 Community Development Block Grant 50th as well as CD week that we are celebrating community development and we are going to start. First, we have Community Development Director Felicia Kilgore. Thank you, Charmaine. Yes, I am Felicia Kilgore, Director of Community Development and welcome. It is a beautiful day today. April 1st, 2024 coming right off the Easter. So we're here today to kick off National Community Development Week and celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Community Development Block Grant. What an amazing grant. Wonderful milestone. So we're here to honor each and every one of you here this afternoon this morning as we commemorate this milestone to renew our community of community development. This week, let's celebrate the success of our collective endeavors under the dedicated individuals and organizations driving positive change and inspire new ideas and innovation for the future. Before we delve into today's program this morning, please take a moment to connect with your fellow attendees, exchange ideas, celebrate the achievements that we have brought together. Once again, I want to welcome all of you to the kickoff of Community Development Week and the 50th anniversary of Community Development Block Grant. At this time, I want to recognize our speakers that we have today. Also want to recognize the members from CCN members. If you raise your hand. Thank you. Thank you. Our speakers for this morning. We will have Miss Councilwoman Tina Herbert. She's a representative of our Council District One. Also the chairperson of the Community Development Task Force. Secondly, we will have Mayor Rickerman, the mayor of City of Columbia. Also want to recognize Councilman Tyler Bailey. We'll also have words from Ms. Diane Moll. She's the vice president of the Alumni Advancement and University Communication with the Columbia International University. Then of course, at the very end, we'll have closing and I'll come back for that. Okay, so I'm going to turn things over to Councilwoman Miss Herbert. Good morning and thank you, Ms. Felicia. Welcome to District One and Hyatt Park. We're glad to see everyone here. And I'm really excited about Community Development Week. National Community Development Week was created in 1986 and elected officials began to bring national attention to the CDBG program through grassroots support at the time when the program was facing real scrutiny. The main objective of National Community Development Week is the education of congressional members on the importance of CDBG dollars and its impact on our communities and the need for more funding. National Community Development Week is intentionally held during the congressional appropriations process. I just learned that so that the significance of CDBG can be imparted to congressional members through local activities conducted by grantees and program partners at a grassroots level. This year, National Community Development Week will be held April 1st today through April the 5th. This is a crucial time for appropriations work coming up for the FY 2025 year will be in its initial stages right now. National Community Development Week provides the perfect opportunity to cement the importance of CDBG in the minds of those in Washington and to increase our CDBG funding. And I'm going to welcome Mayor Rickerman. Good afternoon, everyone. It's good to see you. I want to take a moment first of all to recognize obviously you heard Councilwoman Herbert but she's also the chair of our community development and as we continue to move and be creative and think about it but I also want the community development staff would y'all stand up to be recognized y'all work so hard every day for the city. I just want y'all to be recognized and we appreciate y'all being here and being part of it. You know, as we celebrate National Community Development Week it makes us realize is that we're continuing to invest. As you know, housing is a big part of it. This last couple weekends I've had an opportunity to ride around our community and see all the opportunities that we have and really focus on how do we create more single family? How do we create more multifamily? How do we have townhomes and quadruplexes and duplexes? The things that are needed in our community that are focused across spectrums not only for our young families but also for our seniors who may want to stay in their neighborhood but don't want to stay in their house and have to deal with a lot of long term maintenance and all of that is important because as we leverage these dollars how do we take those dollars stretch it and partner and use other resources to actually grow our community? We have so much opportunity as we ride around our city to fill it with families, mothers, seniors and others to have a place of living inside the city limits. But I want to take a minute to talk a little bit about the CDB. I always want to say CB first. It's CDBG history. You know, this was enacted in 1974 under the Housing and Community Development Act signed into law by President Ford and it provides necessary funding to communities across the country to address not only infrastructure, economic development, housing, disaster recovery but other community needs and it's so important for us to be able to leverage that and you know for years we've done a lot of of of safe investing and looking at things and and now we're getting away a little bit from traditional and figuring out how do we compete with these other cities in the southeast? How do we use those dollars really to leverage with partnerships to create the housing and make sure that we don't lose any more population and we have to be real about that conversation. We've lost population in our community and a lot of it is around housing so let's return that let's build up those fabrics of our neighborhood one block at a time and as we leverage our lots, our funding resources, our talent from our community development office along with our council and our city manager who has really invested for us and as we move forward in our next budget year really to focus on community development and how do we make it a more stronger intricate part of our community because we got to be the seed planners and we need to be planting more seeds and we're going to continue to do that but it's very important for us as we look at this history and understand that cities and counties that receive this direct program allocation, small rural communities receive assistance through their state, non-profit organizations, contractors, other local partners serve as sub recipients to to deliver local. How do we embrace that? How do we at the same time take this money, build it into our community, rebuild our housing fabric but also help us grow the small businesses and that's what excites me because the more money we can spend locally that means people are hired here but the better than that they're part of our community and they give back and it's so important for us to embrace that. So I'm very excited that we kick off this and that we look forward to the new year as we continue to use innovative ways to deliver housing needs, infrastructure needs at the same time allow us to grow our economic development. So the more density we get the more opportunity we have to get grocery stores, neighborhood retail, keep up those neighborhood businesses that we all want to go back to who doesn't want a corner market in their