Thank you very much.

Good evening, everyone.

I have a brief announcement to make everybody aware that we currently do not have a quorum available.

So we will not be able to take action on the minutes from our previous meeting, nor will we officially call to order or adjourn since it will be an informal meeting.

But since we do have representatives here to give us an update and we have some people who may have questions to respect everybody else's time, we're going to go ahead and hear the update and entertain questions during this informal meeting.

So with that, I'd like to thank everyone who has been able to make it here and join us this evening.

And I will start off with introductions on my left.

Michelle Nada, District 3.

And I'm Scottis Gordson.

I'm from District 2.

Anyhow, with that, I thank you all.

And we will be jumping right into the quarterly update.

If we can have France Administration, thank you very much.

Good afternoon.

This is our quarterly update, which we haven't done in a while.

On the agenda for tonight, we have where we are, our PY 25 spending to date, the PY26 allocation amounts, a project highlight for PY26, some current challenges that grants administration is facing, and uh a little snippet about our upcoming needs assessment, and we'll have some question and answers at the end.

Where we are, the FY26 HUD income limits have been released.

The PY26 annual action plan has been submitted and is awaiting HUD review.

The PY 26 will begin officially July 1st.

We are currently waiting on the PY 26 grant agreements.

The needs assessment public hearing is July 9th at 5 p.m.

And the CAPER public hearing will be September 10th at 5 p.m.

These are the PY 25 expenditures to date so far.

You can take a moment to look at those.

Were approved during the allocation meetings direct where the additional funds will be utilized.

These are the project changes as outlined in the contingencies.

CAP submitted a proposal for a program that differs from projects funded in recent years.

Drew France with CAP is here to provide an overview of the PY 26 housing stability program.

Hey, good afternoon.

I am Drew France.

I live in District 1, and I am the Senior Director of Strategic Strategic Planning and Community Partnerships at CAP Tulsa Community Action Project.

And we are an anti-poverty agency, and long ago we decided to stop doing a little bit of everything and double down on one strategy, and that's high quality early childhood education in combination with supports for the parents and caregivers of children.

So today we operate nine large preschools across the city.

We enroll about 1700 children under the age of five into full day year-round services as we prepare them for kindergarten and beyond.

I'll tell you that for the first 14 years that I was at CAP, our organization paid very little rent of the families we served.

We really didn't have the resources to do that.

And honestly, I think the need for housing support was probably less when I started the work.

Then came the pandemic, and for the first time we had a wealth of one-time resources bestowed upon us.

And both directly and through partnerships, we began for the first time paying lots of rent.

We were staving off a lot of evictions, we were helping stabilize families' housing situations and also paying utility disconnections to help the families we serve survive the pandemic.

As those resources expired, we have been recalibrating.

And really the change of the city and the HUDs locally, their focus to really, instead of investing kind of widely across all the community and to really double down on housing has coincided nicely with our shift as we uh through partnership have begun a housing stability program in this sort of post-pandemic new normal.

So really thanks to the United Way and an organization they partner with called the Seymour Institute, we for since 2023 have been taking uh really private resources from United Way and uh supporting uh families with a focus on decreasing student mobility.

We know that when families in poverty are moving around due to um you know maybe lapses of their ability to pay rent if they're their couch surfing or living with family members, we know how hard that is on the family and specifically how hard that is on children and their outcomes.

So we we in partnership want to really minimize the number of moves and unplanned moves their family of young children is making during the school year.

Uh so through that partnership, we have funded a family coach, and that coach works directly with families to help them uh navigate their situation.

Sometimes that's supporting them to eviction court and helping them pay that that rent that might have lapsed.

Other times it's uh connecting them to partners such as Tulsa Responds to make sure they're getting access to the benefits they they may be entitled to, such as SNAP, to child care subsidies, and to Medicaid if they're eligible.

Uh, we also want to uh connect our families to things like the financial empowerment center so that they can make sure they're doing everything in their power to stabilize the income in the household.

And then more recently we've been working with Tulsa Public Schools and others uh to connect families to what is known as the hub at East Central Middle, where there's an array of legal services and other support.

So when families are threatened with housing instability, they have a network of community supporters that can meet them where they're at.

We don't actually use HUD funds to pay rent.

We use private dollars to actually pay uh rent in situations that families are eligible, but we definitely need the staffing support uh through the HUD process.

So, as was mentioned for years, we have come to you with educational programs and asked you to invest in our high quality early education, and while we value those investments, we also support your focus lately to think about how we can stabilize housing, and we're proud to be a recipient of this first year of funding for for our housing stability program.

And I'm happy to answer any questions, but we hope to I think we will commit to 50 households that will stabilize through your support.

And how successful do you think that your program is?

I think in the short term it's very successful.

There are literally 50 families a year that might have otherwise been evicted.

Uh, we know we typically ask to see the eviction notice, and we we want to document that they're kind of on that cusp of losing their housing.

And that feels very satisfying.