.  First, an overview of the statements and budget requests themselves, though I know many of you are well familiar with these mandates either from your own work actively currently or previously within community boards, I think it's important that for others on the commission and anyone who might be here from members of the public to sort of understand these in context before we share the summary data.
We also will then review City planning's roles and overall goals of the context of this annual cycle, including key activities our team under took in 2020.  Then we'll be digging into the data.  Sharing some highlights from the 2020 community board perspectives and sharing with you some high level takeaways from the three major components of these submissions.
Then at the end we'll look ahead to the coming cycle including some update City planning is working on related to our online planning tools and data resources which serves as information and tools that are intended not only to support community boards in undertaking this charter mandate but also more broadly to inform, to support more informed public participation in the land use process and other means by which City planning engages with the public.
Moving onto the next slide please.  Just again to set context, these two charter mandates are integral to informing more equitable planning in decision making in government.  These long‑standing charter mandates although previously had happened in parallel, in recent years City planning in coordination with OMB have brought these two together in a more streamlined way through the creation of an online submission form that marries these two together in their process so that the inputs themselves can really compliment one another.
We see on the left‑hand side of the screen are the key components of the district needs statements and as many of you are well familiar, these are more of the qualitative distributions of the needs of the district as perceived by the community boards and they include recommendations for proposals for programs, or services to meet those needs.  They're uniquely derived from the local perspective knowledge of the community board volunteers and increasingly we're seeing community boards reach out into broader communities to obtain public input to inform their submissions.
Importantly they establish context by which the community board budget requests and the right‑hand side of the page can be understood.  They're intended to be used actively for ongoing engagement with key stakeholders, including the agencies who are mandated to respond to the community board budget requests but we encourage them to be used for ongoing advocacy with other stakeholders including groups like your own, as well as other agencies, the City Council, or others who are looking to understand the local condition text, CBOs or developers as an example.
On the right‑hand side of the page you'll see the community board budget request, those are submitted annually by mandate and prioritized by boards, with information gathered by agency consultation budgets and undergo votes and pry organization each other.  We'll be giving you a closer look at these submissions in the course of the presentation today.
As part of the reforms that we've undertake Minnesota the recent years to streamline these through the new form we also created a new underlying structure that captures the information in three broad buckets of information, the top three pressing issues, the most important issues by policy area, and budget requests.  We're going to go through these in a lot of detail through the presentation.  But it's through this sort of reorganization and standardization of these inputs that have helped to, intended to level the playing field for community boards providing those who may have capacity challenges sort of a leg up in helping them to create a form that's organized in a clear and concise fashion and provides them a clear framework to provide these inputs each year.  It also enables us to do analysis and summary data analysis for presentations such as this today.
Moving on, again to set these charter mandates in the context of City planning's work on these, on the left‑hand side of the screen you can see our overall goals of our agency's work that's led by our team in conjunction with our borough planners as well as our strategic planning teams and on the right‑hand side of the page we summarized some key activities we under took in 2020.
As you see on the left‑hand side of the page our overall goals are to inform objectives.  Dialogues between community boards and say generalcies, this is in response from feedback that we heard from community boards and agencies, before the recent reforms we've undertaken both agencies and community boards had questions and concerns about how frequently these were used, whether they were informing and whether they were actually informing the considerations and decisions in the context of the City's budget cycle as they were originally intended to.
We've also focused on insuring that they are delivered to agencies and other City decision makers at the key points in agency processes, chiefly, following the receipt of the submissions at the end of October and early November, insuring that they are delivered to City agencies in the context of preparing departmental estimates.  We also intend them to inform City agency's planning and out reach and decision making outside of that cycle and encourage City boards to see them as an iterative planning tool in which they can use and leverage for ongoing engagement with agencies.
Through the sharing and use of these inputs the overall aim also is to increase the trust between communities and government and insuring that these perspectives are elevated and considered by the City's senior most leaders and decision makers is part of our team's ongoing work and focus and we deliver meetings just like this with other agencies and agency Commissioners as well as City Hall to insure that they're elevated in the context of ongoing work and can inform priorities of the administration.
