AGENDA and MINUTES- Pillar 5 subcommittee meeting, May 1, 2024

Illinois Commission on Poverty Elimination and Economic Security

Subcommittee on Pillar 5: Support Trusted Community Based Providers to Serve the Needs of those In Deep Poverty

Meeting Agenda and Minutes

Wednesday, May 1, 2024, 1:00-2:00 PM

Recording

Members:

Agenda:

1. Welcome Roll Call
2. Public Comment - subject to written comment in advance
3. Approval of Meeting Minutes: February 7, 2024
4. Review of Goals and Collective Input
   1. Goal 1 - Create an integrated network of trusted community-based providers who serve those experiencing deep poverty to ensure ongoing stakeholder engagement, practice sharing, and regular dissemination of opportunities
   2. Goal 2 - continue scheduling meetings, having conversations and increased awareness of key decision-makers to ensure sustained caregiving funding
   3. Goal 3 - Support IDHS in beginning to comprehensively assess state contracts and recommend increased equitable funding to community-based organizations serving underrepresented communities
5. Discussion
   • FY25 Goal Planning
6. Next Steps
7. Adjournment

Minutes

Subcommittee members present:

1. Lauren Wright - Chairperson
2. Kimberly Tate - representative of Senator Kimberly Lightford, Commission member
3. Amy Brennan - public member
4. Courtney Hedderman - public member
5. Becky Salazar - public member
6. Lesley Schwartz - IDHS SME/public member

Administrator: Priya Khatkhate, IDHS-Chief Policy Officer

Facilitator/s: Matthew Rodriguez - Institute of Research on Race and Public Policy (IRRPP)