neighborhood, who doesn't want to be able to walk to grab their dry clean and their banking or whatever needs they need. So let's continue to work together because the only way we're going to do this is do this together. That means the city, our community, our business community forged together. Thank you. Thank you so much mayor. That was a wonderful overview and and outlined the importance of CDBG as well as some of the activities that these funds can be applied towards. I'm going to bring it home just a little bit to kind of outline some of the projects that we have been involved in here at the city within the city to assist the residents and communities right here in our area. Standing behind me is Hyatt Park. We have invested a large sum of funds to assist in rehabilitation. We've helped with the mirror out there. We've also invested many of the other parks in the city. As a matter of fact we have working right now with Hyatt making additional phase with them to improve and to develop and expand as well as T.S. Martin. We are involved in assisting with more development with that particular park as well as we've assisted with Fairwall, Lord Park, E.B. Sessions. Not only with the community just as the mayor mentioned affordable housing which is near and dear to my heart assisting low to moderate income individuals to get into home ownership. We work with them, get them prepared for home ownership so they can buy a home within the city of Columbia. We also have a program that we've supported for many years to provide housing rehab upon our maintenance assistance program, upon our shine program, providing those dollars to help low income homeowners to improve their homes to make them safe decent so they can remain in those houses. Also ultimately improve the neighborhood as we move forward to make those improvements on those homes. Also we've supported our affordable housing loan program. You know we have our C.L.L. in the ones, our C.L.L. in the twos as well as the affordable housing to help those folks purchase those houses. And so we, that is near and dear to my heart. We have that and we certainly want to encourage anyone interested in purchasing a house in the city. Please feel free to reach out to us so we can move their process forward for you. As you go through some of the neighborhoods, you know we have been involved heavily in improving the roads particularly in the Booker Washington Heights and we improved a lot of the roads in that neighborhoods to improve the look to to go through the re-violation of those particular areas as well as the colony community. We also have worked closely with public works to improve other roads in those in our various neighborhoods to improve those areas. So if you have noticed, CDBG touches a lot of different things as relates to improving our neighbors, improving our communities, and that's one of the reasons why we're here today to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the use of those dollars and that particular program. Now with all that said, I'm going to turn things over to Ms. Diane Moll. She's with the Columbia International, International University. Thank you director Felicia and it is so good to be here today and thank you to each one of you for all you do for Columbia and thank you out here also and you know may I recommend offered the thought about leveraging resources and at Columbia International University we have resources our students are our resources that are ready to work and this is an exciting week for us. It's our fourth annual RAMSERV. Now our mascot at Columbia International University and we just celebrated 100 years for a CIU right down the road here. Our mascot, yeah, so thankful. Our mascot is the RAM but I bring greetings to you on behalf of the board, our president Jones. The RAM today and this week means reaching around the Midlands. So it is our mascot but when I'm bringing greetings today it is about the Midlands and reaching across and around the Midlands and I also just want to recognize Professor James McCall. He's our assistant dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and many other titles if you get an email from him Charmaine and Felicia I know that that fall underneath his name but really the heartbeat behind our RAMSERV day. It is tomorrow we will be working in about 25 to 30 areas around the community and like I said I have had the privilege of working alongside students probably about 90 percent of our students participate. That many of our faculty and staff and administration I know our whole executive and cabinet of our president's committee is going to be serving tomorrow. I've served at the areas that we've worked at churches, worked at parks. We've also worked in communities and neighborhoods and and it's just so exciting to be a part of it this year on the 50th anniversary and so I just want to thank Columbia for the opportunity for what we get to do as a university, Columbia International University because it is special to partner along, it is special to be working together and to have this opportunity and we need each other right. We need each other and for our students and we know that some of them will stay in South Carolina some of them will go to the uttermost parts of the earth as we say but we are so thankful why they are here at CIU at Columbia International University. They can learn the importance of community development and what it means to come alongside your community and so thank you director Felicia. Thank you to each one of you. Thank you for all that you do for Columbia and it is just a privilege to be here today. Thank you. Mr. McCall would you like to get up and say a few words sir? Sure. Okay. Well thank you for the opportunity to taller sorry. Thank you for the opportunity to come and serve our community. One of the heartbeats of CIU is our mission is to know him and to make him known and the value of making him known as as our students go out and just serve selflessly. I love the fact that for Ram serve one of the things our students are passionate about is not necessarily going and serving the way they feel like they should serve. They're actually going and serve we're contacting the community and seeing how can we serve them in a way that they need and I think that's a shift and there's beauty and there's power and just see and just coming a little alongside and helping. So once again I just want to thank you. Thank you all for for allowing us to partner with you each and every year for the last four years. We look forward to many more years of partnering and just working around our community just to continue to bless and serve our community. Thank you so much Mr. McCall. So I'm going to circle back around to Councilman Bailey. See if you'd like to come and say a few words. They don't want me standing up there like I'm on a choir pew and not saying anything but thanks everybody for coming. Please just know the importance of the block grant so important. I think it's a valuable mechanism as the mayor said and bringing housing and density back to the community. It's a way to combat gentrification so not only do we need the robust funding to continue but we need more funding. So just know the importance of the block grant and the great work that we do through it and continue to support the community development committee and the work that we're doing. Thank you. Thank you so much Councilman Bailey. So this brings us to the end.