[Music] good morning everyone the may 25th 2022 meeting of the seattle city council's economic development technology and city light committee will begin it is 9 30 in the morning i am sarah nelson chair of the committee we have one item on our agenda which is a presentation from the office of economic development on their 2021 race and social justice initiative accomplishments and before we take role i want to note that vice chair and council president juarez has been excused from this meeting will the clerk please call the rule council member herbald councilmember salon president councilmember strauss president chair nelson present and we will uh make sure that we um that we announce if uh when council member herbal joins okay now would be the time for public comment but i see no one signed up for public comment is that correct that is correct all right if there is no objection the agenda will be adopted and i see no objection all right so um moving right along we are now ready to uh proceed to our items of business today we'll be joined by the office of economic development uh interim director mark mcintyre and his team to present uh their rsji accomplishment uh for 2021 and i will leave it to um interim director director markham to introduce himself and other members that we'll be presenting thanks councilmember nelson really appreciate it uh phillip sit from our team is going to drive our powerpoint so philip if you can load that up we'll get going beautiful thank you um good morning everybody happy wednesday my name is mark mcintyre i'm the interim director for the office of economic development uh thank you councilmember nelson for inviting us to come in and share this presentation with you this is actually my first presentation to a committee since stepping into the role about 12 weeks ago so very excited to be here and um thanks also council members sawant and strauss for for joining us this morning um today we're going to present to you uh our race and social justice initiative accomplishments from 2021 um next slide philip please uh and what we're gonna do also though is is start with kind of a who we are what we do give you a sense of how oed um is changing uh with with under mayor harrell's uh new administration as well as just the changing economic conditions um so what are we trying to do who who are we trying to become who are we trying to serve and how are we trying to serve them then we're going to talk about how uh racial equity and rsji principles are critical to economic development a little bit about how we're putting that into action including some of the successes and challenges and then talk about our commitments for the future um so i'm going to start out and give you kind of a preamble and then i'm going to introduce some of our team members to talk about our accomplishments over the last year um i'll note that while we're talking a little bit about the racial equity toolkits that we did we're also going to talk more broadly about our covet 19 response and how racial equity was a key part of how we drove some of those programs um so it's a little bit broader than what we were tasked to do but i think you're going to hear a good story and hopefully set us up for future conversations uh yeah please i'm sorry to interrupt but i want to we've been joined by councilmember herbal welcome councilmember um all right next slide please fill up so we have this huge opportunity in front of us um kind of emerging from the pandemic and having had uh our economy and certain industries in certain classes of workers really decimated um and so as we think about what's next it's really not a recovery back to something it's trying to build something new and so we're trying to think about what's oed's identity and role in not just the seattle economic development ecosystem but the regional economic development ecosystem and how do we make sure that we're actually playing a particular part and kind of leveraging a lot of our partners through partnership rather than just kind of operating in a silo which has sometimes been the risk of of what seattle's done in the past so our mission what we'd like to see is build an inclusive economy where everyone in seattle can fully participate and then our role is driving economic growth through strategies investments that open doors remove barriers to individual business and community wealth building opportunities particularly for communities that have been excluded from such economic opportunities so that again starts to show you kind of the focus towards racial equity and social justice issues just just in our mission and how we're operating making sure that we're hewing towards communities that have excluded from wealth building opportunities next slide please um and this is just to kind of show that we we do a lot of work with a lot of different folks we have kind of a broad span of influence um we're not uh just working with businesses we're not just working with workers we work with businesses we work with industries neighborhoods workforce all of those are kind of within our our purview so it's a lot of people and a lot of different organizations that we work with but as we go to the next slide i think it's more important to think about how we're working with those folks and that's kind of where i think the real difference is next slide philip really what we need to be is an orchestrator we need to be a dot connector we need to be a catalyst within this regional economic development system we're not just going we're probably never going to be the biggest funder sitting in any table nor are we going to be kind of necessarily the biggest player at any given table what we really need to do is uh think about how do we drive alignment and how do we hunt for multiplier opportunities when we're spending a dollar or we're making a play we want to make sure that we're leveraging that against other public private or philanthropic dollars or efforts um so we don't necessarily uh again we're not necessarily going to be the big dollars in but we can be the team that puts the deal together or is the first money in to catalyze a new idea or bring new voices to the table in like a unique or kind of innovative way and so as you see here really what we want to be is have a set of strategies for businesses that come to us needing help so we're responding to them and helping navigator connect to resources but we also need to have enough capacity and space set aside to initiate new things to really be proactive and think around the corner and kind of hunt for those opportunities and put together those deals and projects that might not otherwise happen in a reactive mode so we've got to have both the proactive and reactive strategies built out and i'll just give a quick example there hopefully you saw recently the work that our team did in cooperation with the state the port council member morales many others to [Music] help save the seattle maritime academy which is a hugely important workforce training tool for our maritime industry again we weren't necessarily the big money in but we could