 Good morning, everyone. Great to see everyone on this beautiful sunny Friday. And thank you all for being here. This is our second to the last recovery and renewal task force meetings so I just can't believe that we've been almost a year at this, but cannot imagine having served with a more dedicated group of leaders. So thank you all for your continued leadership. We're going to go ahead and get started this morning with updates. So I will turn it over to chair howerton and mayor shul for their updates. Madam chair, why don't you go ahead this time. And I'll follow you. Well, thank you mayor. Good morning everyone and happy sunny day we may get some rain a little bit later but it's sunny right now. So just a few things. I'm watching the presentation by Miss flood last night about the funding for the homeless and I'm looking forward to that money coming to Durham. And I know it was going to the city but but I'm just looking forward to how we will be able to help out people in this community. Steve can tell you about the amount and all that. A couple of other things I just want to give honor to the W a our life mobile unit that have been out in the community and rock and tell you more about them and what they've been doing I was out with them one day this week and going to communities that are difficult to get to and doing back sit back scenes that going door to door and just to give a little bit of praise to them. The other things a couple of other things are would be the crop walk is coming up this weekend. And I don't know how many people going to go walk or they're going to do it walk virtually think they're going to do both. So that's coming up. The other thing that we had this weekend that this this week at our work session for anybody that doesn't know. We have a full BULLS and for any of you that don't know what that means is building up local life sciences, and we've got some incredible partners in this community that have joined together. The purpose is to address the growing labor needs of the local life science industry by connecting residents to a rewarding career path. And we just want I want to thank all the partners that are involved with that because, and the county commissioners are going to support that with all the might, because we want all people in this community to get those jobs. The only other thing that I have is, you know, there have been several churches that I visited over the last week or so, and churches of really participating and people are lining up to get the shots, especially since it's opened up to everyone. That's basically all that I have. Thank you so much. Any questions and be blood glad to answer those so toss it over to Steve. Thank you very much Brenda. And good morning everybody. Great to see everyone it is hard to believe that it's been a year and but it has. I'm glad to see everybody in my, my, I just want to express my gratitude to this fantastic group. It's just been amazing to work with you all. There are just a few things that are on my mind. One is, we all know that there have been a lot of crowds gathering, especially of young people. So, Anna Davis in the city attorney's office is received some notifications from the health department that she's taken some actions on, especially at a couple of larger night spots. And so we'll be continuing to do that and, and urge if anyone has any season of those kinds of events to be in touch with Anna or city attorney's office, because she's doing a great job trying to get compliance and compliance going to continue to be important. The, we have received and Brenda alluded to this quite a bit of funds from the American rescue plan. And these will be the city is receiving $50 million that will come in two tranches one of them 25 million will be coming very very soon. The F is working to figure out how to allocate those resources, some of them, but not very much will be needed to cover holes in our city budget. For example, nobody's been parking downtown. We have a big hole in our, in our, in our budget our debt, our budget which requires, we have to pay the debt for our parking decks and usually that's done by parking fees. We have a few things like that, but basically our budgets in a really good shape and we'll be able to use a lot of those funds for central community needs which I'm really much very, very happy about. And there's a public process that's that'll be going on that our city manager has has gotten going. And then at the education roundtable, which I thought went really well, and it's just great to. It's great to see our schools doing so well and our public schools had a good discussion with the leadership there earlier this week seemed things seem to be going well and so so much gratitude for everybody that's trying to make all that work I know how hard it is. And finally, the two things that continue to be on my mind one is longer term is the, there's the economic recovery and I know we're going to talk a lot more about that today and afterwards, but especially also more immediately vaccine equity, and I know we're going to hear when we hear our report from from Rod and Katie and a book and but I, I continue to be really concerned about it and want to really make sure that we dedicate the resources to that that we need. And I know that at the city, we're ready to step up with more resources if necessary, and would really like to know from both people on the front lines, as well as our, our leadership are all of our health leadership Rod and Katie and others. What we need to do resource wise to help make that happen. And so that's a discussion that I'm anxious to have and want to be having this week. Well I guess this week's over having early next week with all of you all who are involved in that and really give us some direction and let us know the resources necessary. So that's my report and thank you very much. Great. Thank you so much. I will give a brief update on the education roundtable and then turn it over to Matisha to give a brief update on our proposal subcommittee. So as as Mayor Schultz said, great meeting with our education roundtable I continue to be so inspired by our students our educators. They, they just are staying so vigilant have stayed so vigilant overall and really just doing a tremendous job. Really spent much of last week's meeting talking about graduation planning, as well as beginning planning for the fall, actually. Graduations NC Central and Duke will have in person graduations, but students only to allow for enough distancing and safety Durham Tech is planning their graduation toward the end of June, and looking at their safest options right now. And then science and math is planning a graduation outside, but with limited guests. And so they're still working through those plans all of the schools but and and still very much monitoring where we are in terms of cases and and working to do. Take all of the safety precautions and that is again so encouraging that vigilance that they've had Durham Tech and NC Central are both vaccination sites Durham Tech is working toward being a vaccination site community vaccination site as well. And that's really encouraging again the more more we can spread out the vaccination sites I think that is wonderful news for our community, and will certainly help us from a vaccine equity perspective as well. So overall very good, very good session. And as I say they are beginning plans for the fall and how they will come back in the fall. Hopefully to a new noun normal so more to come on that in. They also had some discussion about how they may want to continue meeting even after recovery and renewal task force and what that might look like for them. Perhaps not in the same cadence but that they have found value in being able to get together and have conversations and and share best practices so again that group will decide how they want to do that moving forward. Do you want to give an update on the proposals. Thanks Katie. Good morning and happy Friday everyone. So the budget proposal subcommittee continues to meet. We had several well we had a meeting and several conversations since our last meeting to evaluate one proposal from green light related to vaccine equity. As Mayor she'll mention vaccine equity is a is an area that we do need to spend some more time in our resources addressing for that particular proposal we did decide as a