Travis County Commissioners Court
Tuesday, May 11, 2010,
Item 22
Item number 22. Consider and take appropriate action on the following items related to the community action network: receive briefing on the can dashboard project; and request for printing support for the can dashboard 22 document. Commissioner eckhardt.
>> the can dashboard is a project ken has been working on the past two years, it is a culmination of a committee that has been put together to look at metrics to diagnose where we were succeeding in our effort in health and human services and where we were not. The committee looked at a host -- a host of issues across every imaginable line of services and started out, i believe, with 86 different metrics and boiled it down to 16. The 16 in no way does -- i am speaking for ken and my capacity as -- what is my official title?
>> vice chair.
>> vice chair and chair elect for next year or something.
>> yes.
>> [laughter]
>> but ken, in no way represents that these 16 metrickings are the only things to look at in assessing the benefit that the various service providers in the community are providing or the -- the places where we need to improve. These 16 are much like a dashboard on your car, when you see the little light going on, it indicates that you need to take a closer look. So with that, vanessa, can you kick us off tells us what the 16 indicators are and how we anticipate using them over the next year, over the next five years, over the next ten?
>> okay. First of all, i want to thank you for inviting us today to share the dashboard, my name is vanessa, the executive director of the community action network and this is marijuana dodd, the assistant director and mary will be telling us what the indicators are tells us, i want to thank judge biscoe and commissioner eckhardt for their participation in the can board and judge biscoe served as chair and also was one of the creators of the community action network. Now, the community action network was created so that different partners in the organization -- different organization -- excuse me, different partners and organizations in the community could work together towards something common, towards common goals and a mission statement that was created in 1995 or so were these partners would work together toward mutually agreed upon outcomes through a process that would maximize private and public resources and this dashboard report really is about operationalizing that mission statement because the first part is to achieve mutually agreed upon outcomes and that is what we are trying to do with this report. It is the first report of its. If you guys remember in the past we used to have thick community reports and assessments and it is very overwhelming to get this information and not be clear about where our community is headed. One things that very important to understand is that these indicators work -- they are a package of indicators, they are like a framework of a house or a barn. If any one of the pillars goes down, it affects the whole structure, and so these indicators should be seen as a package. I also wanted to say, what's very key -- another key thing about the dashboard report is it was founded on some very key reports. Judge biscoe has chaired the 2001 social equity committee and we looked at the recommendations in the core areas of the report and looked at quality of life studies around the country and sustainability ends project and kerwin institute opportunity mapping initiative and it gave us foundational work on the key components of the quality of life, indicators that commissioner eckhardt mentioned and from that, these were distilled and so, i guess we can put the -- we have the presentation?
>> yes.
>> okay. The first -- in 2008, we actually agreed on a common community vision. We had the can vision but it was a small statement and people wanted to be clear, but about what does this mean, what does it mean for people in our community so we developed the common community vision you will see on this report. You will see it on page 3. It has a list of the vision we want for our community and then from that, we developed this set of indicators, and so, mary, sense, commissioner eckhardt had all right discussed the committee that was put together and owl of that, why don't we go ahead and talk about the indicators.
>> great. Thank you for inviting us here today. We are very -- and we also want to say thank you for the people who travis county provided on the dashboard steering committee. The dashboard steering committee was a very interesting group to work with and we worked throughout 2009 to develop these indicators. Sherry fleming did as long as ron amend jeffreys and darla gay with the district attorney's office and they joined jim walker with the community district project, people from the city, from mhmr and central health and it was a very broad range of people with expertise in a number of different areas and i think it is very important to know that the 16 indicators we arrived at eventually were chosen not by ken's staff but chosen by the committee of people -- you will find them on page 17, i believe, at the end of the report there, a full list of the people who served on the dashboard steering committee and they were a very interesting group to work with and as kenstaff we were not sure which independents would kind up on the reports and the board of directors to can also joined more to it so as we considered each of these i.s we tried to think of a few things, first was does it have communication power, when they see this indicator, do they understand it and know what it means and data power. Can doesn't want to be in the business of doing the data collection or creating new data. We want to know there are trusted, reliable sources of data available that we could go to update for the data for us and finally proxy power and what that means is this is an indicator as vanessa said that impacts other indicators. If you improve the poverty situation, for example, that impacts health care and that impacts education. It impacts many other areas of our community life and so very briefly wanted to just run through the 16 indicators. These are grouped into four basic categories. The first is we achieve our full potential. And you can find these on pages 5-7 of the report that you have. And the ones that were chosen are children that are kindergarten ready for school. This is underdevelopment. E3 alliance is working with region 13, success by 6 and others in our community to try to develop this measure. And then the next one is the high school graduation rate. The percentage of student who is graduate high school within four years with their cohort. The third is college ready. How many graduates are college ready? And this is a measure of the taks, sat, and act test, we want to know how many students are not just barely getting by but are really performing well and well now have to get into a college. And then the fourth is travis county is the unemployment rate. The second category is on page 8 through 10 of your report and those are the basic needs and so for that one, we looked at low income and we define low income as 200% of the federal poverty limit because we know that it takes much more than the federal poverty level for a family to survive. This low income indicator would be about $42,000 for a family of four. And 32% of all of the people in our county live at this level and if you take a look at parents of -- single parents of children, it's more like two-thirds of those families live at this low income level. And then the second one is, households that are cost burdened. And this is hud's definition of families who pay more than they should, more than their income for housing and 37% of people in our community are housing cost burdened. And then the third indicator is one for homelessness and for this one, we wanted to take a look at how many people show up at carrie's house or the front steps seeking emergency shelter actually receiving safe and stable housing and we are working with echo to get this measure. And