As with all of City Planning's work in 2020, needed to be recalibrated due to the pandemic over the course of last year.  We really focused on thinking about how community boards needed different types of support last year and from early last year, starting in March we engaged closely with stakeholder civic engagement team to really rethink our civic engagement strategy and to ensure that they had the tools, resources from a technical capacity perspective, as well as the planning support to be able to undertake these charter mandates in the remote work environment.
We also stayed focused on helping them improve overall quality of submissions and insuring they were on hand in supporting them to do this work.  We also held a number of remote engagement sessions including two best practice webinars that reached over 100 community leaders and members as we led into the height of the City needs process.  We also worked with community boards who had shown entering in broadening and diversities the community perspectives that are represented in these submissions by supporting them in launching online surveys and in serving more broadly within their own boards to broaden the participation and information that's collected and represented in these submissions.
As Andy mentioned, we as a team and an agency are grateful for the support of others that are seen as public stakeholders and supporters of this process which also include the borough president's offices and the civic engagement commission team who are extremely instrumental in helping to support community boards with targeted engagement to insure they had the support that they need and encouragement to get across the submission deadline.  We also partnered closely with our borough planners, as you all know work day in and day out with community boards, technical expertise on a range of land use topics but also to enlist them to get closer to this process in terms of the day‑to‑day support that the community boards often need in the final stretch of preparing their submissions.
We're very pleased that all 59 community boards were represented in the 2020 submissions and it was a real test 789 to their perseverance and engagement within their organizations that that was achieved.
We were also then able to deliver targeted reports to the 28 City agencies who where are responsible under this mandate for responding to budget requests, we delivered through this new system tailored agency supports so they land on the desks of the planning, Commissioners, as well as those responsible for the review and community budget requests themselves.
Moving on from here, and again I would also encourage anyone who has observations and questions to be able to drop them in the chat while they're fresh and I'll pause at the end to take any questions that you might have.  This slide shows summary takeaways from the 2020 submissions.  I recognize that the slide is very dense and rich with information.  I'll broadly summarize the three buckets of information that you see here on the slide, they're really a preview of the highlights that are in the slides to come through some maps and graphs that describe the other analysis as well as some of the narratives from the statements themselves that we've pulled out for you to really get a sense of the nature of the information that the community boards left up through this process.
The three main components again include the top pressing issues identified by community boards City wide.  This year we really engaged closely with community boards to encourage them to refresh their submissions so that they are reflective of the impacts being felt in communities across the City as a result of the COVID pandemic, as well as to help those who read these reports really understand how that may have impacted shifts in the underground conditions in the communities over this last year.  We'll be highlighting for you some of those in the slides to come.
We also took a look from an equity lens in evaluating these submissions and in particular as the City created the task force for racial and inclusion and equity last fall there was intended to create a prioritization framework for agencies to evaluate its pandemic and response activities.  We've looked at the geographies that were identified as most vulnerable and looked at the community boards submissions with that as a backdrop and we'll be sharing that view.
We've also pulled out for this group some highlights from the housing economic development and land use policy area.  These submissions are collected across 7 broad policy areas that are oriented to the operations and services of the 28 City agencies.  We've highlighted for you three here that are most core to what we understand the civic engagement commission's focus to be.  Including highlights that were identified for community board resources as well as requests under the youth education and child welfare area related to remote learning and technology.
Also through this presentation today we'll be giving you a view of the summary of budget requests and responses, each year and this year there were over 3500 budget requests submitted to those 28 agencies which is a slight uptick NYCHA the previous year.  We're able through this system to really evaluate trends and not only at the City‑wide level but also as an agency level which is part of what we share with agencies as an outcome of the cycle.  And we also take an equity look at the evaluation of these budget responses to understand how and where investments are being made through these cycle.  I'll pause there finishing the intro slides to see if there are any clarifying questions that you might have on the overall structure the analysis itself.  I'm looking in the chat and so far I don't see any related to this topic yet.  I know it's a lot to digest but I'm hoping this up front setting is useful to understanding the analysis to come.
>> Sarah, thank you for this.  How many of the 59 community boards did you hear from?
>> We received submissions from all 59.
>> Oh, great.   