subcommittee that we were not going to bring that proposal forward to the task force. As we still had many unanswered questions as it related to as it relates to the logistics and the readiness of that proposal. Our hope is that we could continue to leverage some of the existing channels to address vaccine equity but we certainly know that that's an area that we need to focus on. We also have four more proposals that we will be reviewing next week. One proposal is related to a possible bus station vaccine clinic which hopefully that you know continues to address some of the inequities as it relates to vaccinations. And we have three proposals related to economic recovery. So once we meet next week. If there's any follow up that we have almost proposals will send them back to the submitters. However if there's any of the four that we want to move forward will send it via email to the task force for you to weigh in on our recommendation to move it forward so be on the lookout for something from us. Possibly next week. And if not next week then maybe a week or two after that. One additional item that's not on the agenda but I'll just ask CC to chime in if she doesn't mind. I know the worker survey is out and there's some incentives for folks who complete that survey. And I think it's actually going to close soon so CC do you want to give an update on the worker survey and or the town hall that's coming up. Thank you. So yes we've been running the survey for about almost four weeks it's going to actually close on Sunday. And we've received over 2000 responses so we've surpassed our goal for 1000. And of course a portion of those are actually completed we have like 1500 that are actually completed. And as I said we will be closing on Friday on Sunday, and we are planning for the town hall either the last week of April or early the first week of May. We will be presenting the results of that survey as well as inviting folks to come and give their testimony also talk about some solutions that relate to the survey results and be able to present recommendations for this committee in the city and the county to consider that will really help workers in this time but we've asked questions around financial impacts you've asked questions around COVID-19 in the workplace and how they've been receiving the vaccine or health and safety on the job. And then also programs that have helped throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and which ones have been most helpful and which ones we want to continue to fund, as well as some additional comments so it's been going really well, we'll be meeting with the workers rights commission today to get that out and then hopefully we'll have some flyers for the town hall that will be out next week. Thank you so much CC, I'm glad that the response rate is so high that is awesome. And it should give some great information for us to determine you know what are the best next steps so thank you for your leadership on this. All right, well I will turn it back to Katie Rod and a book and and Phil to talk about some of our metrics. Well I can maybe start off with the hospital metrics, which are continuing to improve, and that's the good news. So we are down to 84 cases across the health system, 46 of those are active. You'll recall that we were over 100 last month, or just a bit, yeah just over 100 last month, and had been as high as over 200 back in January so again continued improvement there. We are at 32 active cases between Duke University Hospital and Duke Regional Hospital. Nine of those in the ICU, 20 total in the ICU between Duke University Hospital and Duke Regional Hospital. Again, continued improvement we had gotten down at Duke Regional into the single digits. We're back up to just over that now but but still seeing improvement I think we just need to keep everyone vigilant though right and we. We have heard concerns raised about the fourth wave, we have certainly seen that we're seeing that in Europe, where the cases are on the increase we're seeing that in other parts of the country where cases are on the increase. We've done so well and for so long and we know that this is hard and keeping the vigilance is hard, but continuing to focus on our tools in our toolbox are, you know, wearing our mask wearing our face covering consistently, washing our hands consistently, staying six feet apart social distancing and getting vaccinated. And now everyone is eligible for vaccination. These are the tools that we have and so remaining vigilant on all of those and continuing to encourage people to take the back on the bull pledge, I think is is where we need to be. In terms of vaccination across the health system. We have completed over 212,000 doses of vaccine administered, which is very significant. We have completed nearly 8,000 of those in employees or team members, and the rest patients in the community. Our partnership with Southern Heist with the Health Department on Southern High School with DPS and the Health Department continues to be really an excellent partnership. We shut down the Southern clinic last week and have opened up thanks to the city at the old wheels fun park so some of you may remember the old wheels roller rink over off of Hoover Road. It is a terrific space and it's based at the city actually took over back in December and was was vacant. It is ideal for a vaccination clinic. It is sort of similar geography to Southern and you'll recall one of the reasons we chose Southern for the location is because it sits in that 27703 27704 line, which are the two zip codes most impacted by COVID. So we are similar with wheels. We are able to double and potentially over time triple the number of vaccinations we can do each day so we were, we had gotten up to 500 a day at Southern High School, which was excellent. We're doing over 900 a day upwards of 1000 and with plans to be able to as vaccination allocation allows and as staffing allows be able to go up to 1500 a day. So it's very significant there and I really think Rod and Mayor Schuyl and everyone, Parks and Rec has been phenomenal partner on this, and just so appreciative of that partnership. We continue to really focus on vaccine equity. In addition to having the Southern site which really is and now wheels really has been dedicated to that the health department is making many of those appointments we've also extended in our partnering with community organizations to help us fill those appointments so we have committed to at least a minimum of 1000 a week appointments that will be scheduled through Latin 19 and those community organizations again focused on on vaccine equity moving forward and making sure we have bilingual staff there as well. To be able to make that a really comfortable welcoming environment and a safe environment for our members of our Latin X community. We also continue to do a number of pop up events or mobile. It's it's really the that mobile approach where we take it out to two organizations and we've partnered with a number of churches and through the IMA through Durham can and others they've helped us identify locations and continue to do that each of those events is typically 220 to 250 people vaccinated in about three hours. So that that is certainly helping us I will tell you we are still not at Duke where we ultimately want to be in terms of our vaccine equity but we have made improvements. So you'll recall probably last month I mentioned that a month into this so early February. We were at about 8% just over 8% of those vaccinated were African American and just about between one and 2% Hispanic we've made significant improvement in African American with now 18% of those vaccinated just over 18% are African American still lagging behind on Hispanic were at 4.6% of everyone vaccinated through the health system. Patients are Hispanic and 5.6% Asian. So those are our demographics and again still continuing to work on it. We continue to have a vaccine equity committee that is meeting regularly and and looking at how we continue to partner with the community to help get get doses in the arms of those who've most been impacted by COVID. With that I will turn it over to Mr Jenkins. Good morning to everyone I'd start off by wishing everyone a happy national public health week. I'm not robbery to maintenance because my staff and I as well as health departments across the globe have