1. Welcome Roll Call - Chair Wright welcomed members; members put their name and affiliation in the chat
2. Public Comment - subject to written comment in advance, none received.
3. Approval of Meeting Minutes: February 7, 2024 - postponed for the next meeting due to lack of quorum.
4. Meeting goals:
   1. Recap on the status of the three goals that were set out for FY 2024, which is quickly coming to a close;
   2. Determine which of the three goals need to be extended or modified for FY25; and
   3. Determine if there is a need to create additional goals as the group gears up for FY25.
5. Review of Goals and Collective Input
   1. Goal 1 - Create an integrated network of trusted community-based providers who serve those experiencing deep poverty to ensure ongoing stakeholder engagement, practice sharing, and regular dissemination of opportunities
      • Obtained list of vendors from IDHS (with contracts with IDHS) assuming that it is a part of what would be considered as a network of trusted community-based providers as a starting point. The next step is to cross-reference it to the Illinois Partners list that Chari Wright leads and share it back to the group to see if there are any missing providers or if the list is comprehensive enough in capturing the goal.
      • The challenge is how to make sure that the group is focusing on the deep poverty areas as have been identified by the Poverty Commission. There is a need to align with the Commission goals.
      • Another challenge is that the list provides zip codes of the providers, but it might just be zip codes for their headquarters and not the areas where they are providing services.
      • Further, sometimes providers receive particular grant funds to provide that service and it may fluctuate from year to year as to whether or not they're actually servicing those who are experiencing deep poverty.
      • One possible way to move forward is to reach out to the providers to self-identify and opt in. However, before reaching out, Chair Wright wants to make sure of the additional tangible value for the providers if they decide to be part of the integrated network and not just more meetings or listening sessions.
      • Matt suggested as a potential extension to FY25 goal is to do research on best practices on convening organizations as an added value of being part of an integrated network.
      • Other points to consider: one organization may receive different grants at a time for different types of services; one organization may have different locations doing different work.
      • More organizations may opt in if they can see that being part of the integrated network could be an opportunity to provide direct feedback to the department about what they need to better serve people living in deep poverty. This added value however, should be beyond the communication that is already happening between providers and IDHS.
      • Lesley pointed out that the providers are probably serving families in deep poverty regardless of where they are in the stage because that's who IDHS serves and so learning more about how to serve people in deep poverty will not be a problem. One important thing is to make sure that the folks running the programs at DHS know what messaging is going to the grantees so they can support the grantees better.
      • POTENTIAL EXTENSION to FY-25: Research best practices around how best to add value when outreach to entities specifically servicing those experiencing deep poverty happens to ensure "...engagement, practice sharing, and dissemination of opportunities," to operationalize what is meant by building an "integrated network."
   2. Goal 2 - continue scheduling meetings, having conversations and increased awareness of key decision-makers to ensure sustained caregiving funding, as well as securing COLA to community-based providers to ensure wage increases to frontline human service workers servicing those experiencing deep poverty
      • Courtney has previously shared the legislations that AARP was proposing that are based on their research done in the in the counties of Cook, DuPage, Madison, Effingham and Peoria about caregiver and care recipient experiences. Link to the report - AARP1487_SL_PathwaystoCare_FINAL.pdf(Review) - Adobe cloud storage
        1. Caregiver tax credit - no go but hoping that initial conversations will continue to next year and that the Governor's Office will closely look at the proposed legislation and introduce the bill next year (POTENTIAL EXTENSION to FY-25)
        2. HB 4677 - Caregiver Resource Portal Bill; passed the House unanimously and assigned appropriations on Health and Human Services Committee at the Senate; the Governor's Office has expressed support as well as the Department on Aging; hopefully will get posted next week. https://states.aarp.org/illinois/ilcares
      • Chair Wright raised that it might be helpful to know from IDHS what kind of COLAs were integrated in the grants for this year as this may help continue the conversation in the coming year.
      • Goal 2 can potentially be split into two: (POTENTIAL EXTENSION to FY-25)
        1. Sustain care-giver funding
        2. Secure COLA for community-based providers
   3. Goal 3 - Support IDHS in beginning to comprehensively assess state contracts and recommend increased equitable funding to community-based organizations serving underrepresented communities
      • Chair Wright previously shared the Human Equitable Pay Act which is being proposed by Illinois Partners for Human Services and would require IDHS to commission a study around pay equity across the human services sector including pay disparities between state workers and community-based workers performing similar work.
      • There was a pushback from IDHS because it is not feasible for IDHS to commission such study without some sort of financial investment. DHS advised Illinois Partners to work with the Commission to revisit the legislation, understand better what pay disparities are, narrow the scope to get good data and use other best practices for other similar types of studies.
      • Illinois Partners believe that pay disparities is a really important issue that affect community-based organization's ability to meet the needs of their communities. They will continue the work in collaboration with IDHS and the Commission.
      • Lesley shared the Governor's Early Childhood Funding Commission page which contains reports and information on pay disparities in early childhood and cost modeling on home visiting which could be used as a model for narrowing the scope of the proposed Human Equitable Pay Act bill.
      • Prep for FY-25 - potentially bring the language of the proposed legislation to the committee to work on:
        1. Narrowing scope
        2. Identifying problem areas
        3. Alignment to the broader commission
6. Discussion - FY25 Goal Planning; the pillar has two main focus areas -
   1. Support our caregiving workforce by ensuring equitable wages and develop meaningful supports for unpaid caregivers.
      • One potential FY25 goal is how to support the direct care workforce that also have unpaid family caregiving responsibilities. Amy shared that the Illinois Family Caregiver Coalition wants to focus on the ways and one of them could be through larger organizations such as the SEIU and state agencies; identify what it means to actually support the human service frontline workers and what policies would look like
      • Chair Wright shared Worker-Well-Being-is-Community-Well-Being.pdf (illinoispartners.org) which takes a deep dive into the unpaid caregiver issue and shows how few full time community-based human service workers are actually making a living wage and also the best practices that allow them to stay in their positions, which includes things like PTO flexibility to be with their families, etc.
      • Providing more financial support to the unpaid caregivers can eliminate one of the barriers and can help them keep their jobs
      • Amy shared another idea which is outreach to employers to help them better understand what the caregivers are going thru and it help gives support to the caregivers in their workplace. New York State did a good outreach to all the employers in the state.
      • There is an appropriation bill (Doris Turner or Lisa Hernandez?) to increase the caregiver funding from $5 million to $6 million.
      • Amy shared HB 2161 creates a category of discrimination so employers can't discriminate against a person if they are doing family caregiving and that can be childcare or other family caregiving. The bill already passed the House.
   2. Provide community-based providers with consistent and equitable access to state funding that adequately keeps pace with rising costs.
      • One potential FY25 goal is to support providers, especially grassroots providers who don't typically apply for state funding, by identifying barriers to applying for state funding and make recommendations on how to reduce those barriers such as:
      1. Identify best practices around communication strategies;
      2. Technical assistance on application completion; and
      3. Looking at the applications itself.
7. Next Steps
   1. Two things to really push for thinking for FY-25:
      1. Sustained caregiver funding (focus area 1)
      2. HB 4677 - Caregiver Resource Portal Bill (focus area 1)
      3. HB 2161 - Unlawful Discrimination-Family (focus area 1)
      4. Explore editing the Human Equitable Pay Act proposed bill (focus area 2)
   2. Finalize and articulate FY25 goals and get feedback from members.
   3. The final FY25 goals ideally should be ready before the upcoming full Poverty Commission meeting which will be in mid June 2024.
8. Adjournment - Chair Wright moved to adjourn seconded by Amy. The group unanimously agreed to adjourn at 1:55 PM.