the fourth is vehicles traveled per capita per day and this is a very important measure for travis county, especially because so many people travel from outside of the county to travis county to work, and it impacts many aspects that you have to deal with as commissioners, whether it is air quality or roads or jobs and infrastructure. And then the third category, we are healthy, on pages 11-13 and people under the age of 65 who have -- or who do not have health insurance. We are hoping the new health reform laws that have passed will help improve this indicator. The second one is a mental health indicator, those who report five or more days of poor mental health and this indicator along with the smoking indicator and the andobesity indicator are taking from behavior risk factor surveillance system which is a phone surveys that part of a national -- a national data collection and then finally, we have air quality, epa ozone requirements, and then finally we look at, we are safe, just, and engaged and for this one we are looking at violent crime rate and proportionality of arrest demographics and the community justice council is going to help us take a closer look at these indicators and understand these indicators better and then finally, voter turn out as a measure to civic engagement, sos this the first year vanessa said we had this report. We launched it in march. Sarah eckhardt,al long with our current chair, david yvonnes and laura morrison from city council and austin who is chair of the dashboard steering committee, introduced this report to the community and we were very pleased with the coverage we received from that and now what we are doing is we are taking a closer look at these indicators with community council televised forums on each of the independents and asking three questions at each of these indicators, where doe stand, what local groups or collaborations are working on the indicators and finally what more needs to be done and what can we do together as community action network? How can we work collaboratively to try to address these indicators? And this slide shows the televised forms, the schedule and this month, next monday, we are going to address vehicle miles traveled and air quality and these are two issues that will turn to campo to help us understand how we can deal with these issues better and i think one of the really interesting things about this dashboard is that it's helping community action network to really engage all aspects of our organization, this issue area groups that specialize and hone in on special aspects of transportation or basic needs, they help us design the forms that we door to community council, help us come with agenda, presentation and speakers for the forums and the city council is using their monthly forums to really analyze -- these indicators and they have a similar plate that presenters are asked and the most important question they are asked to answer is what are the three cross cutting, cross jurisdictional approaches we can take as can to try to improve this indicator, and so every third month the community council is taking time often from their forums to think about the information that they have received, the recommendations they have heard from all of these different presenters to say what is it that we need to recommend to the can board of directors so they are making quarterly reports to the can board of directors about these are the highlights of the forms we have received and these are the recommendations we think we should pay attention to and from that can staff is e condensing this information into brief reports and information will be used for next year's report and finally by the time we hold our can retreat in early november we will have better idea of what comes to the surface, what are the issues impacting across the board and what are the issues where cross jurisdictional action is really important and necessary to improving the situation? So as far as the next steps, these indicators are being used to keep the community conversation going about all of these important aspects of our community life and to find areas where we need to work together. And as we mentioned before, this is the first of what will be an annual report, so we will issue a new report next year and the conversation will continue. And i would encourage you to look another our website, you can access the report at www.caction.org. And the benefits of viewing the report online are that all of the areas that are in bright orange text, that links directly to the research that was used for the report and it also links directly to the partners and the collaboration that iss thaty such a big role in addressing these indicators.
>> thank you very much mary and i believe sherry has something to ask for the court.
>> good morning, sherrie fleming executive director for health and human services. As you can imagine, disseminating this information creates quite a financial impact for the community action network that primarily exists off the contributions off of its partners and so in light of that fact and how important we think it is for the staff to have the documents available to share across our community so we make sure that everyone is included in this conversation, we are requesting that the court approve up to $1,600 in printing through the travis county print shop so that we can assist in duplicating the can community dashboard and we are requesting up to $1,600 because we do have a quote from the print shop in 500 print run increments and so that's -- we will print the first 500 and then if there is a need for a second run, then we would do that, so that's a reason for an "up to" request.
>> actually, vanessa or mary, could you tell us a little bit about the history of this act? My understanding is that originally the report was envisioned to be primarily an electronic report. In order for us to be as green as possible and to save costs. The printing of the electronic report in a colored format is expensive. And so we looked to alternatives and the travis county print shop can print up an absolutely serviceable vision for significantly less than the original version that was only intended for a very limited print run. Is that an appropriate --
>> that's correct. Yes, we only printed 200 copies and we have had many requests for them and aren't able to meet the requests but they were expensive. I think it was $1,400 for 200. And your print shop is able to beat that price by a lot.
>> what would be the source of fund something.
>> it would be health and human services budget and we, i am afraid, we don't have a particular line item, but it would be the health and human services budget.
>> you are going to work with epo on identifying an appropriate line item?
>> yes.
>> second the motion.
>> thank you. Discussion of that motion? , to approve the printing request? All those in favor? This passes by unanimous vote. It is important that community members be able to read this report if they are interested enough to request a copy of it. Has a lot of valuable information and if we are ever able to take more action, then hopefully it will be based on appropriate information and so a lot of us working together to generate the information that would facilitate appropriate action, so these copies ought to help that.
>> okay.
>> can pre we proceed, or do you like to sit close to the can representatives?
>> yes, sir.
>> a good looking group, i understand.
>> [laughter]
>> i can't fight that. Thank you so much
>> thank you so much.
>> thank you very much. Appreciate it.
The Closed Caption log for this Commissioners Court agenda item is provided by Travis County Internet Services. Since this file is derived from the Closed Captions created during live cablecasts, there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors. This Closed Caption log is not an official record the Commissioners Court Meeting and cannot be relied on for official purposes. For official records please contact the County Clerk at (512) 854-4722.
Last Modified:
Tuesday, May 11, 2010 12:35 PM