been hard at work with this pandemic is important to recognize our heroes. I will do my best to be brief. I know Katie did say a lot of information that I echo but I would say as your public health director that there are two things that we have to do right now to continue to do well here in Durham. We have to keep pushing down doubling down tripling down on the public health measures, which Katie eloquently explained, and we have to do whatever we can to get as many people vaccinated as quickly and as expeditiously as possible. And this is the only way for us to really ward off a fourth wave of the virus infections. And it's also the best way to get us back to normal per state epidemiologists, Zach Moore and many others. North Carolina's cases are low and remaining low while, as Katie mentioned the Northeast and Midwest and other places seeing spikes particularly in Europe. And that's due to loosened restrictions in some states that have vacated mask mandates and while that's unfortunate, it's definitely a blessing that our, our governor and leadership. Thought it not robbery to keep our people masked up our current statistics. You will find are much lower our total current active cases 387. That's very low at one point time, you know it's been as high as 900. So again it's indicative of how well we're doing with this pandemic and Durham continues to lead away 23,536 individuals have beat COVID. We have now 220 COVID-19 deaths of thoughts and prayers are always with those people who've lost loved ones due to COVID-19. Our total since the pandemic began 24,148 total cases since last year. A seven day moving average of positive cases as of Monday was 45 cases. This is a decrease of 49 last week and 53 the previous week and so far in the month of April. There've only been 380 cases. So again, we still see it downward trend and our trajectory of cases continues to decrease. We keep a close eye on race and ethnicity as far as COVID infections and Hispanic or Latin X remains at 12.27% of all of our cases. Our African American community right now is overrepresented at 55.91. We fully expect for that to level out. Just keep in mind, it's as early as far as our data reporting and our white community continues to be underrepresented at 19.09% of all of our cases. So while we're keeping a watchful eye on the African American community, we are confident that those numbers will level by the end of the month. Percent of positive labs reported electronically 4.7% was last week. This is a slight increase, but we continue to hover less than 5%, which is right where we want to be. And Duke's model has North Carolina's infections growing at 1.2% and Durham's infections have grown at 1.5%. Still relatively low compared to where we were a few short months ago. Let's talk about vaccinations. Per the CDC, percent of total population that's been fully vaccinated in Durham is right at 24.3%. That means first and second doses and or one shot dose of Johnson and Johnson. Our population that are greater than the age of 18. 30.5% have been totally vaccinated. And I'm most proud to report that our percentage of our population that are greater than 65 years of age that have been fully vaccinated is right at 70%. I pause there because we know that they were our most vulnerable population and through the work of Katie's group Duke and a lot of other people we've got our seniors vaccinated and it's definitely showing in our metrics. So again, big big shout out to that. When it comes to when it comes to vaccinations. So far for the county of Durham were currently vaccinated groups one through five so we run again. Anyone who is 16 years of age and older effective April 7 is now eligible for the vaccine. We're doing our best to promote that on every angle from every channel. Since yesterday, 177,774 vaccinations have been performed for Durham residents. That is a significant increase from February and March, which really equates to about 58% increase, which is also indicative of the fact that we now have more vaccine to perform perform vaccinations. Durham County residents throughout the nation really have been vaccinated 444 different vaccination provider sites across the state and across the nation. Of far as demographics of the total white population in Durham County 44% of our residents have either been partially vaccinated. 33% have been fully vaccinated of the black or African American community for the entire County of Durham 22% of our residents have been partially vaccinated. 17% have been fully vaccinated. And with our Hispanic or Latin next population, 17% of residents have been fully have been partially vaccinated, whereas 8% have been fully vaccinated. Again, these are rather preliminary data because as Katie has said so many times before, with this being April the ninth for only four months into vaccinations. And we were also slightly stagnated by groups with with us now being a group five and many individuals who want to partake in this vaccination who have been possibly on the sidelines observing they're now coming to get the vaccination, get the vaccination. So it's been encouraging to see families come into the mass vaccination site at Southern and also at the health department. It's been particularly delightful to see 16 year olds with their moms coming to get the vaccine. So we're starting to see a whole lot of diversity in our vaccination efforts. And I can relate to you all that more time is needed in order to increase our different demographics and I know that it will happen of vaccines as far as ages concern 65 plus population as mentioned earlier accounts for 35% of all of our vaccinations is 60,155 individuals in his age group and highest single age at present of vaccinators is 31 which 2374 so it's getting much much young. I will end and pass it to Dr Kahlu by saying, we are working with incredible partners to ensure vaccine equity. We are committed to ensuring that the vaccines are distributed fast and fair from SIEMRA North Carolina to La Semilla to El Centro Espanol to the ministerial alliances. It was great to work with Dr Herbert Reynolds and in a lot of other people we're doing all that we can to ensure that the vaccine is out to everyone in the community. Since opening to groups four and five as I mentioned a lot of diversity is now coming to get the vaccines. It has been very delightful to see our lack next population come to the health department because there was some hesitancy at first from anything from not going to be seen with the National Guard to just being apprehensive of government. That's all now dissipated. I see a lot of our lack next come population coming to get vaccinated. That's certainly a good. We are using geo mapping to ensure vaccine equity by ensuring that we are able to go to these different pockets of the community from, you know, the different zip codes that definitely have needs for vaccinations. We have committed to most Saturdays for our vaccine events. We're partnering with UNC mobile clinics. They are slated to come on next week. We have provided vaccine to them for their request and they're just going to go to those areas that have the high demand and be able to do it. As Chair Houghton has said, the war for life effort is a valiant effort that's, you know, an individual who is community center, thought it not robbery to get some transportation and are going into the nook and crannies. Public health and Duke can't do it all. So we need community partners to do that. And we are happy to report that we are more than willing to provide vaccines to them. Public health has reached out. Public health has reached out to Jason Williams and his team to offer as much vaccine as they desire. So we are doing that in addition to working with our local pharmacies that are taking care of many others. I'd be remiss if I did not mention, Chair Houghton also did mention the homeless population in Durham, and we have been working tirelessly to make sure that our homeless residents at Durham Rescue Mission and Urban Ministries of Durham and many others have the vaccine that they need. And we will continue to have single site opportunities for individuals in this population to get vaccinated. I've said a lot, but I just want you all to know that vaccine equity is top of mind, not only in the state of North Carolina, but also the Durham County Department of Public Health. And I'll be happy