connect the dots and kind of pull the pieces together to make sure that that got off the ground and stayed as a key piece of our our maritime industry um next slide please uh so a lot of this leads though to how racial equity is going to be core to this work uh this quote that i've got here is something that dr raphael bostic who's the chair of the atlanta fed said in in the wake of george floyd's murder which today is is the unfortunate anniversary of um and he said systemic racism is a yoke that drags on the american economy and that this country has a both moral and economic imperative to end these unjust and destructive practices and in 2020 that just rang so true to me the fact that we have this both moral and economic imperative and so as we think about economic development we want that to be one of our north stars this moral and economic imperative driving our work and that if we're doing it right we're actually creating more opportunity and more wealth creation throughout our for our local uh local and regional economy than if we're just going back recovering back to something that was and so again trying to really think about what an inclusive economy is and bringing together individual wealth business wealth and community wealth in a unified in a unified way is going to be really really important so this is part of our north star as we think about where we're going next with oed and the projects that we're going to put together the partnerships that we're going to build um and hopefully the the wins that we get for for the city in the region uh next slide please so as we're thinking about doing that there's obviously challenges and opportunities and i'm not going to read the list here but just picking a couple certainly we're limited in what we can do as economic developers there are other states other cities other regions that have much more direct tools for economic development we have some limits here in our state so we've got to be very creative about how we navigate around those we've also got and i'll just be frank about this we've had five directors in five years over at oed we've had a huge amount of staff turn over we're still trying to fill vacancies as quickly as possible so we've got some internal capacity issues which we really need to address uh so that we can get again out of that reactive cycle and into that more proactive thinking about how to build um toward a future we've also got some issues with how we are communicating what we do this language access issue is is really important for us to get right because we can build the best programs in the world but if they're not reaching the populations that we really want to try to work with then then we're doing it wrong and so that's a huge challenge as we kind of look ahead and think about building towards the future but then as i mentioned some of the opportunities are there's there is a lack of regional alignment and so if we can be a leader in that regional um in that regional construct we can really generate some good ideas and some good projects that leverage federal dollars that work with the state work with kind of our other public private and philanthropic partners to build some really unique and interesting models and i'll just note that one of the interesting ones that we built when i was back at the chamber was the housing connector group which is now spun off into its own uh own self-sustaining non-profit and doing some really good work getting people housed and that still exists as a public private partnership and i just think that that model is is so keen and there's so many things we can do for economic development there um the final opportunity that i'll highlight is storytelling we have such incredible businesses and workers here in this in this city and oed wants to be that chief storyteller to kind of lift up those stories and make sure that we're both highlighting the challenges they're experiencing but also celebrating those successes and so one that i'll mention is we recently launched our seattle restored program which is helping matchmake between um bypac business owners and vacant spaces downtown and the tas we're a project business that's down close to the stadiums in the pioneer square area um going down there and visiting with uh the business owner and kind of learning about what she's doing and how excited she is to have this space um and her ability to import some goods from africa and support some uh entrepreneurs back there while also supporting herself as an entrepreneur it's just such a great story and so figuring out how do we tell more of those and really kind of lift those up that can help inspire kind of future generations is is something that's keen on our mind as well um next slide please phillip uh here we're talking again so as we're trying to retool and reorganize ourselves uh we're also trying to rebuild our team culture we have a skeleton crew right now as i mentioned that's been through a lot so there's definitely some just sensitivity around making sure that people feel included people feel like there's transparency people feel like they belong as part of this group and so we've got some real work to do especially as we talk about race racial issues on our team for instance we have both of our change team leads are out on extended leaves right now and so one of the near-term opportunities for us is to rebuild our change team really try to invite some of our new staff in and make sure that people feel included and like they belong and that we're being clear and direct about these issues and not trying to shy away from them so this is going to be a huge team culture building moment for us uh over the rest of the year as we kind of add some new team members in and make sure that rate talking about race and social justice issues isn't a sideline thing but it's core to our identity and and the team that we're trying to build next slide please which really leads us to looking backward at some of our racial equity work last year so we're going to start off talking about some of our racial equity toolkit highlights so our rats and i'm very pleased to introduce scott bluskalick from our team who's going to talk about the shop to the beat program its origin the impact that it's had and kind of where it's going next so scott i'll turn it over to you thank you very much director mcintyre and good morning chair nelson and committee members thank you for this opportunity to present to you today my name is scott kluskalek and i am the nightlife business advocate for the city and i am also the program manager for the shop to the beat program and i will be presenting today on the racial equity toolkit that um informed and continues to be in progress on the shop to the beat program uh next slide philip thank you so wanted to give a little background on this the impetus for this re threat was um a webinar that i and my colleague mellie darby attended back in august of 2020 on racism and the nighttime economy sponsored by a group called 24-hour dallas and some of the topics that were discussed in there included exclusionary