The Chattanooga City Council met on February 17, 2026, at 7:00 PM. The meeting included approval of the previous minutes, presentations from two community partners (United Way of Greater Chattanooga and La Paz Chattanooga), and discussion of upcoming calendar and board appointments. No public comments were taken.
2026. Or we get too far. Can I get a motion on the minutes? Don't move. Second. Alright, we have a motion and a proper second. The minutes will stand without objection. All right. We have two of our community partners here in the room with us today, council, both that have important updates for us. The first is United Way, and the second will be from La Paz. So Abby Garrison is here to fill us in on the status, I believe, of 211. And Abby, take it away. Awesome. Well, thank you. Appreciate y'all inviting us in today. Really just kind of have been been trying to get in here for a while just to kind of give y'all a mid-year update. There are a couple different things we wanted to kind of run through. Always want to just refresh everybody of what you know, like all the various things that United Way does while I have you. And then really get into the 211 and stormwater fee program that we run on y'all's behalf. And then wanted to give y'all just an update on what we saw through the SNAP benefits crisis component. It was a wild month or so at 211, as you can imagine. And so really just wanted to update y'all on that. And then just make sure that y'all understand what we do and what we what we need from the city to keep doing what we do. So sound good? Yes. Okay. So overall, I'm not gonna read this to you, but you guys know United Way of Greater Chad Nigga. We've been around for over a hundred years doing all sorts of things. 211 and the emergency assistance funds that we put out through 211 is a huge component of our work. But also keep in mind that we do our community investment process, the fundraising that we do through corporate partners, we help support the nonprofit ecosystem at large, you know, whether we fund them or not, just nonprofit support. We run our region's volunteer center. So anytime there's a big volunteer mobilization that needs to be coordinated, that's the volunteer center at United Way. We also have an initiative that I think many of y'all have joined us in, which is the United for Working Families Summit, and all of the partnerships that have grown from that with our business community. So really helping working to help our companies support working families as well. And then lastly, increasingly we are doing some public policy work kind of coordinated through our network around supporting Alice households and working families at the state and federal level. So that's United Way as a whole. I wanna I want to just reiterate to y'all that 211 in many ways, we do not think of this. Yes, we're a nonprofit, but we do not think of our work at 211 as your traditional kind of cherry work, right? We think of this as civic infrastructure. So everyone's familiar with 911. Y'all are familiar with 311, I know that. Um increasingly 988. I'm sure y'all have heard of all of these three-digit codes. Um, you know, if you really want to know what 211 does, it's it's sure it's up there on the screen. But think of it as all of the things other than life-threatening emergencies. So 911 is car wrecks and medical emergencies. 988 is a mental health crises. 211 is all of the other needs and calls that people have around social services and helping, you know, it's certainly oftentimes in a crisis, but not like a life-threatening crisis, if that makes sense to y'all. So, you know, last year, just through the Chattanooga Call Center, we uh responded to over 57,000 calls coming in to 211. And we do have a 15 county footprint, but the bulk of our calls come from Hamilton County and City of Chattanooga.