>> It was definitely a really challenging year for all of us and differing levels within the community boards but we were able to maintain contact and communication through a really, a targeted agency persistent responsibility of outreach on an ongoing basis, the coordination within City planning is led by my small tiny but mighty team but we really leveraged the partnership of our borough planners who worked die in and day out.  In particular in 2020 that became part of their weekly framework of their engagement with community boards both for well calls with them and to really understand both the, any underlying technology challenges related to convening of public meetings, not only related to this process but others.  And I think it's really through that persistent and consistent engagement that we were able to know where everyone was and what their needs were throughout the process to insure that they were all able to get these submissions in.  Thanks for the question.
>> Could I jump in for a very quick second, I promise not to hijack but since Chris is on the line with you here.  Persistence is one thing but you were supporting us, I think maybe you should add that to your list of attributes, it is a challenging process but you didn't just hock us for getting the submission in on time you provided access to support on the technical aspects of how to fill in those little boxes so quite grateful for that support as part of the process.  So thanks.
>> Thank you mark for that feedback.  We also really see that this is for many and can be for others a very direct tie in to engaging with agencies including our own on land use and planning.  So through engagement with our borough planners we're also really encouraging boards to think about this as an iterative planning tool.  So to mark's point we see our role beyond getting them through the finish line, really engaging with them substantively on their submissions to really encourage them to use this for contextualizing the conversations that they're having with agencies about their changing needs and the budget requests and ongoing City investments, whether it's related to an active la land use project like in board 6 in Brooklyn for example, or in the context of a specific development project where they might want to use the statement itself to set some broader context through data and trends and the narratives involved here.  But I think we'll pull some of that out as we go through the presentation today.
Let me take us further and please feel free to drop questions and observations in the chat and I'll pause as we go through.  What we were able to do with this data is really present you this high level summary of the top three pressing issues identified by community boards each year.  You can see on the Y axis, on the left‑hand side of the screen there's the menu of options that community boards have to select from that really represent the gamut of the issues that both result to the core programs and services of agencies and in looking back at historic submissions we see that these consistently have been raised as underlying issues by community boards.  The slide itself presents in each of the bands the number of community boards within each borough that selected each of these issues and then at each of the ends of the bands you can see the total number of community boards that selected each issue this year.  For example, 29 community boards selected affordable housing this year.  Which is an uptick from five boards in the previous year.  You can see in the two years with brackets we can present to you if year on year trends.  PP you can see also some highlights on the right‑hand side that really spans some of these areas and some of the more salient trends.  When we look at the top three for two years in a row.  We've seen a significant uptick in crime and public safety, which is likely a correlation with some of the on the ground experience within communities as a result of the COVID‑19 pandemic.  And we also pulled out some of the increases that we saw related to economic development and recovery as well as health‑care services also which we see is likely an outcome of the perspectives being reflective of what took place over 2020.  
Again, these submissions come in in October and November, so this is really reflective of that moment in time and I think we can expect if and when these are refreshed in the next year that we'll be able to really understand more deeply the sort of next year of impacts that have been seen and felt by these communities through this.
So moving onto our next slide, what we'll share with you next is a view of the number of community boards that selected affordable housing as their top three pressing issues last year.  As I mentioned, 24 of those, of the 59 community boards selected affordable housing.  You can see those mapped in the dark red.  We've also called out for you those in the lighter pink that added affordable housing nearly in 2020.  We've listed those on the right side of the page, you can see the Bronx and Brooklyn community boards that newly added affordable housing.  We've also included stars for those who have identified affordable housing as a top three pressing issue for the past six years.  It's no surprise to us in City planning that we continue to see this as being the most popular mentioned, we're in a housing crisis.  As an agency that is consistently engaged on this topic, to us seeing it so clearly, and of course the community boards who have identified this really tracks with our experience but I think it also helps you to see this in context in terms of the City‑wide view and when we look at this we see both that 24 boards have identified this issue and also that those boards are predominantly in Manhattan, in western Brooklyn, in northern and western Queens as well as throughout the Bronx.  And none of the Staten Island community boards identified affordable housing as one of these top three pressing issues, in fact all of those boards include transportation and traffic in their top three mentions each year.  It really underscores that it's the local context and the local perspectives that really are the underpinnings for these selections and when you scan the narratives that we've called out for you here as well as the excerpts that we've included in subsequent slides it really starts to give you the underlie nuances, of what community boards mean which of course differs depending which community you're looking at.