practices such as dress codes or guest lists that were designed to keep people of color out of certain establishments and venues income disparity between uh musicians and artists uh uh uh bypoc uh artists and um uh white artists uh and then cultural exploitation by white owned venues um which included sort of using uh bipoc musicians and and artists in a certain way to um to to promote their their venues so this raises the obvious question to us if this is happening in dallas this clearly must be happening as well in seattle and what does that look like um and for a little uh background information on the the context that this was happening in the code closures that had happened uh with all the venues so shutting down the entire uh industry had basically started spurring conversations on what is building back the music ecosystem more economically look like how do we do it there was a recognition that the the industry was not equitable um prior to the closures so taking this time how do we take this time to actually look at that and and work towards a more equitable industry um and this included both locally and nationally the washington uh nightlife and music association and the national independent venue association started generating these conversations as well so it was clear to us that we really needed to gather information and start talking and engaging with stakeholders and figuring out how to use the information that we've received to inform city policy making and how we design programs so next slide so we decided to start having these conversations um we wanted to start small uh i'm sorry i see sharon nelson you have a question i'm sorry you're a mute yeah i had a specific question about um this industry sector so before we proceed past this i'll let you finish and then i'll ask that question thanks okay thank you um so we again we started uh decided to start fairly small um we reached out to bypoc industry professionals uh in seattle uh to have one-on-one conversations with them to sort of lay the groundwork um get a sense on a very personal level of what their uh their uh experiences were um and these folks ranged from uh there was a spectrum of professionals including promoters producers um artists musicians themselves uh managers and technicians and we asked them uh some of these questions not limited to these questions but this was sort of the basis of our conversation around accessibility um what it was like for them working in the industry any microaggressions or over instances of racism and exclusion that they had experienced and income disparities for them or the ability to monetize uh their work um we asked how the seattle industry compared to other cities um and then we started looking at um okay this is a we knew we wanted to have larger conversations beyond these so who else should be at the table um what does the change look like and how can or should even the city lead or support the report like are we the people to be able to to really lead this um next slide so while we heard many of the similar things that we heard during the um the dallas webinar we also heard some things that were very um specific to seattle itself and the industry here one of the top things was the uh significant changes that seattle's nightlife and entertainment landscape had been going under which preceded covet so this wasn't just because of the loss of venues due to the pandemic but that there was already had been the systemic loss of venue closures lots of community spaces and lots of cultural programming we heard a lot about how there used to be just culturally in seattle um things like day parties or house parties that were um a chance for that were community-led community built and they were able to bring folks together to spontaneously um do performances and um and share share experiences and those had um diminished and had disappeared and a lot of that had to do with gentrification with loss of space um with people being priced out of the city and artists moving to other towns lack of opportunities which was dr were driving um folks to other cities to pursue their their careers um we also learned that here nightlife and entertainment relationships are really uh very uh relationship and reference based so it's about who you know and if you don't have the ability to get in on the ground floor if you don't have the ability to network if you don't have access to networking um air systems then you're you're kept out and then [Music] another highlight of it was due to that there was a big opportunity and need for further education and industry awareness and peer mentorships to build help build up that networking muscle next slide please so we had a plan that we were going to um uh obviously have larger conversations on this um but that raised some questions for us um again is the city the right convener for this should we be the lead on this or should we just be a support system that helps facilitate a conversation that comes organically from the community who should be at the table again how do we reach them how do we bring them in another barrier uh to moving forward was also we felt very very strongly that we needed to compensate people for their time in participating in these conversations um and that if we were to be the lead convener that we would need to get a facilitator from the community to delete that and we wanted to be able to pay them so there was a budget constraint um that we would need to identify where that money would come from and how we would we would identify that and then finally of course because of covid how would we um uh convene large groups of people during the pandemic in a way that was meaningful and allowed for um for meaningful conversation um but while we were noodling on this and we were trying to sort of come to an agreement about where how this was all going to happen um the harper funds started happening and they were where we were being asked to um uh submit ideas for um for how to use those funds and how to get them out into the community and our um former colleague pedro gomez had this idea that eventually became the shop to the beat program which was we have these two sectors retail businesses and musicians who have been extremely hard hit by uh the pandemic how do we match them together and support both at the same time so when that came up and we started exploring that we realized that this was a really great opportunity to utilize some of those conversations that we had originally had and some of the information that we had heard and how do we use that to inform and create this program to be as equitable as possible and to really address some of those issues so um giving you a little overview on on shop to the beat itself what is it it is a program where we pair uh musicians to perform live music in non-traditional venues such as retail stores gyms coffee shops jewelry shops furniture stores so places where you wouldn't be expecting a musician to be playing you walk in and there's somebody there in the background and um the idea here was how do we address some of these issues that