to turn it over to Dr. Colu for additional commentary. Thanks for that. So I just was going to make two comments focused on children. We've heard a lot of concerns nationally that children are pushing the spread of variants. They kind of want to be cautious about that interpretation. So locally, we know that we have ongoing clinical trials for children. And we anticipate that we will, we should have vaccines authorized for our kids and talking about kids that are less than 16. As of right now, if you're over 16, 16 and above 16, 16 and 17, you can get vaccinated if you would like to. For the younger ones, masking still works and creating that protective bubble around them still works. And we know that kids have been less impacted by COVID-19 over time. It would be important to continue to ensure we're practicing the things that work until we can add vaccines to that arsenal of protective elements, but masking certainly works. Locally, we have not seen a huge spread of variants among the younger kids. We certainly remain worried about extracurricular activities or sporting activities, sleepovers, parties, things like that. But I just wanted to score some of the increase anxiety, but not put all of us too much at ease. We know it can spread, but we've not seen that pattern locally yet. Phil, would you like to give an update from Lincoln? Thank you very much. I'm amazed at the quality of the work that you and Rod are doing. I'm certainly happy to have you guys as community partners. It means a lot to us and our ability to deliver services to all populations over here at Lincoln. We try to remain true to our mission, so we're still focusing on creating access to permanent preventive healthcare services to all vulnerable populations. So we're still doing about 12,000 medical visits monthly. In regards to what we're doing around vaccination, we've provided over 5,000 vaccines to patients of Lincoln and members of the broader Durham community. Lincoln continues to be a leader in vaccinating historically marginalized populations, and Durham with 80% of those vaccinated identifying as belonging to the Black or Latinx communities. We're holding vaccination clinics Monday through Friday, one to five p.m. by apartment only at the main site and we're using the Moderna vaccine. This is April 7th, as it was mentioned previously, North Carolina open vaccination to groups one through five, which means all income patients ages 18 and over eligible vaccinations at Lincoln. Patient 16 to 18 can seek the Pfizer vaccine at one of our community partners. We see a little over half of our vaccination appointments for providers. We've reserved about half of our appointments for providers to directly schedule vaccination for their patients. Other appointments are open to through a call center. We seriously evaluate scheduling and adjust as necessary. On Saturday April 17 between eight and 12, we'll hold a special vaccination clinic with Johnson and Johnson vaccines open to the community, again by appointment. You do not need to be a Lincoln patient to schedule an apartment and the necessary registration information will be taken over the phone. Patients and community members can phone or call center at 919-956-4034 starting next week to schedule appointments for a special Saturday event. A major limiting factor is being able to provide more vaccination is the need for more staff. I hope that your contacts know that we are looking to hire great medical assistants, LPNs, and our we are thankful for the partnerships in the community. Like the city we've received a generous grant to address issues around COVID-19 pandemic. So we're eager to work with our community partners to look at any kind of innovative ways that we can increase or reach into the community. So fast the word we're willing to do more limiting factor is our ability to recruit enough staff to do the work. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, the staffing continues to be I think now that supply is beginning to ease I think the staffing will be our challenge and making sure that we have enough people to be able to get vaccine to to the community and so we're all working on that. Thank you Tisha. If you don't mind if I if I may, and I would definitely love for Dr. Kahlu to weigh in on us. Just just just a quick minute about vaccines. The best vaccine that you could take is the first one that you can get your hands on. Much has been said in the media about the Johnson and Johnson, and the CDC has come out and said that the Johnson Johnson is still safe and still highly effective. We were saying at the prelude of this session that oftentimes people get nauseous because they go to the vaccination sites on an empty stomach or they're not hydrated. So we would encourage you to ensure that you are that he aided to make sure that you have something on your stomach and make sure that you are hydrated. It is still a safe vaccine and same thing applies for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine. There is, you know, a little bit of unreadiness out there now, but as public health director I just want to make that announcement that it is safe. Anything you'd like to add Dr. Kahlu. I agree completely we've heard about vaccine shopping and I think honestly at this point. It's important to get the vaccine that's available to you and is right in front of you at the point of access. 16 and 17 year olds, the vaccine that's authorized for older children younger adults, so to speak, is the Pfizer vaccine so that's the only group that has a specific vaccine because of what has been authorized. Everybody else, all the vaccines that are authorized as safe, the effective a prevent an infection. And if you do get infected preventing you from having a severe illness, but ultimately prevent an infection is our goal. And the vaccines do that so all of them work. Thanks for bringing that up. Just a little bit to you Matisha. Thank you. Thank you so much and I appreciate you taking that very important minute to share that. We'll move us along on our agenda. So next up on our agenda is, I think it's economic recovery 2.0. So I will turn it over to Jeff and team or committee to lead that conversation. Thank you Matisha good morning everybody. I'm going to let you guys know that our group, consisting of myself, Susan Amy, Nicole Thompson, Dr Anthony Nelson, Ed Boyd, as well as people are Richard Goldberg and recently. Eleazar has been able to join us from El Centro has continued to meet weekly as we started this task force kind of reduce that back to pretty much bi weekly if not monthly in advance of kind of what what what things look like moving forward. We've invited our partners from both the city and the county to join us today so thank you to both Andy Miracle from Durham County as well as Andre Pettigrew from the city of Durham. I'll go and kick things off and I'll turn it over to Susan and the rest of the team for further comments before we turn it over to hear from our partners in the city and the county. So from from my standpoint it has become so clear that the interrelationship between community health and economic health is so clear, and in this case Durham again has proven to be resilient. It's true we've had an amazing amount of challenges over the past year, but also remarkably, we've had a lot of successes that shouldn't be overlooked either. We continue to welcome new businesses and expansion of our local businesses into this community, and those collective efforts from from everybody on this call, as well as our partners beyond this task force, we're able to deliver on 13 major job announcements over the past year, and that totaled over $2 billion of private investment coming into the city and the county with the expectation of more than 4000 new jobs to come here in the coming years. And again, it's amazing that all those announcements occurred during the pandemic. And in fact, even in 2021 we've had five new major announcements, and we see many more coming in our project pipeline. And I think I believe that our collective efforts in working with our educational institutions, community organizations, and many of you here today are really paying off. We have a lot of work to do no doubt. And we need to continue to help those displaced and unemployed workers either retool or pivot and take advantage of the opportunities that are coming to our