Next is the community boards that newly identified land use trends and both that identified in 2020 and 2019, those in the darker blue, the newly identified are if the lighter blue and we've called out those community boards for you and excerpts and some of their narratives on the right.  Also those boards that removed land use trends in 2020 which also underscores that boards do make changes to their submissions year on year despite some of these topics really being long‑standing pervasive challenges we really encourage boards to think about these new each year.  We look at boards that, a lot are related, including affordable housing as well as economic development as some of those boards who shifted their mentions.
We've also called out for you and we actually shared this slide with our own internal team, the stars we noted those boards that submitted at least one budget request to City planning.  So we're always looking from that lens from those boards who are flagging land use as a topic are they also coming with a budget request, so they're using the submission and their issue to contextualize the underlying need behind their budget requests themselves.  Mentions related to the pandemic as well as just really sort of underscoring the variation in the topic matter itself as it relates, even the same land use trends issue, it really of course is underscored by the local on the ground conditions.
So I'll move us on.  I'm going to next share with you examples of two planning lenses we use to evaluate these submissions and we share these with agencies, not only with City planning but with the leadership of different City agencies across the City who evaluate these perspectives.  The two lenses I'm going to share are first those communities that were identified under the tree task force as most vulnerable and prioritized for more equitable investments in pandemic recovery and then.  
So what we've mapped out for you here are three sets of geographies that were informed by the City's work to really identify the vulnerabilities within these communities, both socio‑economic, demographic, and to help inform agency planning and engagement and prioritization of initiatives.  
What you see here on the slide are three different groups of prioritization rubric, one being TRIE, those priority ZIP codes are flagged in blue.  The Department of Health ZIP codes that were identified last fall in orange.  And we've also highlighted the overlap of those two geographies in yellow.  So when you look at that in total with the backdrop of the community district boundaries behind them, you can see that much of the City is encompassed in these areas and what we've done also is really overlaid the mentions of the top three pressing issues from each of these community boards.  So interestingly when you look at those you can see that affordable housing is the one that sort of jumps out as most commonly select but we also see schools and land use trends being mentioned by these community boards.
Again, these prioritization frameworks were established land fall in recovery efforts, so next year there might be more of a direct correlation of some of what we thought we might expect being more in the health‑care services realm or perhaps unemployment which we do see in box three for example, but we've looked at this for ourselves in terms of adding it as an additional layer of data in our planning work and have encouraged other agencies to do that as well.
When we look at the next level of analysis we're able to see the sort of qualitative context to help us better understand those board needs that our, and whether there were any relationships with the factors that were analyzed by Department of Health and the TRIE task force whether it relates to the pandemic or health or food access for example as some of the elements that were used to inform those criteria.  So for example, when you look at them more closely you can see in Manhattan, in east Harlem they identified unemployment as one of Urroz of their top three pressing issues and they discuss challenges related to educational opportunities and job opportunities in the district.  And then when you look on the right‑hand side of the page you're also able to see other mentions related to unemployment as well as health‑care services and economic development and recovery and in some of those mentions we did start to see some of the tie‑ins that community boards were making to these topics as well as the pandemic support that they were seeking from the City.  In particular when we look at Queens 3 and impacts on small businesses and some of their narratives relating to the loans and support from the City.
This is something that we've looked at ourselves as an agency and is V encouraged others to as well, and we'll continue to planning lenses like this over time.
Moving on next to another lens that also focused on equity, is looking at the submissions with the backdrop of those communities at the lowest median income.  So when we look at that in a little bit more detail, we have, when we look at the community boards in that lowest median income win tile, quintile, we highlighted in yellow, those are a different census related geography, but we've sort of overlaid those with the community districts so you can understand the community districts within that and you can clearly see that these districts are mainly located in the South Bronx and upper Manhattan and eastern and southern Brooklyn.  We've also called out here the unemployment rates across the boroughs and again layering in so we can see that these boards again are, focused in in the Bronx and then overall 7 of 11 of these community boards identified affordable housing as a top three pressing issue.  So it's looking at these trends and the trends over time and the narratives themselves that were called out by these community boards that helps us understand more deeply how these community perspectives can be used to inform our work and including our engagement with boards on these topics.
