Welcome back to this weekly meeting of the Community Planning and Housing Committee with Denver City Council.

Your community planning and housing committee starts now.

All right, we're on air.

This is the Community Planning and Housing Committee of Denver City Council.

It is the afternoon of April 14th.

My computer tells me.

And we have a couple of briefings today, both from host.

We'll start with council member introductions.

And why don't we do online first?

I'm Sarah Paradise, I'm one of your council members at large, and I think we have at least one colleague joining us on Zoom.

Hi, good afternoon, Councilwoman Chanteau Lewis District 8.

Thanks, John Tal.

Pausing in case there's anyone else on there, but I think there is not.

Alright, so then with that, we will start with the president on my left.

Hi.

Narciss Denver District.

Yes.

Doing the one of those every day.

Jamie Torres, West Denver District 3.7 Soyer, District 5.

Diana Romero Campbell, Southeast Denver District 4.

Lovely.

And then I believe we have Kevin Kelly from us to start with a presentation on Denver Day Works, which we all learned a lot more about last budget cycle.

So we're looking forward to it.

Thanks.

Awesome.

Thanks y'all for having me.

Yes, my name is Kevin Kelly.

I'm a program officer with host, and I am here today to talk about Denver Dayworks.

So the action we're requesting for today is for your approval on an amendment to the Denver Daywor with Service Source.

The amendment will do three things.

It will add 413,000 onto the full contract amount, bringing it to 550,000 for the calendar year.

It will also extend the terms.

We did kind of a mini contract which expired on March 31st, and the amendment will extend it through the end of the calendar year.

And then lastly, it will update some of the contract language to update our priority populations.

One being referrals from hosts, rapid rehousing programs, and then the second being newly unhoused households who are entering into our shelter system.

I know we typically use this chart to kind of show where a program will fit within host's spectrum of work.

Dayworks is a little bit of an outlier for us in that it doesn't really fit super neatly into any of these categories as it's an employment program, and you'd be really hard pressed to find a program and host that is not focused predominantly on housing.

The one through line, though, being that obviously this is a program focused on serving unhoused people, and that's obviously one of our main constituencies.

To give you a brief uh overview of the history of Day Works, it launched in 2017.

It was based off of a program out of Albuquerque that did mostly kind of outreach for people who were panhandling and offered them day labor services.

So Bayod Enterprises and at the time Depart the Department of Human Services organized the contract and really built out on that idea.

The original kind of day labor experience looked like meeting the Bayod staff down at Civic Center Park.

Uh DHS provided a bus which would come pick everybody up, and they would go to two work sites.

One would be at Dotti's main facility, that one off of Alameda and I-25, and they would work there as well as in one park throughout the city.

Typical kind of work ranged from uh light landscaping, cleaning up, picking up trash, uh snow removal in the winter, raking weaves, and things of that nature.

While folks were engaged in that work experience, they were also engaged by a resource navigator who would help with things such as benefits acquisitions and uh coordinated entry assessments, and then they would also meet with an employment specialist who would help them develop their resume, apply for jobs, prepare for interviews and things like that.

Um so obviously the focus was really on finding that permanent work that was the ultimate goal for every participant in the program.

Um and I wanted to put this image on the slide today.

If you came in through the front of the city and county building, that kind of central rock garden, all of those trees there were planted by day workers.

I think it really highlights uh just how much benefit the city has had from the labor of Denver Day Worker participants.

I think a lot gets made and rightfully so of the benefit that the program has for participants, but we as a city have also really benefited from their work.

So there are very few places I go in the city where I'm not like Denver Dayworks cleaned up this area or planted flowers here or something like that.

They've helped at the Colfax Marathon start starting line, many Rhino Art District Festivals.

A few day workers were even hired to replace all of the light fixtures in the downtown central library and the Castro building with green energy efficient ones several years ago.

So this program has a real legacy of benefiting the city as well.

And then we have Dayworks today.

So as I'm sure everybody is aware, Bayota Enterprises, as it formerly operated, is no longer no longer in operation.

It is split into two existing organizations.

There is the Bayod Works, which operate our cold weather shelters as well as some of our non-congregate shelters like the Tamarack.

And then other parts of Bayod, including Denver Day Works, went over to an agency called Service Source.