community. We need to work quickly and efficiently to ensure equitable opportunities across Durham, which is one of the reasons why we've asked our partners both the city and the county to join us here today. I do believe that our economic outlook is solid, and that alone should give us help. And this pandemic didn't overshadow all of our community has worked towards and still continues to help her. Even in these unprecedented times, entrepreneurs continue to choose Durham to start up their ventures. Companies who have homegrown in Durham have started here continue to expand and new businesses are choosing to locate all here in Durham. But we know that this isn't the only part of Durham's story. And moving forward, I believe it's critical that we focus recovery efforts towards those industry sectors of workers that are indeed hit hardest by this pandemic. And as reported here in recent months, it's the case that many of our small businesses, especially those in hospitality and leisure industries have indeed been hit the hardest by a wide margin and ongoing support is in fact needed to assist those businesses and the workforce in recovery. And with that, I'll turn it over to Susan for further comments and ideas. Thank you, Jeff. I appreciate that and what I'd like to do is give an update on where we are on a number of initiatives that have been moving forward and that we are proposing to move forward through the proposals that Matisha referenced earlier. So you know where things stand. What we've heard much about is the Durham Delivers bulk food delivery program through our restaurants. That program continues to march on when all everything's tallied by the end of March we will have generated about 150,000 in revenue through that program. Our intent is to continue it into well into the summer, and then to evaluate it going forward. My thought is that there will be a time when it's no longer necessary. However, we've got a lot of people in the community who have come to enjoy it and the sort of community spirit that it engages so we will make a decision as we get a little later on though about whether the restaurants would like to continue it. And the back on the bull campaign is a part of it and I think listening to our medical and health experts talk about this, where we stand in Durham. It just reinforces for me the importance of us continuing to have a public health communications campaign that is reminding people that they need to wear masks that they continue to need to be careful about how they engage with people. And at the same time this relates to economic recovery because it's also encouraging people to be safe but still support local businesses and that's really important. And I know later in the agenda we're going to talk a little bit about what happens to the back on the bull campaign and for how long does that go on and what happens as we ramp it down. I will also say I want to express my appreciation for the city and the county contributing to fund that campaign. And one of the most visible parts of it which will be the TV spots across WRAL, WTBD and Spectrum TV are just getting underway so you should start to see more evidence. There's a billboard on I-85 that's going to be going up in the next few days so you'll start to see more evidence of that campaign in play, but it is across multiple media channels. One of the things we've talked about over time is festivals and events, those have a tremendous economic impact in Durham for our hospitality businesses when they bring people into the city and from outside of it and also just bring residents out. And we recognize that that's one of those cases that is not necessarily what we want to be encouraging right now in big ways, but we are trying to continue working with our festivals and events on how they can come back as it becomes safe to do so and under what circumstances. We were going to put in a, we've been discussing putting in some kind of proposal for financial support, but what we've concluded is that the group that has been assembled and I appreciate Mayor Schultz's support of that has been making some great progress and what they're looking at. And this is in helping these festivals and events be able to operate, recognizing that they're going to experience lower levels of attendance potentially in revenue and greater costs to protect people. So there's some things that are being done right now like developing an expanded list of outdoor venues, including some of the unused parking lots that Mayor Schultz referenced earlier to house events, including out with expenses related to police officers, trash collection, things like that. So a number of things going on so that that effort is going to continue and we think it's going to be really helpful. There are three proposals that we put in one is around doing taking some steps to allow us to market our convention center. We have the Council, the Armory and the Carolina Theater, which are, as you know, all co located around one plaza in a, as a camp, a singular campus sort of venue which can help us bring larger events to Durham when it's time to do so. And the next year and the potential for economic value there is tremendous and not to those facilities alone, they will prosper but also all the hospitality business when you bring groups into Durham. They stay at hotels, they go to restaurants, they support our local stores, taxi and Uber drivers, there's a wide range of our society that will benefit from that. Another one is around workforce development. And we were working, appreciate working with Andre and his team and Andy and many others who have a hand in workforce development issues. We have their number roundtables that we participate in and we had one Wednesday with GMs and heads of sales for about 25 different hotel properties in Durham. And when we asked them what's keeping you up at night, the number one issue for them is workforce. And it's, it says not the salaried employees is the hourly employees, which right now are making more money. In some cases, through unemployment and the additional funds provided through the Relief Act, then they would be on the job. And they are having a real difficulty hiring enough people so we just feel this is a very acute issue in many sectors of the economy. So this workforce development program is designed to help recruit new people design and help them develop skills is designed to work with managers and supervisors on their skills in being good managers and leaders. And one of the culminating activities would be a job fair this summer that would help bring employers and people seeking work together. And then a rediscovered Durham campaign. It is critically important as we move forward, people, there's survey data that a lot of it that shows people are starting to plan their vacations. So should I just see a show of hands of anybody who has been working on planning travel for some time later this year. All right, I, yes, our survey data says, most of us are doing three quarters of people are actively planning travel. We need them to have Durham in their awareness and be in front of them to be thinking about planning some of that travel to Durham. So it is critically important that we are marketing Durham right now. So that it's part of the consideration set. And we put in some a proposal to expand the amount of funds that would be available to do that kind of campaign. And then I'll say the last thing I will say here is that there are a number of roundtables discovered arms always had a lot of roundtables with different constituent possible populations or stakeholder populations for us. And some of those will be continuing and some started up here. We, there's a retail roundtable that I know DDI and Nicole has been involved in in the past and, and we've reconvened that group and are looking at what, where there are opportunities to support that field. I talked about the hotel general manager and sales roundtable which is one we've always done and we have reached. It was on hiatus for a few months but now has restarted. Restaurants is a new one that started. Thanks to I think the work of the groundswell of this task force and will continue and that has that group has come up with all kinds of new ideas and been a benefit to, I think to all the people that have been part of that. And we talked about festivals and events. And then we discovered