Welcome to business session.

Our first item is approval of minutes for the business session of February 8th.

Is there a motion?

Tell me second.

Been moved and second of the item that the minutes be approved.

All in favor indicate by saying aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

All opposed.

Motion passes.

Our first item today is from Kansas City's amazing health department.

Presentation of a blueprint for violence prevention and a safe and healthy community report.

Good afternoon.

Thank you for having us here today.

With me are uh Cecil Watry, the division manager for behavioral health and injury prevention, and Dr.

Kalaya with the UMKC, who is our evaluation partner.

So I was asked today to just give an update on our implementation as a city for the Kansas City Blueprint.

This is I'll give a quick refresher for those who might be new to the council or hadn't really been tracking this.

So a few things we'll talk about today.

We'll talk about the timeline.

We'll just review the timeline for development adoption and implementation.

We'll review some of the key elements of the KC Blueprint.

We're not going to go into depth just because of the time constraints, but we'll cover the basics.

We'll provide an overview of the contracts awarded under the more recent funding for the violence prevention fund.

And we'll also talk about our ongoing evaluation efforts as I realize that is something that people are really interested in right now.

So I'll talk about just a review of the implementation timeline.

Not going to go through all of this, but I included this slide just to demonstrate how long and what was the foundation for the KC Blueprint.

So it started in 2014 with the kickoff or the publishing of the Crime Commission report.

And it basically, this report basically said, hey, for the second time in a row of us doing this crime commission report, we realized there needs to be a comprehensive or a cohesive citywide plan for how we're going to deal with what we're seeing involving young people and families.

We see different pockets of people working on different things, but there's no cohesive plan.

And so after that, the health department, uh, my predecessors and uh those their partners began working to build what we now know as the KC Blueprint.

Um there was the violence free Kansas City Committee that was formed.

We partner with the Prevention Institute, which is a group out of Oakland, California.

They are sort of a best practices and evaluation firm uh that basically worked with organizations in Oakland as well as nationwide to come up with their own community plans for violence.

I'll skip down to where uh it was voted upon and adopted by the both the city council and the health commission in 2020.

Now I want to get bring us up to date a little bit on where we are.

So between 2020 and 2022, uh, the health department and its partners really worked to just get the word out about what is the blueprint.

We did a lot of presentations and neighborhood groups, uh presented to sectors like the business community to point out their the aspects of the plan that they could do.

Um, and we also provided some limited funding.

We didn't really have the budget for it at the time, but provided some limited funding to um small, very small businesses within targeted zip codes at the height of the pandemic.

People who wouldn't have qualified for some from for some of the larger um resources, we were able to provide some small opportunities.

Um and then city council in February of last year um voted to set aside the funding for implementation of the KC Blueprint.

It took some time to finally be awarded uh and allocated to the department in May of last year, and then between August and January, between August 23 and January of this year, we began distributing the contracts, going through a whole request for proposal process, working through them, evaluating them, and then awarding them.

So where we are today since January is where groups are implementing or working to build their implementation, I should say during the early stages of implementing the work they were awarded the funds to do.

Just wanted to kind of share that with you.

Please interrupt with any questions you might have at the time, but just want to give people a sense of where we are in the phasing of the utility of these of the use of these funds, I should say.

So some of the things that are involved in the KC Blueprint, the approach we took with this, and we are still working to update it for some of the new things we're learning about communities and violence prevention.

We have been um told that we need to definitely work through updates for this.

So there we there is space for that.

It's a living breathing document.

We talked about uh neighborhoods and how we work on um building strong, thriving, connected neighborhoods.

That was one of the key factors that our partners from the Prevention Institute found to be a contributor to violence in our city.

We had neighborhoods where people didn't talk to each other, they didn't trust each other, they didn't know each other.

So there was a lack of social cohesion, is what we call in the literature.

And so that's something we prioritized in this KC blueprint.

We talked about the importance of childhood development and the schools and the places you'll see in the blueprint different strategies for those spaces as well as in workplaces and where people go to receive care, not to not to just include hospitals and clinics and sort of things, but also social services, even places like the health department where people come through for different services.

So that's kind of the underlying framework.

So when we look at the literature around community violence prevention from the CDC's violence prevention resources, as well as what the prevention institute came in and their findings to put that together, what we basically find is this pathway where people after convening over 80 groups of folks, talking to young people, talking to organizations that work with people who are impacted by violence and some of the other kind of tangential issues of crime, we can't they came up with this framework, and it is grounded in the literature and grounded in just our local experience, where people found okay, things like limited access to opportunities and social support, adverse childhood experiences for for those of you who are not aware, adverse childhood experiences are things like seeing violence, uh domestic violence in your home, having someone be abused in your home or be abused yourself, going without food occasionally, having lights, water cut off, you know, uh frequently, um, just going without in general.

Um there are there's a whole list of them, experiencing sexual abuse, all of those different things.