As well.

We do have a call out for additional panelists.

So anyone who might be interested, you can go to our website at arts.city of sacramento.org and apply for to be a panelist.

You can also just email me directly.

So that is a general overview, and so many of you were um involved in the process before.

So I thought you might have some questions that you wanted to bring up and um some of the changes.

And Maya, you are first up.

Go right ahead.

Thanks, Ray.

Um, really quickly, I just want to make everybody aware that the audio is still working on the um city website, but the screen is black.

So folks can hear us, but they can't see what we're talking about.

It's okay now.

I'm not seeing it yet.

Okay, I will.

Um good.

Uh so maybe we just want to, I don't know, maybe share the um presentation because there's at least some part that folks haven't been able to look at.

Um I just wanted to clarify what the reimbursement time frame is for folks this time around.

Um with the uh the round two.

Yeah.

So uh as soon as let's go back to this timeline.

As soon as we um allocate the grants and make the awards on November 2nd, they will go right into contracting and uh which takes a couple weeks and they'll go right into payment.

So we're looking at the time period that they can apply for reimbursement, is it?

Oh, I'm sorry.

It is, yeah, sorry.

It is uh um March 1st to September 15th.

Is there a reason why we don't want to just extend it through December?

These are these are reimbursement grants, so um, we have to have the paid receipts up front.

So since the period the grants open on the 16th, we extended it through September.

I was thinking um if people know that they have cancellations of contracts that would have you know been for like that final quarter of the year if they had already gotten a cancellation.

Why would we not want to re like give an opportunity for reimbursement?

Uh we can look at that.

Um, Mike Fry, I don't know if you want to answer that on the spot, or if you want to talk about it in a little bit.

As far as going through till the end of December.

Yeah.

I I think one of the one of the concerns that might come up is you want to try and put everybody in the same position, and if you have some people who um are asking for something that might be more speculative and that is not substantiated at that time, it can be very difficult to uh try and determine whether reimbursement um for something that has not occurred or down the road versus something that you actually can show uh documentation for um which March 1st through September 15th at that point, the city would be able to make that determination.

Ray, I have a question.

Um, you know, last year in the last round, there was some um concern about making sure that we're reaching out to the uh artist, uh the individual artists um and helping them and doing the grant.

Can you explain what's what we see in the second round about how we will be reaching out to those to make sure that uh we're kind of including them in this process?

You bet.

So we do have the public information office on board, and they are doing the same resources they did before, which is all of the social media, all of the outreach, we'll be connecting with everyone who has applied before, all of our partners will be working with economic development to reach out to the um chambers of commerce, commerce, all of the chambers of commerce throughout the um city.

Um we also have brought on a PR firm, which I don't have all the details for it, but I do have um their new website that they've created.

Um so they're gonna be looking at helping us outreach in that set in that sense as well, which we didn't do before, so that will be an additional step, and it looks like this.

Um so I think we have even more resources reaching out into the community than we did before.

Can we um those if I remember there was around 80 individual artists that we uh did not recently?

Can we make direct contact with them to let them know this is happening again and those kinds of we will.

There'll be a lot of direct contact this time, especially with everyone who applied.

Right.

One of the one of the um issues is that when uh we met with um uh councilman Hansen was the issue about making sure that the cultural equity and outreach and um uh making sure those things are very much at the forefront of how our um organizations are going to be addressing those issues or uh cultural statements, all those kinds of things.

What do you think that we will be doing now that will uh include um that concept and the cultural equity statement in those areas?

Sure.

So we did um learn, like I said, from the first round.

So uh we've been able to adjust the application a little bit.

So you'll see up here are some examples.

This is the example of the um creative business and the individual application is very similar, you know, and is very similar.

So we are being very specific this time what's your artistic discipline or area of arts-based work.

We're gonna ask for a brief description of business um and the contribution to Sacramento's creative economy because we did have questions about that last time.

We want them to describe the community they serve.

Um we actually put in briefly describe how your business practices align with the ACE commission's race and cultural equity statement.

So a part of the grant guidelines will be that statement, and they will address that.

And then again, um the same question before, briefly describe how your business experienced financial hardship due to the COVID-19.