So next I'm going to briefly give you a view of the overall organization of the form which enables us to capture the standardized information across the 7 broad policy areas that are oriented to the operations of the 28 agencies that are involved in responding to the budget requests and considering the needs and that information is collected again in the three sections that are below that.  What I'm going to present to you next is a highlight from the housing economic development and land use area related to affordable housing and it's just one example of how we're able to evaluate these both geographically and with a little bit more contextual level of detail in these narratives that are submitted by community boards.
So what we see here on the slide, this sort of rainbow quilt of patch work, we see the mention, the selections of all 59 boards within this policy area and what you can see is that 17 of the fifth boards selected creation of affordable housing is their topmost pressing issue which is two more than the previous year.  All of the other topics that are nested within this policy area really vary and you can see it's sort of disbursed across the span of many of the other topic areas but the creation of affordable housing clearly was ahead of the others in terms of the most frequent and highest number of mentions.  Also what you can see here on the slide are the stars for those community boards who also identified this as a top three pressing issue.  We also noted with the small dots or the stipple, those boards who changed their mention from the previous year.  Helps us get a context for those who are committed to doing the work of refreshing their narratives and triggers agencies to take a closer look at those narratives to understand what might be behind those changes.
With this as a backdrop we pulled out for you the mentions of affordable housing preservation and creation and isolated those on the map.  You can see the 17 boards that identified creation in red and those that identified preservation in yellow including those that made changes from the previous year.  And again, it's really this local context that helps you to understand the local perspectives here and how they differ across the City.  And we do see some changes in these narratives including for example Queens 4 in Elmhurst and south Corona, which was one of the communities hardest hit by if pandemic and they have reflected that by their submission and those impacts on this community.
Lastly, I'm going to bring us into budget requests, to set the table for that, what this slide presents for you is the overall distribution of the budget requests that are received from the City and you can see the breakdown by borough along the Y axis and then across the chart you can see the breakdown by agency with the number of budget requests that are received by each agency.  And the sort of share of that number of requests received by the agencies represented by the scale of the bars.  So as you can see here, DPR and DOT vary sort of significant, receive a significantly higher number of the overall requests.  
You can see the totals at the bottom of the chart and you can see the year on year change from the previous year represented in terms of both the total at the bottom and on the right hand access you can see the year on year trend in terms of the share represented within each borough.
From here I'm just going to show you a highlight of the top 10 most frequently submitted budget requests to the City overall and what you can see here on this slide again is sort of mirrors what we shared on that previous slide where DPR and DOT received the highest share of budget requests overall.  We've also reconstruct or upgrade a park or park amenity being the most frequently requested ask of all agencies with 258 number of budget requests coming in for that particular request.  We've also included here on the table the percent change from 2021, as well as the percent of each of these budget requests which are ranked as a top 10.  We've encouraged community boards to prioritize the overall number of requests and the parameters are 40 for capital requests and 25 expense requests.  We encourage boards to rank those so the agencies who are viewing them can see sort of rough order of magnitude in which the community boards are viewing their requests.
Then looking next we're able to look at the year on year trends in terms of the responses, the breakdown year on year of the City wide comparison of the total number of budget requests received by the City.  For example, in fiscal 21 you can see 3200 budget requests as compared to fiscal 22 where there were 3400.  Within each of the bars you you can see the breakdown down of the share of the responses of and the categories that those fell within, ranging in from not a request, which may mean the request was unclear or doesn't fall within this process's purview or whether the other funding dispositions include either negative, neutral, which is typically the funding cannot be determined at this time, or whether it was funded in a previous year or given a positive response.  So when you look at that City‑wide comparison there's not a significant change that we see in the overall responses.  When you look at the breakdown by borough however, you start to see a little bit of those differences in the borough breakdowns again comparing the same year on year comparison with the total number of budget requests received at the top of each bar and then the furthest to the right you can see the breakdown of the top 10 versus all other budget requests.  Which we also take a look at to see whether there's an indication that agencies use that as a lens in evaluating and responding and we do see a slightly higher share of positives and a slightly lower share of negatives given to the top 10 which is perhaps a positive indication of that.  I'll say when looking at this slide we also in our stakeholder outreach agencies we break this down with a little bit more granularity.  