we heard so addressing lack of venues by creating new venues addressing a lack of access to the venues that we had heard by removing that middle man and created being the producers ourselves placing them in the venues providing an opportunity to connect in community that was lost by those loss of house parties and then parties that we had heard about by placing musicians really directly into the community um and addressing uh issues of uh just the ability to perform and the ability to make money so what we did was we partnered with an organization called gigs4u they run the music at the airport program that i think you may all be familiar with um and they already are in a position to place musicians so we the city were paying the musicians to provide free performances for the venues with the hope that that would drive foot traffic and drive retail sales for those businesses where they perform so those are the overall goals that we were looking to set here um we broke it into two programs because we wanted to be able to sort of do proof of concept so we did a pilot program in um in the holiday season during the holiday shopping season we had 27 participating businesses including such businesses as queen care in the central district hula viola on rainier avenue black coffee northwest in ballard um and we had a pretty good geographic range across the city in terms of where our businesses were um and of the 27 businesses we did have 10 located in what oed identifies as high priority neighborhoods now we had set a target of really um uh uh promoting and targeting uh bipoc businesses um and i think in looking at the pilot program we realized we didn't quite hit that goal um and that we need to that's an area that we need to improve on we are coming back this summer with a larger program that will continue this and we have used this opportunity in between to do surveys of um both the musicians and the businesses to understand what worked what didn't work and what we need to improve and that is one of the things that we really need to improve um we did we did set a priority of um uh targeting a majority of bypoc artists to be a participants and we did have over 60 who identified as bipoc participating uh in the program so um we certainly look forward to continuing this as i said this ret is in progress because we continue to look at the program and tweak it um and we look forward to coming back in the summer partnering with other there's a great opportunity here we missed of partnering with other departments in the city like the office of arts and culture or the department of neighborhoods i think that will help us improve our outreach and our ability to bring musicians into this and and bring in a greater array of small businesses so next slide i just wanted to leave you here with a couple of quotes from some of our participants micho was a participating artist and really spoke to the community focus of it and his ability to connect in there and then wendy who is a owner of the jewelry store in west seattle who was just super enthusiastic about the program um but not only for herself but really in the the ability to promote artists and the fact that she could never have afforded to have something like this in her her business herself um and so she really appreciated having it so um thank you very much for the opportunity to present on this ret thank you scott uh i really appreciate your presentation scott also hosted a meet and greet with the music commission just last night and i mean we heard a lot of these same thing same themes from the folks that showed up that how deeply impacted they've been through covid especially with venues shutting down and still being slow to reopen and so a program like this where we can really again break down barriers and open doors for musicians create that vibrancy and try to have the win-win of getting those musicians paid and getting them gigs but also hopefully increasing retail sales is just really smart and a good example of kind of that dot connecting and orchestrating that we want to do to generate economic activity across the city so thanks a lot scott next slide please so we're going to transition here and talk a little bit about our covet 19 response because this obviously was was a large bulk of the work that we did at oed and there was a specific focus on racial equity for a lot of the work that we we did you can see some of the um some of the things some of the actual activities that we did and then i'm going to turn it over to heidi hall who's going to talk about from our only in seattle team was going to talk about a really innovative way that we were getting money out on the ground to support our neighborhoods um so heidi i'll turn it over to you all right thank you director mcintyre and members of the committee so again my name is heidi hall i work with the neighborhood business districts team at oed also known as only in seattle um so as we i think as we all know the pandemic has been just extremely disruptive with disproportionate impacts experienced in our black and indigenous and people of color communities it's well in small businesses it's well documented nationally and was true in seattle as well so we've been working really closely with our partners to understand what they're experiencing in their neighborhoods and to meet district partners and small businesses where they are so this included helping get access to ppe uh being a conduit for timely information helping them navigate federal and state relief resources and getting those to businesses in need so we've had deep engagement with our partners um throughout the pandemic and the needs that they were seeing in their districts and and hearing from their small businesses really informed the neighborhood economic recovery fund that i want to share with you guys today so that fund was really designed to support community-led strategies for economic recovery and was done designed in a way to intentionally focus on on racial equity so we invested nearly six million dollars of federal relief funding to support neighborhood economic recovery as outlined in the seattle rescue plan so investments were allocated through direct grants to neighborhood business district organizations as well as a public request for proposals to fund community-driven ideas for economic recovery so i'm going to focus a little bit on the rfp so oed received 119 proposals from the rfp requesting more than nine million dollars in funding and so the grant guidelines and scoring criteria prioritized communities most impacted by the depart by the pandemic as i had highlighted earlier uh we did we worked with our colleagues to work on an interdepartmental data analysis that identified highly impacted census tracts to inform our equity criteria so this overlaid things like uh coveted case rates and job losses with the city's race and equity index and displacement risk index as one way to identify those areas most impacted we partnered we leveraged those partnerships a lot of the language access work that we had done for panda for pandemic response communications