Speaker numbers apply only to this recording. Names come from transcript evidence. “Possibly” marks uncertain attribution.
All right. It is 1001 a.m. on October 22nd, 2026, and we will officially get the community health committee meeting started. Madam Clickley, please call the roll. Councilmember Aldarete Gavito. Councilmember Mesa Gonzalez. Councilmember White. Councilmember Castillo. Chair Galvan. Here. Sir, we have a quorum. Thank you so much. Can I get a motion a second for the approval of the minutes from the last meeting? All is in favor. You say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Great. We have a couple folks on it for public comment here. Each person will get three minutes to speak. We'll start off with Tyler Ferguson. All right, good morning. My name is Tyler Ferguson, and I'm the executive director of Blueprint Ministries. I also chair Metro Health's Health Equity Network Housing Work Group. I'm here this morning to share with you from my perspective the immense good that the network is doing to holistically address food insecurity. It might seem odd that someone working in the housing space is intimately involved in Metro Health's efforts to address food insecurity. That's because housing, as well as other social determinants of health, are all interconnected. Your constituents who face food insecurity do not do so in a vacuum. Instead, they must make decisions in the face of impossible trade-offs. Deciding to remedy mold in their house means there's no money left for food. Buying lunches for their kids in the summer might mean mom skipping her medication refill. Those needs are all connected, even when the organizations helping with them aren't. That's where the health equity network has really helped us. Metro Health brings organizations addressing all of these concerns and more together so we can collaborate in a way that allows people to receive support, not just in receiving food for the weak, but more importantly, in removing the barriers that keep them in the food insecurity cycle in the first place. In January, we brought a homeowner situation to our health equity network partners. We could help with the repairs, but there were other needs too that kept this family struggling to put food on the table. Relationships formed through the network helped us identify resources and make referrals for clothing, transportation, and mental health supports. We didn't have to figure it all out ourselves. We had people we could turn to. And that meant we could offer the homeowner more uh more help than we could on our own. I want to close with a thought about the budget conversations that we're sure to keep having in the coming years about the city's role in funding nonprofit organizations. I'm not here today to argue for or against funding going to individual organizations, but rather I want to encourage the city to keep supporting collaborative efforts like the health equity network and to look at how we can replicate that model across different areas of city government. When the city helps organizations work together, its investment can reach beyond what any one organization can do alone. We can draw on each other's knowledge and resources to help the same families in a more holistic way. That's a meaningful way to make the city's investment go even further. And for the people we serve, it means we have more to offer when they come to us for help. Thank