That was published in January, and all of those responses are also published there and made accessible.  So taking us next to the final slides here, here is a view of our next steps looking into the next cycle when the fiscal year begins in July.  We've shared out with community boards their district‑level reports and for all of you who might be interested in looking more closely at a specific district, those are available in our website in our community district profiles.  We also know that community boards themselves will publish these district reports on their own websites and share them with others as a PDF.  We also amid of stakeholder engagement and outreach will take us through the next month.  We also are hosting ongoing trainings both on the CD needs process, we received trainings from individual community boards, for full board or executive committee or budget committee meetings and we share presentations there and trainings, we also deliver trainings, we've done a few recently in the context of the borough's new hire orientations, and we do borough specific trainings for community boards where our team trainings on the City needs process are embedded within modules that compliment land use and other modules that are offered to community boards and then we also provide ongoing planning support to the community board City wide around some of the overall team objectives that I talked about at the out set of the presentation.
Our team will next turn its attention to preparing and opening the website for collecting the next cycle's submissions.  Each year we work with all of the agencies to insure that the budget request options are updated to reflect their current programs and services and we know that in the currents budgeted climate that many services have been shifted or cut so we want to make sure those options, the menu of options are refreshed in the submission forms and the additional resources that we link to within it to help give community boards direct access to the explanation for those services and who to go to at agencies to find out more are up dated within that website as resources.  We do that work over the summer and reopen the form for community boards to begin their submissions.  We also provide ongoing support to boards many of whom are already starting to work within their committees and begin discussions for planning priorities for the year ahead now that the preliminary budget is out and looking to plan for that over the summer and heading to the next year.
Our team will also engage with other divisions within City planning, including technologists who help to develop web tools as well as our census steam and population division as we're all eagerly waiting the results from the 2020 census and will be able to provide community district level data that will ideally be available in time to help inform the next cycle's submissions and our aim is to be able to provide tailored webinars and trainings particularly in the context of this cycle to help them understand how to use that data and use it to describe the context, to do some of that analysis, to provide that additional quantitative analysis to help substantiate their needs and budget requests.
Very briefly, the next two slides I want to highlight some of the resources that our team has developed over the past years to support community boards, these were some of the tools that we dug deeper into in our webinars.  To Mark's earlier point, we often will meet with boards one‑on‑one way or with committees to help prepare submissions to help them guide them through these guides and to really make sure they understand how they can be employed for the process.  You you can see the four resources here including the budget request reference guide, that's the one I mentioned we refresh every year.  How to collect a survey, to diverse by content as well as other tools to help round out their submissions to insure they're clear and concise and more effective in communicating with agencies in a way that's aligned with their programs and services as well as a whole manual that we continually refresh to help troubleshoot and insure any problems that folks might have with using our system and help to bring new folks on for using the submission itself, using the system itself.
These resources are embedded within the community district, the community district priorities website which is only available to community boards because it's really their portal for doing these submissions and all of these links are given to if boards directly through that system and we've also provided these documents directly to community boards.  One thing that we've talked about with the civic engagement commission team, with Sarah and her team, is how we might be able to think about other platforms or avenues for being able to share those resources with community boards to get more folks in community boards involved in this process.
The last thing I'll touch on here are some of the online resources that City planning continues to develop to provide timely objective data and easy access tools to help inform many different community board related activities but City Planning's broader goal of supporting more public engagement throughout our land use process and other processes including the City needs.  I'm sure many of you are familiar with these four tools including the district profiles which our team manages and as well as the facilities explore, these are often things that we highlight in interactive demos and trainings for community boards so they understand how to use these tools, to inform their inputs for the City needs process.  And again we work internally with the teams who develop these tools with the community district with community boards in mind to insure they continue to meet the user needs in a way to help them do their day in and day out work.
I know that was a ton of information, I hope that it was a value to you to get that view.  I have included our contact information here should there be anything you're interested in exploring with us further and I would be happy to take any questions that you might have.  Mark, I'm seeing your question about access to the link, those are things that we could share.  As I mentioned because they were oriented to community boards they've been provided directly to them but we would be happy to share them with the commission as well, I'm not sure if we could do that now live or we could follow up after the meeting.
>> Can I ask a clarifying question about access to the portal, is that accessible to all CD members or only to some?