uh to target outreach to communities most impacted and then we also instituted a multi-tier review process that included a community review panel to to bring in that broader perspective as we were evaluating the proposals so 25 organizations were funded through the rfp which represents 1.35 million and just as a quick highlight on some of the the outcomes of that process 85 percent of the funding was invested in our equity districts which we use to define our high displacement risk um neighborhoods those that have been historically redlined or or that have experienced institutional racism and historic disinvestment so 52 percent of our grantees um are black or indigenous lead grantee organizations 28 percent of organizations are led by persons from other communities of color the other investment strategy are direct grants to neighborhood business district organizations were another 28 grands and those also prioritize communities most impacted by the pandemic uh with higher direct grants awarded to our equity districts and our other districts prioritizing outreach and support for byprod businesses in their districts uh so about 60 percent of the direct grant funds were awarded to equity districts which was another 11 grands um so community grantees are implementing a variety of activities and projects that directly help small businesses communities and local economies recover from the impacts of the pandemic many of the proposed projects actually focus on activations and bringing foot traffic and customers into the districts to support neighborhood businesses as well as public realm improvements culturally relevant business outreach and support and just as a couple of examples again that we can't go through all of them now but just a couple examples i wanted to share you know in lake city for example they are they launched a business incubator in arts and cultural space that includes a year-round pop-up market for bypass vendors and farmers they're expanding the 31st avenue market street for eight weeks during the summer providing outdoor seating and increased revenue for adjacent businesses we did find a lot of our small smaller bypak immigrant owned businesses were not able to take advantage of some of those free street use permits so this is one example where our neighborhood business districts are taking the lead to really organize some of these shared outdoor seating areas um so that businesses can see some of the benefits from that and then they'll you know do some promotion as well and they also have an eight-week training program uh in partnership with the refugee artisan initiative that was supported as well so that's one example we also have multiple activations and vendor markets being supported including black arts love retail project which is focused on showcasing and promoting the work of black artists and bipark business owners anchored in the central district but they're also pulling from southeast seattle as well there's going to be multiple activations in chinatown international districts celebrating the you know the culture and history of the district as well as supporting public realm improvements and partnering to bring customers into the district and support local businesses so the way that those activations are being structured and supported and promoted really thinking about bringing in bringing people back into the neighborhood supporting the local businesses and helping them be more sustainable and just kind of in closing for 2022 we're going to continue to partner with our districts and grantees to support neighborhood businesses there's a number of opportunities to leverage the equitable community initiative investments um including things like technical assistance which is going to be rolling out now including things like commercial space assistance financial health also an expansion of seattle restored that director mcintyre mentioned earlier citywide and so we're actually going through a ret on that right now so look forward to presenting on that next year and um yeah a lot of good things and hopefully we can come back at some point and with our community partners to talk more about some of those projects and activities so i will hand it back to director mcintyre thank you thanks heidi really appreciate you walking us through that as we think about like getting smarter about economic development certainly we want to look outside of ourselves at other cities maybe even internationally and try and steal the best ideas possible but we also need to have a balance of of lifting up the ideas and the thinking that are already in our communities and i think this this rfp is such a good example of that and so we need more of this type of activity because really from the city perspective as we think about helping businesses and helping communities build wealth it starts with listening and building trust and so this type of rfp where we're actually investing in community-based ideas helping build the community helping activate and like generate that vibrancy we need more of that so also don't be surprised if you see in our budget proposal more funding for this type of activity because it's just it's just really crucial to reactivating our neighborhoods and again turning the corner from kind of emergency relief to future prosperity for our neighborhoods so thanks again heidi uh next slide please phillip so now we're going to turn to another really cool program this one really is a perfect example of kind of dot connecting and generating a win-win it's our youth web design program you might have heard a little bit about it previously we just reopened the next round for this program it's helping youth get new technical skills for web design and helping generate websites uh for uh particularly for bi-pac uh business owners but i'll let anissa kudabashian from our key industries and workforce development team talk to you a little bit about it but i'm really excited about this because again it's a good example of trying to create win wins and do that dot connecting over at oed so it needs to take it away thank you um as director mcintyre mentioned i'm anissa kashbakian i'm the technology and greatest creative workforce advocate on the key industries and workforce development team at oed i'm just going to start off by saying it's really no secret that this region has been really greatly influenced by the global tech industry so this is why it's been of the most important importance for us to invest in technology programs and efforts that are truly rooted in the local community such as the youth web design program and this program not only teaches young people technical skills that will significantly support their career growth but it also allows them to earn money and learn at an early age that their work is really greatly valued and truly makes a difference so in late 2020 the youth web design program was piloted in partnership with the urban league of metropolitan seattle as a reaction to two specific needs that we saw were greatly exacerbated by the pandemic one youth empowerment and youth employment and