Durham has a couple of others that are pertinent to this one is a, we regularly convene marketing leaders from different venues and attractions in Durham to look for opportunities to collaborate and public information officers across a number of different organizations including a number of government agencies who have pio so that is the update on past and propose future activities around economic development. And I believe I am turning it over to Nicole. Good morning everybody. How are we. I had Susan's big face here so, and I like looking at you. I like looking at you in the morning but I wanted to see the entire gallery good morning everybody hope everyone's doing okay. Just going to give you a little bit of information around downtown and some of the initiatives that DDI has been working on in the downtown market. Thank you for all the people who have come into the downtown area and have spent some money. Truly that's what this is all about for the next for what it has been about and what it will continue to be about coming and supporting our small local businesses. Just a brief overview of some of the things that we're working on immediately when the COVID pandemic came into uninvited into our city. We pivoted and became a place to share information. I'm a strong believer that you can't really know what to do unless you know all the information and you're exposed to all the resources. So we became that that entity, letting our businesses know what was going on where the resources were and we continue to do that on a much scaled back level. The resources aren't coming out as much but we continue to let them know that the shutter shuttered venue grant is coming that the restaurant grant is coming so we continue to let them know that information. We worked with the city to come up with an outdoor dining plan that could work identifying what public areas could be used for restaurants. Mostly parking parking spaces on street parking spaces but also we had some restaurants that were not adjacent to parking spaces so then trying to figure out parking areas within parklets and plazas that they could they could use. And that was a great partnership and a number of our businesses, especially in the downtown core are using those opportunities and continue to do quite well. We have heard that they have been able to get almost back to pre pandemic on a good night. So that's encouraging leading up to the streetery we were hearing from restaurants they just did not have the money to go out and buy furniture that was just an expense that they didn't know that they could could take on. And if this wasn't a permanent thing, what were they going to do with tables and chairs so ddi went out and we have bought probably close to 200 tables and chairs well let's say 75 and then two times that whatever that that magical math is. We haven't bought any number of tables and chairs that we then loaned we have a very simple one page loan agreement. And there was a time there that it was a little hard to find tables and chairs so you'll see a mix match, not not really what we wanted but our push was to make sure that if you wanted to do outdoor dining, and you didn't want to use your quick your tables and chairs or indoor tables and chairs that you had an ability to do that with minimal cost. So we have provided businesses with those on both within the core but also just outside of the core. So we have seen quite a big use of that. And we have just recently bought another set of 40 tables and 80 chairs that that we will now be using in the final that we worked on the streetery shutting down streets to give a more truly in the beginning of this to give people that come the comfort level to come out into the downtown area and walk and be able to socially distance themselves. And that restaurants could come out into the streets and serve people and space tables and chairs out so people would feel comfortable eating outside. And that was went through March that permit ended in March where we were doing it in the core, and we are now taking that on the road so to speak. And we are moving that around downtown we had any number of our businesses in the downtown just to say hey what about us we'd love to have a great idea. So we are now someone had this crazy idea hey that that'd be an easy thing to do let's just move that around downtown and if you were to ask the DDI team I'm sure there are six people behind me that would say not an easy thing, but we are doing that through the great work of that DDI team and our ambassadors on our first phase to streetery will be at Durham Central Park on the piggybacking on Durham food farmers market this Saturday. We're looking for something to do, come on out to the farmers market stay a little bit and then come out and sit down and enjoy will have tables scattered throughout Foster Street will keep all a foster from James the corner where James is all the way through the farmers market closed. We will have some performers we are walking that very tight line of come out and enjoy and spend money, but not wanting to make it festive. We do see that we are not really doing a lot of marketing we're doing marketing through social media on people are picking it up and spreading it I saw it in something out of Raleigh, a couple of days ago. So we're very, very careful that we're trying to ensure we do not have a mob of people coming into a very small space because our footprints for these streeteries are much smaller now. Whereas in the past, they were three streets that we had closed and you can move throughout. These are much more confined and much smaller. So we're walking that type type rope to make sure that that we try to as best we can control the crowd size. So we'll see how it goes but hopefully that you all will come out and enjoy our next one will be we're doing these let me back up. We're doing these the second and the fourth Saturdays. So it's no longer a Friday and Saturday, but just a Saturday event from 12 to 9pm, hoping to catch the lunch crew, people would then shop a little bit and then catch people who want to come out with kids for early, early dinner and then on through maybe a late dinner and drinks. This one will start at one o'clock the one this Saturday because we're going to let the farmers market or I shouldn't say we're going to let the farmers market doesn't end until 12 and giving the vendors time to get out of the footprint. So this one will start at one o'clock but going forward they will be from 12 to 9 the second and fourth Saturday. We will do this through October. And as we get the permits from the city we will push out information on to market this it will come into the downtown core again just in a much smaller footprint. But we're working with the businesses to make sure that this doesn't impact anyone who was very reliant on car traffic and curbside pickup. So it's a delicate ballast that that we walk on the one in the last one in April on the 24th of April will be at Brightleaf, and it will be there across in the Brightleaf district. So look forward to check out our social media feed and our website we will have all the information on that site. I'm knowing that we were doing a lot around the third Fridays and getting a lot of local artists performing through the buskers of the third Friday as you all know that did that that was put away during COVID. We are slowly bringing that back out working with the art galleries to bring that back out. But over the COVID over the last 12 months, we did a virtual Durham from the heart where we had local artists perform virtually through our social media feed in order to give them exposure and to continue to give them opportunities to perform. So we have been doing that since probably last last May and we continue to do that as we start making the switch to having more of those buskers and performers at our streetery of this. So that's just a little bit of some of the things that we have been doing just focused on on COVID. We're extremely excited about the recent announcement kind of piggybacking on what Jeff said of the the jobs coming in with Google. That was quite an exciting announcement for us. And we look forward to working with Google and how we can help them with their needs their workforce needs their location needs, and then just how they could be a good corporate partner in downtown on a number of the issues that that we find important to continue to grow. I will end saying that a lot of talk on small businesses and how they're faring. When we look at our street level retail restaurants and bars. We right now have about 177. Not including professional personal services things of that an office space that is just the restaurants bars and retail. We have about 177 of them. We had 27 that opened over COVID. And this isn't a credit opening up a restaurant or a bar is difficult anyway, trying to do that in COVID when you are limited at 30% or 50% of capacity is amazing to those 27 businesses. 