>> We initially granted access and provided training to district managers and Chairs who typically are those who lead the submission process and each board does this process a little bit differently.  But we also, we often find that it's either the district managers or the Chairs that sort of channel the information into the form.  And we have given, left it to the board leadership's discretion as to whether they want to provide access to other members of their board and in the last few years we have seen that many boards are doing that.  In particular, to their committee Chairs who many district managers are delegating to be the point people within their committee and to draft some of the content but from a work flow perspective, what we've seen within the boards is that often the district managers will collect that information through the, their committee structure and then serve as sort of a final vetting role in insuring that the overall statement has a singular voice in flow.  But there is the short answer yes, access can be permitted for as many board members as the board would like to give access.
>> Thank you.
>> Sure.  Amy you have a question or.
>> Sarah, thank you so much and the planning department.  Great work.  I just want to discuss affordable housing as a bucket, because within affordable housing you have senior, supportive housing and then many levels of affordable, I'd like to know, I know this is annoying from someone who does all of this work ‑‑
>> You're cutting out Amy.
>> To start to bring affordable housing ‑‑ that we have to promote supportive housing.
>> You're cutting out a little bit but let me see if I can try to summarize what I heard.  Within the category of affordable housing and particularly under the most important issue area, there are a number of categories that have been defined under that that again are intended to align with specific programs and services of different agencies including HPD, City planning, DOB, and these are intended again with specific programs and services and also the specific budget requests that are oriented to those, and that includes supportive housing services which I believe was underlying part of your question, and within that category there is in recent years we have worked with HPD to parse that out where a next level of granularity.  To specify that as its own category so the boards both understand that breakdown from a poll perspective a little bit more clearly, and so that the needs narratives that might come in that are oriented to that can be more squarely aligned within that mention and be viewed in the context of the analysis that follows.  And again we work really closely with and are guided by sister agencies to help us tailor this.  Does that help.
>> Yeah, I switched my WiFi so hopefully it's stronger.  My thing is that looking at affordable housing as an overall bucket we're not getting to senior housing, supportive housing, where the economics of the developer are very different and also the zoning.
>> The one thing I would say to that is that we don't see that distinction in the most important issue, that that bucket that I talked about at the beginning of the presentation where it's more of just a high level what is your most important issue and it's much more macro mention where we parse that out a bit further is in the next level of the structure of the form in both the important issues and the budget requests themselves, in the budget request category themselves it is extremely granular and gets down to that level of detail that you're talking about.  That is also reflected in the budget request guide that we give to community boards so they understand those sort of nuances, the word affordable housing in and of itself is not sufficient to get to the levels of nuance.
>> Yeah.
>> Any other questions, comments, feedback?
>> There was a question in the chat.  Highly referenced because it doesn't have a new budget allocation or just to that slide particularly.
>> Referenced ‑‑ if you recall.
>> That was me.  Your bar chart showed that the most populous request year on year was DPR and I was wondering, they don't have a capital budget per se, so very often those kinds of requests have to come through community boards who are really making the request of the agency in order to have your local elected official or borough president use their member item to do it, is that a question of that trend?
>> It's a reflection of both I think that as well as that is the most sort of popular, if you will, request for upgrade to a park or park amenity, and this is the process that they use to advocate for that.  Whether it is intended to inform the small discretionary pool that DPR has or the allocation of those dollars through other elected officials, but yes, I think it's a reflection of both of those things.
>> I think there's a question from Eve and, hello Eve, I haven't seen you in quite some time.  It's nice to see your name here.  Eve and I worked together many years ago when I was a borough planner in Brooklyn and she was at the borough president's office there.  
Can you explain where and how DCP leverages other agencies in the City budgets to get to high priority budget requests.  That's a great question.  For us we see ourselves in the context of this process and our team's engagement with agencies as sort of a conduit for sharing this information in an objective way, but also in a way that's very sort of clearly presented and organized to help directly inform and joys planning and decision making, and we present directly to agency Commissioners, planning directors, budget directors, including equity lenses for viewing all of the input as well as budget responses from the preliminary budget but we are not into it sort of advocating or for a specific outcome.  We see ourselves more objectively in that role but also as being helpful in presenting the data to them in a way that can really directly inform the right time in the budget cycle.  I would say that in the context of this process.  The other piece of it is that, one of the ways in which our own agency uses this process is through collaborating with our capital planning team which also works really closely with our borough planners in the context of coordinated neighborhood plans and with other agencies and informing equitable capital investments and communities that are responsive to community needs inclusive of considering these perspectives as one of the many inputs that help to inform that civic engagement.  I think that's part of the work that both we do as a team and through our planners we're really looking at and helping, encouraging boards to think about their prioritized budget requests being one of the levers in advocacy tools that they're using for those conversations and keeping them high on the agendas for discussions with agencies whether it's in one‑on‑one meetings that they ask for, whether it's in district consultations, borough budget consultations, interagency task force or teams or in the context of a neighborhood study, that these should be seen as a lever for helping agencies to prioritize these investments and ideally seeking alignment between agencies and communities for advocating for the City's investments and helping get to yes.  I hope that's helpful.