internship opportunities that support sustainable career development were greatly impacted due to the stay-at-home order and then second is the need for small businesses to have a web presence especially minority owned businesses namely by puck and immigrant owned and we know that the most marginalized bipac individuals and communities both in the realm of workforce and small businesses experience inequities and the most lack of opportunities so um what this program is at a high level is high school students so far we've been working with garfield high school students most if not all identify as black african and or african american are taught website design and as a final project they have been creating a professional website for a local a local small business and the young people receive a stipend for their work and um i want to note that we also cover the expenses for the website and the domain for a year and this year we're now expanding this program to professional creatives as well to support our creative industries goals and help local creatives gain employment and or gig work and this really connects to the creatives that scott got to work with through shop the beat so the goals for the youth work for the youth workforce goals um are to equip young people with interest industry standard skills [Music] namely coding html css and java and they're able to earn technical certification and they also are provided paid learning opportunity and portfolio development and they receive skills that help them establish uh themselves a career a potential career in tech or in a creative field or entrepreneurship and it just allows them to um be empowered in their next step in their career trajectory and as i mentioned before it also gives them leadership skills and confidence in knowing that they can create something professional at a really young age and as i mentioned also earlier majority of the participating students do identify as black african and or african american and it's been really important for us to empower them to be competitive in career fields that by bipolar communities are really highly underrepresented for the small business goals it really is to get small businesses online who have little to no web presence we've been prioritizing outreach to bypass small businesses particularly those in equity districts um and we're like the goal is to support businesses with the highest digital access barriers and for the creative professionals which i mentioned is the new it's a new addition to this program starting this upcoming cohort um we really want to ensure that we're supporting local creatives who have no websites or have no uh have limited web presence and we want to help them procure work and um and some lessons learned some challenges and lessons learned in the the last two years of this program has been one of the biggest ones has been outreach and case management the small businesses and to address that we recently hired a canvasser who's been visiting bypoc businesses prioritizing equity districts and going door-to-door to spread the word about this program and also supporting those business owners who have signed up and require more one-on-one support to be on boarded and we're continuing to look at ways to meet these businesses where they're at and lastly it's important to share that the youth web design program has received clipper investment which is allowing us to scale this as well as possibly add additional elements to the program such as covering the website and domain costs for maybe two to three years adding possibly adding a social media and marketing element to it we're also looking at expanding this to other high schools such as rainier beach high school we are working with the seattle public schools right now to see how we can have the young people learn earn cte elective credits and what you can expect this year which director mcintyre mentioned as we have a cohort coming up in the summer and we have one in the fall and that's it so i really thank you for this opportunity to share about the youth web design program i'm going to hand this back to director mcintyre thanks anisa um again just just a shiny example of a win for youth workforce development a win for small business digital access and a win for building trust and partnership with the urban league so again dot connecting at its finest and really trying to figure out how we scale these things to create more opportunities in all of those buckets uh next slide please fill up so uh wrapping us up our final presenter is the man who's been driving this presentation philip sit who's going to talk to us a little bit about some of the activation work that we did in 2021 so philip take it away thank you director mcintyre and good morning committee share and committee members um my slide is really just a quick reflection of some of the different partnerships that we did in 2021 as we were reopening the city starting off with the welcome back weeks in collaboration with office of arts and culture department neighborhoods parks and others around may and june we started thinking about you know as we reached on the milestone of being one of the first major cities to obtain 70 vaccination rates and knowing that downtown was hit with a kind of double whammy of you know workforce not being present and how do we kind of elevate people to come back to downtown and support those small businesses uh so working with our community partners as listed here we did a series of activations uh across the downtown core oed's role was really to kind of elevate south downtown uh because of the anti-asian bias that was occurring around the region and the country we want to really focus as our community partners were focusing on the downtown core and center city oed was tasked to kind of how do we support pioneer square all the way to little saigon so we partner with intentionalists which is an organization that highlights and spotlights our bypass small businesses around the city and as the activation was taking place we ran promotions to highlight businesses that i would say kind of like the hidden gems of our city businesses that uh were working around the clock during the epidemic and also didn't have necessarily kind of like a visible presence on digital media similar to what anissa was saying in terms of her program with the urban league um happily announced that in terms of our full report on the downtown recovery activations we had about 500 businesses that were supported directly or indirectly through campaign dollars and marketing dollars eighty percent of those businesses were identified as women or minority owned we also were able to employed about 200 creatives during those activations in june july and in the also the fall and 90 of those creative types kind of dovetailing back to scott's uh presentation on that particular industry ninety percent of the creatives that were hired were also self-identified as bipod so great uh set of events that occurred in 2021 and as heidi was mentioning kind of our neighborhood investments a lot of the best practices that