10 of them are in the Durham food hall that to open that had the great distinction of being the a facility that opened at the very beginning of COVID. They got their final their certificate of occupancy. They got their final certificate of occupancy late March early April, and trying to figure out and working with them on what they could do so that those small vendors within that that place could could survive, and a great shout out to a dare and her team, and those vendors that they have survived. If you've not been to the Durham food hall. And it starts at one o'clock and you can come on down and you can walk through the food hall imagine look how that works, but but a great shout out to them what they've done but we had 27 new businesses that that open street level businesses that opened. We have 15 in the pipeline that that are slowly working to open up. So that is incredible. However, there is a little bit of a sad, sad note that we did lose 22. Starting back to March we lost 22 small businesses that that just could not survive for one reason or another. So we were sorry to hear those of course many of you know some of our long term retailers Morgan imports is the one that comes to mind immediately they just celebrated 50 years and unfortunately could not and decided not to continue. We're seeing growth. We are watching quite closely the minority mix in the downtown business community. We did see some minority businesses close, but not a significant amount. So we are providing them extra help and extra benefit and not benefits extra help and resources as they come to us and as they need assistance. We're reaching out very specifically with them and trying to offer anything that we can. So that's just an overview of what's happening in downtown Durham. It has been a pleasure serving on this committee. It collects a little early on a Friday, but you know for you guys I didn't mind doing it. So I look forward to whatever is happening in May to to conclude this this task force and I wish all of you all the best of luck going forward many of you I had not met. I had heard your name so it is great to put an electronic face now to that name and I look forward to seeing all of you in person one day and in fact, come on down to downtown after you get your vaccine and I will treat you to coffee or dinner or something just to continue this great collaboration and thank you for your great work that you all have done. I really appreciate it sorry I'm taking way too much time and Jeff didn't know I was going to do any of that but since I had the floor I thought I would, I will turn it over to I think, Andre. So may I ask a quick question before of Nicole before you get away just really quick. I don't I don't answer questions. Of course you don't. You mentioned right leaf, and you know as we all if you've been downtown you've seen this completely, you know, under renovation or something, and a number of the long term businesses that long time businesses that are no longer there. Could you just speak just a little bit more about support that's offered to businesses when they come to you guys and I'm also thinking about the palace, you know that has recently closed. Any additional information around, you know, what support is provided to to for these businesses. Well, our general support is are the emails that we send out from those emails we will get phone calls. And that's what we we discovered very early on back in March and April and May, that that would trigger phone calls. So we're getting phone calls from employees of some of our small businesses trying to maneuver the unemployment benefits and what how that worked and how did the federal connect to the state and I'm not getting through and and trying to find them those resources so generally that was provided to everybody. Businesses that reached out with very specific questions we would we would run you know my my my hope for DDI during the last year was that you focus on running your business, let us go find the answers. And that's what we did so it was very specific about it when they would come to us typically it was this concern this issue. I need this kind of money. I'm just digging through, would PPP really benefit or not and I, we wouldn't get into the very into the details. We work very closely with our partners at SBC and the SPT DC. I'm in handing them off, but trying to do a little bit of explanation about how that worked what kind of forms you would need to have, getting that information together. I'm being approached by some of them who were looking some businesses here in the latter part of the of the year, looking to relocate for whatever reason, and trying to find them the space on that takes a lot more time. The space needs to be renovated for their needs, trying to work through what their space needs are. They're going from one space and then trying to and they've been in that space a long time trying to sit down and talk with them about well what do you see yourself doing in this space and how does how do we how do we need to work with the property owner to configure that space. So, when we hear and someone contacts us, they're getting ready to to leave a vacate a place for whatever reason, it takes a little bit so that's why you don't see this business close and then it's opening up here it typically doesn't happen that quickly sometimes it does. So we are working with some of those entities that are leaving a place that they have been for a while and we're trying to find them a space that is suitable. And then there are other issues that they're they they want to be a certain place in downtown they're looking for access to parking that is always a struggle and and trying to maneuver how you work with a business who may not have been in a apartment, how parking plays into that. So, that is very specific so it's a kind of vague answer but it is very much generated by the need of the business when they contact us. No that's an excellent answer so you're providing technical support, all kinds of it runs the gamut. It runs the gamut. Good morning. My name is Andre Pettigrew, the director of the Office of Economic Development, Economic and Workforce Development for the city. Again, thank you for inviting me to share some of the priorities that the city is working on. And again I'm pleased to see that there are so many friends and colleagues and partners on this call. I wanted to cover two things. Just to open it up. First of all, to really kind of talk about from the perspective of the Office of Economic Workforce Development. Economic Recovery 2.0. I just think that it's a really important time to talk about that. And second to give you a preview of a presentation that Andy Mirko and I are doing before the joint city council and county commissioners meeting next Tuesday in regards to the during fall business recovery loan program. And again, I'll try to be brief but it really the timing is really important. And again, I really appreciate hearing my public health colleagues describe the issues and challenges that they have faced during this pandemic, and how they've responded. Again, there's a lot of parallel construction and health and economic health are inexplicably linked. They are joined at the hip. We can't have a vibrant economy. If it's not safe and healthy. And again, there are a lot of lessons that I've picked up here in the last year. As I've watched the public health sort of respond to this. And some of the top line lessons that I think we all have had to learn here is one the importance of innovation resiliency partnerships and invest invest today and tomorrow. And it's clearly in my mind that the 2.0 recovery is about a systems recovery. Initially, we've been really focused in on trying to help businesses survive. We're going to quite frankly