>> Thanks Sarah.
>> Thank you.  Thank you for these good questions and I know that what we've shared is a lot to digest and absorb but we welcome any continued questions or feed pack that any of you might have in your work or otherwise and we would be happy to share our information and you can reach out to us directly.  We like to think about all the myriad ways that this informs work that folks are doing in engagement throughout the City.  Thank you again for having us.  I think I've gotten to all the questions.
>> Thank you, thanks so much that was really very very informative and I think helpful for us to understand the bigger picture in which our own work fits into, connected to this area.  One of the things we've been talking about also is like how do we help, how can CEC better help community boards to connect with their residents to have greater input into the needs and budget process.  And try to come up with strategies including one of our potentially using our resident engagement platform as a tool for community boards.  So I think one thing I was going to mention, we're almost at the end of time, is just to note that reminder that try to continue checking your e‑mail, your CEC e‑mail because if you don't check it the password expires every 90 days and if you don't check it they assume that the account is inactive and close it out.  So if you just log in and check it, it shows that there's some activity on the account, so we want to avoid provisioning the account.  So are there any questions on the account issue?  You can also use Outlook to send e‑mails to another address, you can have forwarding to your regular address through Outlook in office 365.
 >> STUDENT:  Sarah, it's Anastasia how often should we be checking that e‑mail account to make sure that it stays active?  Does it have to be like once a week or once a month?  Because I always forget to do that.  So I'm going to have to set myself a reminder.
>> Yeah.  I think that we were told that they, it's I guess the programming is set up so that it after 90 days if there's no log in it assumes that it's inactive.  So I think we were at the beginning any way, we were working on sending the notices for e‑mail for the meetings and stuff to both your personal and your commission e‑mails.  Francis, is that still happening?  We'll continue to do that in either case.  We also recommended if you're responding to us it might be bettered to respond via the commission account, just so you keep your personal e‑mail out o the commission business in the event that we are already foiled for anything that way your personal account will not be in the foil process.  That was just a cautionary reason for why we had set i these accounts, as well as if you wanted to communicate with others on behalf of the commission, if you wanted to set up meetings with community leaders or anyone you would be able to use the CEC account.
>> Yeah, that definitely makes sense.  In my case though because I work for the speaker's office and I'm the speaker's appointee, I have never used the personal e‑mail account so actually the commission e‑mails go to like you're saying the CEC account but in my case I have it go to my City Council address because the work overlaps and intertwines so I just wanted to figure out a way.  So I actually receive it the second e‑mail account is at my work e‑mail.  So in terms of the foil issue, I'm not concerned because I just wanted to figure out what kind of reminder I can set for myself because I have lots of e‑mails that I'm keeping track of so I just, I get my work e‑mail and it makes me forget to check the actual CEC account.  That's all.
>> I mean you might want to just log in like once a month.
>> Okay.
>> If you want to set a timer for a reminder for yourself.
>> great.  That's helpful.
>> Since we're at the end of the meeting I wanted to remind everyone that we set up a new meeting: We're not doing our meeting in May, we're having a meeting in early June sings the meeting was I believe was set for the same day as election day.  So our next meeting is going to be on June 1st if I remember correctly.  And I think that we can ‑‑ if there's nothing else that anyone wants to say right now, can I hear a motion to adjourn the meeting?
>> So moved.
>> Second.
>> Thank you.  The motion to adjourn has been seconded.  And all in favor?
>> Aye.
>> Any opposed?  Okay.  So I'm going to call this meeting to adjourn and we will see you next time on June 1st.  So thank you again everyone.  Have a great rest of the day.  Take care.  Bye.