started from the welcome back week's events in 2021 were able to be leveraged for our community partners in south seattle and north seattle and west seattle in terms of as they were provided with neighborhood grants how do they bring those kind of like activations in their urban uh business corridors uh secondarily following how we actually were able to do kind of like an outdoor gathering of that size was because as i mentioned we were i think one of the first cities to hit 70 vaccination rate uh in collaboration with seattle fire department king county public health in the state but we also recognized that there was still a lot of folks you know working two jobs that maybe not have direct access to schedule an appointment for the vast scenes that was available in our region so we were tasked by the mayor's office and the fire department to set up kind of 15 different vaccination pop-ups in neighborhoods and events where we can reach community members where they were we had great collaborations and partnerships with small businesses out in west seattle we did a ice cream giveaway with husky deli we had over 125 people get their vaccinations in april and may during that time frame uh in the youth district we partner with you can see kind of the image of that kind of discount and we were able to provide ice cream for the first 50 people in the u district supporting also a bipod ice cream shop called sweet alchemy um those uh in all in all those were great events we were able to again reach community members where they were um you know maybe a farmer's market a community event or just showing up uh in sodom where the industrial employees were still working around the clock during phase one and phase two um pivoting a little bit in terms of the clean city initiative this was a multi-department initiative to kind of spruce up the city as we were reopening in phase three and phase four oed received a portion of that funding in collaboration with seattle public utilities and also parks and sdot um looking from an equity lens our bias had a lot of capacity and they were doing a lot of great work during the epidemic and most of them have some type of vendor service to do pressure washing graffiti removal and street cleaning um so we made a decision um a strategic one to allocate some of the funding to the non-bia equity districts just so that they could get some of that beautification um on their public realm so we partner with a non-profit called uplift northwest some of you guys might be familiar with that organization they formerly were called a millionaires club they employed folks that are returning back to the workforce so we were pleased to provide half of the funding we received we allocated to uplift northwest so that they could provide clean services for this kind of reopening period of three to four months across 18 different neighborhoods that were outside of the bia ecosystem um all in all i think about 50 individuals were paid a market rate uh in terms of this program in order to do some of the public realms work so kind of this is like a holistic uh recap that kind of i think intersects a little bit of you know the neighborhood investments the height you mentioned the creative industry which you know definitely took a hit during the pandemic in scott's presentation and uh a nissa in terms of digital access i think we saw a lot of small businesses were able to happily pivot because they had that kind of capacity but we also saw a lot of small businesses where they were um really facing a lot of struggles without you know a digital presence or were not situated in like an urban village like columbia city where uh there was still a lot of employees high wage earners that were working from home uh we have some fascinating data from 2021 where some neighborhoods actually saw foot traffic increase from 2019 as we were reopening the city including ballard and council member strauss's office uh district as well so um so in closing i'm going to turn it back over to director mcintyre but that kind of gives you a little bit hopefully a little bit more layering of the recovery work that our office was doing in 2021 thanks very much phillip uh next slide i think we're reaching the end and then we'll be happy to take take some questions here but just just to wrap it up um as i said at the top you know we're trying to rethink oed's identity and role we really want to be seen as an orchestrator and a dot connector and make sure that we're trying to um trying to find ways to break down barriers and open doors to wealth building opportunities for communities that have particularly for communities that have been excluded from such opportunities and that we're defining inclusive economies where everyone can fully participate um and that we're generating individual business and community wealth kind of holistically uh hopefully you've seen kind of a clear thread through some of our work last year centering racial equity doing a lot of outreach to different communities and really trying to focus on where where there was the deepest impact from covid the different industries the different geographies the different demographics um and so going forward we're gonna make sure that we center racial equity in in our work as we think about economic revitalization workforce development it's gonna be a core part of our planning not a not an add-on but kind of a key part of it um i mentioned earlier that we've gotta we've gotta figure out how we communicate what we do a little bit better both the storytelling but also where those opportunities are and what those programs might be um and then finally as as i said we we're still a little bit of a skeleton crew over here and so this team did really great work last year and they're doing great work now but as we look at the future and we look at kind of what we want to do we're going to need to invest in our people we've got to invest in our infrastructure and our technology we've got to invest in our team culture and make sure that we've got a really positive forward-thinking group of people working on these issues so those are a couple of things or that's kind of wrapping up what we did last year in a look ahead into the future we're going to be excited to come back to this committee later on this summer and give kind of a fuller explanation of uh our work plan our priorities and kind of what we're trying to set up now and going forward but hopefully that gives you a glimpse of some of the great work that this team has done i want to thank phillip heidi anissa and scott for helping present for their great work um there's a lot of others on the team that put in some great effort as well uh with that we'll wrap it up and see if you guys have any questions or comments thanks very much thank you so much team for for outlining this and i do look forward to future presentations i just want to say that um when you talk about the identity of oed uh to me um i've always believed that key to race and social justice is providing more opportunities for wealth generation and in that can be home ownership or um you