All right, Morgan, let's go ahead.

Are we ready?

Okay, recording.

Okay.

All right, welcome everybody to our work session for tonight.

Um we are missing Council Brabant, who's excused, Council Campbell's hopefully be here soon.

Um and we're gonna start with update on supplier diversity and community benefit programs.

Perfect, thank you, Mayor, uh council.

Um my name is Andres Portella, pronoun to him.

I am a black man, curly brown, uh curly black afro, clear frames, wearing a brown uh slash tan sweater, and that compliment my brown skin.

Uh we are here to discuss the supplier diversity program and uh community benefits programs.

Um in that um uh understanding it is one um council goal.

Uh we are gonna talk about two very distinct programs and how um and that'll be reflected in the presentation.

Um I also want to take a second before I get started and acknowledge that it is Asian American and Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Month.

Uh I begin my presentation with acknowledging the contributions of Asian Americans nationally and locally, but also uh the proclamation's gonna come from count come from council next session.

Uh additionally, we're gonna talk about some disparities that were teased out in the statewide data.

Um, this presentation may seem familiar for some folks.

We it came in front of the local contract review boards, LCRB um, and presented in April.

Um we we took some of the feedback from that conversation and incorporated it today.

Again, this comes from our uh council goals on sub uh in the city strategy for advancing the city's commitment commitment on equity.

Uh the action was to develop and implement a supplier diversity program, community benefits program.

Um moving forward.

I wanna I as we uh some of the feedback we got during L CRB was to um delineate the two projects because they are completely separate projects with one council goal.

Um in doing that, I want us to understand the difference between our uh supplier diversity program and uh uh our supply diversity program uh focuses on incorporating businesses, suppliers and vendors, uh vendors owned by people with diverse backgrounds into the city supply chain supply chain and business practices.

A diverse supplier is a business that is at least 51% owned and operated by an individual or group that is part of a traditionally underrepresented and underserved group.

Um that includes minorities, women, veterans, and under another underrepresented groups.

Um talking about community benefits, the focus is uh on the workforce and the cities, um purchasing power and wage and increasing wage insurance benefits, environmental considerations, apprenticeship programs, expanding economic opportunity to the to benefit the community.

Additionally, I want to I want to frame the next part of this conversation on what are we actually trying to accomplish here.

By doing so, the city seeks to reduce disparities in economic opportunity and promote more inclusive economies.

Additionally, foster local economic development, supply supply diversity and community benefits programs can stimulate the economy by developing and encouraging procurement of goods and services from local businesses.

Inclusive procurement delivers broader societal benefits by generating economic opportunity for disadvantaged communities or folks who have been left behind.

Additionally building stronger communities, increasing our supplier pool by actively seeking out and engaging with diverse pools of suppliers.

The city can enhance competition, innovation, and quality in our procurement processes, additionally creating uh accountability and transparency.

Who is our target audience?

So you're gonna hear a phrase throughout this conversation in WESB, minority woman-owned in emerging small business and veterans, contractors and suppliers and community-based organizations, and then thinking about what's next.

Um there's gonna be some code updates later on in regular session.

Uh, we're gonna talk about the pilot programs, both in the supplier diversity side, but then also on the community benefit side.

We're gonna talk about implement uh implementation, outreach and engagement, and then our processes for learning, building, growing, scaling, refining, and improving.

All right, let's talk about this research.

So this was a um the research um took a lot of considerations from states, some local, um, some federal actors in understanding supplier diversity and community benefits.

Some of our key takeaways were the state of Oregon in their disparity study, uh, looked at 3.1 billion in cont in their contracting budget, and only 10% of them going to women and people of color, and 1% going to folks of the API community.

Uh, and of those folks, only several companies.

Later this year, a date uh data dashboard will be launched showing a high-level data disparity report.

Um, some of the things that we took away from from the statewide disparity data was the need for high-level county data and city data, but then also we learned about um getting some more granularity around the supplier pool, specifically around um COVID certification.

Um, there are some barriers that were discussed in um and uh we are gonna try to figure out on our implementation side how do we address those barriers.

But it also allowed us to have conversations around getting some more granular data, working towards more localized certification processes, and then improving the process to build capacity and doing some folk uh targeted focus on underrepresented community groups such as veterans, women, minority, and persons with disabilities.

Andres, can you pause for a minute and just talk a little bit about what does that mean if a company gets or contractor gets certified?

Um you rephrase your question.

So I think you said COVID certification.

What does that generally mean?

And and I know there's some barriers for folks getting certified, but that's what we want to see is you want to see get people get that certification so that we can talk about wanting to have certified suppliers.

Great.

Wonderful question.

Uh right now, the acronym is escaping me.

I was gonna know that help here.

Cool.

Yeah.

But initially, COVID was set up to encourage uh minority or underrepresented communities to go through the process of becoming certified in creating certification in the certification.

The process was to talk about who you're contracting with, who you're subcontracting with, who your employees are, uh, the representation and leadership, those sort of things that get to the essence of we are at 51% um uh minority-owned, women-owned.

One of the things we would like to do is because it is a pretty significant barrier and challenging process at the state level is to do something at the local level that would make that less onerous and quicker.