Outreach Notebook Sunday June 5, 2022

Welcome back to Outreach Notebook everyone. We are a “four-seasons-weather” kind of crew here at #eastannarbor, but these last few days around here have been some of those blissful, perfect-temperature conditions for lots of outdoor activities. We hope you have enjoyed them too.

Let’s get right to it.

New Human Services Partnership [NHSP] - Washtenaw County

At its meeting on Wednesday June 1, the County Board of Commissioners approved 6-months of gap funding for the safety net of workers in agencies like Avalon Housing and Ozone House who keep housing insecure residents in homes. District 7 [Ann Arbor] Commissioner Andy LaBarre released the statement below and passed the resolution linked-to here.

“To follow up on your previous communication, I want to share that we just unanimously passed the attached resolution which funds these entities for the next six months. During that six months we will have to put in place the structure of a sustainable funding program. I believe it will need to be explicitly focused on obtaining desired outcomes rather than emphasizing innovation or additional collaboration which the old Coordinated Funding model sought to achieve. I hope you will engage in this process, especially in sharing what services you think need to be funding. I want to be as clear as possible that after two years and three iterations, I want to make sure the answer we provide by the end of the year is a long-term solution. I also believe we need to realistic in the expectations of that process and that the outcome will be an imperfect but workable way forward. I welcome your feedback.”

Andy

The statement was emailed out to advocates and agency leaders who have been in contact with Mr LaBarre about the NHSP.

More on this as community conversations continue and the vision/ ideas articulated here are acted upon.

Place Is The Space: #A2Council, #YpsiCouncil and #YTown

Where else in the local political blogosphere do you get tangential references to revolutionary cultural leaders like Sun Ra? Nowhere! That’s right :)

#YTown [Ypsilanti Township]

As the 2nd largest municipality in Washtenaw County, Ypsi Township has ~55K residents, former home of the “Arsenal of Democracy” [cough…CAPITALISM cough…], Ypsi Township is in a position to improve the life circumstances of a lot of folks who are struggling to make ends meet. See the screenshot of our county “opportunity index” map below:

Legend:

⦁ dark blue – very high access to opportunity,
⦁ lighter blue – moderate access to opportunity,
⦁ lighter red – low access to opportunity, and
⦁ red – very low access to opportunity.

Side note: Just looking at this map you can see why we are focusing our participatory budgeting project efforts on the eastern portion of our county.

Who: Ypsilanti Township Board Members

Brenda Stumbo, Supervisor Heather Jarrell Roe, Clerk Stan Eldridge, Treasurer Jimmie Wilson Jr., Trustee John P. Newman II, Trustee Gloria Peterson, Trustee Debbie Swanson, Trustee

Trustee and other officer elections for Ypsi Twp will be taking place in 2023 for the most part. However, of note, Trustee Jimmie Wilson Jr. is running in the August Democratic Party primary election for State Rep District 32. Here is a list of the other candidates [there is only one GOP candidate thus far, Martin Church]: Marshall Averill, Roderick Casey, Isaac London II, Robyn L. McCoy, Carol Smith 👀

What & When: for the issues at play in our neighbor to the east, I often go to Alex Thomas who is a member of the local news/media collaborative organization What’s Left Ypsi. Every Sunday he’s been hosting an hourlong program about local issues and usually an interview with someone involved in the local politics/ activism scene. Here he is chatting with Desirae Simmons whom we’ll write more about below as she is a candidate for Ypsilanti Ward 3 Council in the Democratic Party primary August 2.

The next #YTown Trustee meeting is this week Tuesday June 7 at 7pm. More info can be found here

#YpsiCouncil

In recent years, Ypsi City, its residents and activists have been in the lead for creating space for participatory democracy.

• What: On the agenda for the meeting this Tuesday June 7  is a public hearing for the Community Benefits Agreement with a developer regarding a single family home development in the city. The link above took quite awhile to load. below is a screen cap of some relevant info from the 331 page packet.

More info about the development and the hearing can be found here.

And this link takes you to information about how can can participate and speak at the meeting.

Who: Desirae Simmons, Amber Fellows and others involved in the REDY coalition helped turn out residents to participate in negotiations with the developer for the project referred to above.

Current Ypsi City Council: 3 wards, 2 reps per ward + mayor. Ward 1 Nicole Brown, Brian Jones-Chance; Ward 2 Jennifer Symanns, Steve Wilcoxen; Ward 3 Anthony Morgan, Annie Somerville

For primary elections in August, there are three candidates for Mayor: Lois Richardson, Anthony Morgan and Nicole Brown. Of note, Ward 1 appointed incumbent Brian Jones-Chance is not running again. In Ward 3 it is Desirae Simmons  against Marc Arthur. And this is interesting… In ward 1 Michelle [Me’Chelle] King is the only candidate to file for what will be Nicole Brown’s former seat as she chose to run for mayor this year. There is another spot open in Ward 1, a partial term ending in 2024. Roland Tooson is the only candidate listed for that seat. Oh… wait [see Ward 1 incumbent Brian Jones-Chance not running above]. In Ward 2 Jennifer Symanns is the only candidate listed for the primary.

#A2Council

There is a council meeting this Monday June 6. Info on how to sign up for public reserved comment time is here along with other ways to speak during council meetings. The agenda is quite light this week. There are no issues to address directly with advocacy or any further explication than what is present in the agenda text.

Elections for Ann Arbor City Council this year feature 2 incumbents [Elizabeth Nelson in Ward 4 and Ali Ramlawi in Ward 5] a whole bunch of new candidates, two uncontested races in wards 2 and 3. Current Mayor Christopher Taylor will face former Ward 1 council member Anne Bannister.

We will write more about this set of elections in weeks to come.

Mental Health Awareness Month Reprise [“May This Be Love” Redux]

May is “Mental Health Awareness Month.” We didn’t feature anything specifically about this but want to circle back for a minute. Anyone who is having a mental health crisis or who needs a psychiatrist/ therapist is going to wait on average 2 months to get connected to care. In the meantime, there are crisis resources in our Washtenaw County Community and beyond. If you or a loved one is in a crisis or experiencing an emergency situation, please use any of the following resources:

§ U-M Psychiatric Emergency Services (PES) at University Hospital: 734-936-5900 or 734-996-4747

Washtenaw CMH Crisis/Access Line: 734-544-3050

§ National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK (8255)

§ Text 'UMICH' to 741741
This service is sponsored by the Michigan Medicine Wellness Office, Office of Faculty Development, Organizational Learning, and the U-M Comprehensive Depression Center

§ Safe House (for support navigating intimate partner violence/domestic violence):

https://www.safehousecenter.org/

§ National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-SAFE

We need to be able to talk about these things like they are coronavirus. We are going to be reckoning with policy decisions made over the last several decades that have essentially defunded mental health services. We need to “Re-fund Mental Health”

What do you think?

Epilogue: Songs and Images for Mental Therapy

Water has so many soothing and healing qualities.

REF: https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1BCkXoyzPqsbl7zpM7fscF4-C5HdXarsS_JrLtPJFN-4/mobilebasic

Thanks for reading and for your partnership. We wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t been there™ See you all next week!