know access to count to capital for um business owners in bipolar communities and uh any number of things but basically oeds to me your identity is um helping helping people to start and grow businesses in seattle and that in itself is um is facilitating wealth generation and so it seems as though that is what we're talking about today is basically in in the core dna of the of your department uniquely in the city so thank you very much for this presentation and for the work that you've done in the past everybody there who's been with oed for a while and uh and going forward so um in my inauguration speech i laid out the top two priorities for my committee and they were revitalizing downtown in neighborhoods small business districts and preventing the displacement of minority-owned businesses in communities that are undergoing rapid gentrification and to that end i've met with uh leaders of um equitable community to develop organizations those that are um are partners in the crescent collaborative i've met with cdfi directors and uh and also mike fong who is the regional director of the small business administration to figure out how do we get more capital into the hands of people that have been excluded um because of uh because of the fact that um they don't have the equity or the property that um traditional banks require for commercial loans i'm interested in land use and building code changes that will make it easier for businesses that could be displaced from neighborhoods that are um that are undergoing change like for example when a big development comes in perhaps it's a uh an affordable housing um project that comes in and uh places four or five store fronts or whatever how can we make it easier for those businesses that would be displaced to move back into those spaces start small you know be able to uh to grow as their business grows um land use code changes maybe even a program that's modeled on the multi-family tax exemption program that would incentivize building owners to cover the cost for tenant improvements so that we can keep those businesses here and those jobs here so um is the core priority of mine and your department has the know-how and the historic knowledge um on uh what needs to be done so i look forward to working really closely with you going forward and what i um when i raised my hand earlier when we were talking about nightlife i just wanted to uh uh getting back to dot connecting which is a key function of both oed and city council i believe when in i think it was march maybe it was february my office uh met scott at uh el corazon and we were talking with dana the owner about um how important nightlife is not just as um as it's because it supports our artists but also as um as job creators because there are so many people that uh that enter into their professions working at music venues um doing the lighting and sound engineering and all of that and they were talking about ways i don't know they put forward that it would be really helpful if if the city could figure out how to strengthen that pipeline of um you know between uh people that uh that are looking for well-paid jobs in our creative industries and and the uh the owners of venues and whatever ways that we as a city could serve as a conduit for those opportunities so hoping that we could talk more about that and also yeah scott and philip and i and councilmember lewis were all at the music commission's event last night thank you very much for convening that uh and they are starting their um let's see city of music revision which is their strategic plan and they had one from 2010 to 2020 then the pandemic hit and so they are uh they're restarting that divisioning process and so i expect that oed will be involved and i would love to help um facilitating their priorities too and then finally one last thing and then i'll open it up for questions when you were talking about uh the work that you're doing with um youth and digital equity i never knew about that program and i'm really glad to know because i was thinking you know what small businesses really need in this town that don't have it already is a website because we've seen how important that is so i'm really glad to hear about that work um and when it comes to you know helping our young creatives figure out how to make a paycheck from their art i want to lift up the work of unified outreach which does just that they work with youth in in high schools and uh in summer programs that basically uh help people think about young people and crime and this is they frame their work partly as gun violence prevention they help young people think about how they can actually break into the industry so if they're interested in in video well what do they need to do what are the steps they need to take to get into actually um professionalizing their art but in any case i will stop talking now and open it up for questions or comments from my community members chair i'll take this opportunity just to say thank you to the entire oed team the work that you do is incredible it is the underpinning of so many people's success and i think you intervene in failure more often than people realize to be that safety net for businesses and i really can't thank you enough for all the work that you've done through the pandemic you were crucial in making sure that the ballard farmers market was the first farmer's market to reopen after when the pandemic shut it down even though people were still getting their groceries from the farmer's market um and that's just one of countless countless countless numbers of ways that you've helped me my community and our entire city so with that and i mean we're not even talking about i'm i haven't even started talking about nightlife or the saving of bumbershoot or all that is to come as we rebuild a better seattle because we don't need to return to the way we were we get to return to a place that we've been better than ever before and i'm trusting in your leadership because i see you as trusted partners keep it up go forth and let's make the seattle the seattle we know it can be council member herbal thank you so much uh and thank you consumer spouse for good to hear um some optimism around turning the corner here um i want to just also thank um oed not just for all the work that you do generally that is so important in ensuring that we have a thriving economy and thriving uh business districts but i also want to thank you really for the emphasis that you have um shared with us in this presentation today on the creative sector uh we know that uh before the pandemic the creative sector really dr drove a significant portion of seattle's economy and we also know that um the creative sector was among the very hardest hit by covid and um is predicted uh not just specifically here in seattle but generally uh um the creative sector is anticipated to recover the slowest so um really again appreciate that that focus um love that you um shared with us that the west seattle junction was among the locations that benefited from uh shop to the beat that's super exciting um i just had
2022-05-30