Good afternoon and welcome to Hampton City Council Work Session.

Madam Clerk, will you call the role, please?

Councilman Bowman.

Present.

Vice Mayor Brown.

Here.

Councilwoman Campbell.

Present.

Councilwoman Fairby.

Present.

Councilwoman Harper.

Present.

Councilwoman Muggler, present.

Mayor Gray.

Present.

And we have two presentations this afternoon.

I'm going to uh ask City Manager to uh introduce the first one.

Thank you, Mr.

Mayor.

We're very excited to give you an update presentation from our director of economic empowerment and family resiliency, Miss Deanna Valentine.

This is a presentation she's done for some community groups most recently, I believe.

Well, maybe there's been some that I'm not aware of, but the Macedonian Call Group that is a group of faith-based leaders.

Uh they were very pleased with the presentation, and I we thought it would be good not only for the full council, but more importantly for the larger community to see the work that Ms.

Valentine is doing and how we're approaching the work of trying to lift more people out of poverty and some of the challenges and barriers that people who are in poverty find when they try to move from poverty to self-sufficiency.

It is it is one of the council's strategic priorities, and it is something that we want to address as a larger community.

It's not something government alone can address.

So as we as I start going through this presentation, sort of keep in mind where we are in regards to the rest of the region for poverty and some of the initiatives that we might potentially look at.

It's very unique, but when it comes to poverty, it's even more unique specifically because there are not entire communities that are entrenched in poverty in the city.

There are more pockets of poverty.

So we're hovering somewhere about 23,000 less than the state median income.

So that gives us it shows us that we have some opportunities to not only increase the median income for our households, but to also look at attracting employment and providing skills and training to our our residents so that they would be able to work up to that median household income and even be able to surpass that.

Again, you will see on here highlighted in purple where we are above, you know, where we're we're in the middle.

Um Mayor Gray mentioned during um some of the the budget information sessions that Hampton has been in the middle, in the middle in regards to salary, and this also shows where we're in the middle in regards to median income.

When we look at our poverty landscape, we see that there is a correlation between poverty and crime, but there's also a correlation between poverty and where we see that female-led households tend to be more highly impoverished than those households that are either headed by two household members, two heads of households, or by male household members.

The Alice population, as you all may know, is asset limited, income constrained, and employed.

The individuals that are in this population are those people that are classified as the working poor.

These are people that don't necessarily qualify for state benefits like SNAP or Medicaid, but also don't necessarily make enough money to get out of the situation where they currently are.

And so any sort of a critical illness vehicle might need repairs.

Housing repairs could very easily slide these individuals and these families backwards into poverty from where they've so hard tried to work out of.

So on this slide, you can see that you know, black households make up the majority of people that are living in poverty.

Our Alice households for the whole city is 31%.

When we look at the Alice households in comparison to the people that are currently in the families that are currently living in poverty, we see that people of color and minorities tend to make up a larger portion of both those people living in poverty and the Alice population.

The state average for the Alice population is 29%.

So we're we have more people and more families living in that Alice threshold, the working poor than the state currently has as a whole.

So I I went through that section a little bit quicker because I wanted to be able to spend more time on what poverty looks like, providing a little bit more texture to it, a little bit more depth to it, so that we start to realize that poverty is not just about finances, it's everything that contributes to poverty, so that we're we're not we're having a full, you know, 100% view of what we can do to be able to combat it.

So when we look at situational contributors to poverty, there are disconnects.

So over the last, I guess, six months at this point, one of the things that I have been able to identify is that there is a disconnect between the people that need the benefits and the people that are providing the benefits.

Hampton is resource rich.

However, the people that need the benefits don't necessarily know where to reach out, they don't necessarily know who to connect with.

And then that disconnect gets even that gap gets even broader when there's a lack of communication or a lack of follow-up.

That goes both ways because there's also a disconnect between our resource providers and other resource providers.

So we all know that COVID negatively impacted so much of the face-to-face work, that in-person work.

And now with budget cuts, we also know that funding is going to negatively impact what people are able to do and with the resources that they currently have.

Speaking of budgetary constraints.

So with I've been speaking with different people in, you know, our nonprofits, for-profits, etc., and there is a growing concern that they are stuck in this place between cutting programs and cutting staff.

And if staff gets cut, then they don't have the staff to run the programs.

And if the programs get cut, then the people that need the programs aren't able to move forward and be able to be able to prosper.

Systemic barriers.

There is oftentimes a disconnect again when we start thinking about well, it should be easy, or why is it that someone can't receive this, or why is this, you know, this should be a simple process.

And I can tell you that as a whole, not just in the city of Hampton, but as a whole, there are a number of systemic barriers that often hinder people from being able to exit poverty.