do the work required to bring back our small businesses and continue to quite frankly build on a strong economy. We are going to have to make a commitment in my mind, over the next three to five years of continue investments to build the infrastructure, the small business infrastructure to support our businesses in response to the market opportunities. And for me, in our office, we've set five new priorities. Again, I know that when you're working with small businesses, so much of it is micro it's what the immediate needs are of the individual businesses and you have to address that. But at a systems level, we've got to think more holistically and more comprehensively. You can't just get stuck talking about the money and I'm going to talk about the money. Again, capital access to capital is the fuel that runs every business large and small and the ability to access it is important. But you can't talk about that. Without a recognition that businesses need markets. You can't be a viable business if you don't have markets. So while the first priority for us is really to improve the access to capital, a second priority is around supply diversity and access to new markets. Again, supply diversity is really how our companies will work with the corporate community, both public and private to access those markets. And again, I'm really encouraged in working with Jeff and the chamber and the host of companies that have come in over the last year, because in my dialogue with these companies, I'm not only interested in their abilities to provide jobs. I'm equally interested in their ability to be markets for our local companies in building the supply chain. And again, I think that's a little different conversation that we've had. And again, the companies that have come in the Clorox, the Googles, these are corporate citizens who do that work. They know how to do that work and they're committed to it and we have the ability to leverage that. But additionally, you also have to talk about this management and technical assistance and I thought that Lois's question is an appropriate question because it takes you to the micro. Again, let me compliment Nicole Thompson and the work that she's done over the last year. So, Nicole Thompson has been one of the most consistent partners in terms of sharing information, very quickly, very fluidly around this work. And again, technical assistance is really how you help businesses, entrepreneurs, figure out how to pivot. I don't know a business in America today that hasn't had to try to re-figure how they do their business. And most importantly, how they see their future market. And again, small businesses are challenged in just in terms of the operations, they may have a special skill, they may have a special niche. And so the ability to work with the Small Business Development Center, the Small Business Technology Development Center is important. And I've actually requested additional funding this year to augment the capacity for technical assistance, because that's the base level of helping people do their books, understand their markets, come up with strategies important, but I do think that we may need specialized consulting for some businesses that are trying to come up with a new business model with 50% less revenue. So again, how do you go from, you know, on the ground retail and then maximize the opportunity of being online. Again, that may sound simple, but the ability to have both bricks and clicks is just essential. We found that that was necessary as a part of this response. And so the ability to have the right equipment, the right configuration, and to make those investments are really a very important part of the level of technical assistance. And it'll be different for every business in every sector. But again, we want to be able to have that sort of, you know, capacity available to provide more one-on-one. And one of the other things that we have figured out during this pandemic is the number of peer learning groups that we've put together providing technical assistance. That's putting together businesses either in a sector or even a cross-sector, but having them work with a consultant to facilitate, you know, the development and the relationship. We've done these Momentum 360 is a program that we've developed and that we're going to expand. We've also put together an African American Legacy Business Program where essentially we've been working with these businesses in cohort groups, providing both peer-to-peer learning, but also working with them individually to help them. And again, I'm going to scale that model if they do more of that going forward. This area of information and communications is essential. Again, as you guys talked about the vaccine equity, we too have a market and money equity that we need to pay attention to. And in that, getting the information out through trusted partners remains essential. Again, all of the data, both the local data that we have as well as national data, shows that local community-based organizations, CDFI certified development financial institutions, and local banks are the best conduits for information technical assistance and actually access to capital. And so to me, the ability to communicate effectively, you know, following the Nicole Thompson model, but realizing that we also have to put it in Spanish language. Again, we've augmented our program this year to, again, target the Latinx community. Again, when I talked to you about the results of our loan program, to get the results that we got was required, you know, intentional strategies and partnerships to sort of drive that home. And the final priority is the importance of taking this work where businesses are and going from micro to macro. And what I mean by that is really connecting the work that entrepreneurs and businesses do to neighborhoods, working in the quarters. They build quarter and your driver much more intentionally, much more in partnership with the work that's going on there. So again, to me, that represents economic recovery 2.0. It's going to require a full range of partnerships. Most of you on the phone are partners in this, but it has to be viewed as a three to five year commitment, though we'll collect this asset from a budgetary standpoint, annually. But I do think we as a community have to think about the investments that we're going to make and commitments that we're going to make in these areas over the next three to five years to be successful. So let me quickly go to the update on the Durham Small Business Recovery Fund. Again, this time last year, the city, the county, the community was scrambling to figure out what sort of response we could make. The government had put out the PPP program and the Idaho loan program with loan forgiveness and what have you. Every local community and jurisdiction were sort of left to sort of figure out what it might do and could do. And again, the city, County of Durham was very innovative and resilient and quite frankly joint Duke University, was one of the games in her group, a critical partner to enable us to do this. That partnership created the recovery fund program, it represented approximately $3 million of new capital, one million of which was going to be grants, because again the city and the county are limited in that in terms of that work. We've been able to effectively deploy in this program, almost $2 million out so let me, I'll talk about that because one of the things that I think we forget is that in the month of December, the city and the county deployed $519,000 of grants to businesses, in addition to the 144 businesses that got grants through the recovery program through Duke, Duke's million dollars were a form of grant. So effectively $1.5 million have been delivered to almost, you know, almost 200 businesses, local businesses here, since, effectively since July. And that's pretty impressive. We also have a loan program as a part of this program. And again, let me just tell you, yes, grants are better than loans. But again, there's not a grant program that is sustainable businesses will need markets, they'll need to be able to make investments and capital through banking relationships be able to be successful. We have approximately $670,000 of loans that have been let, we have 31 businesses who have been approved for loans, we've actually had over 80 businesses apply. And so there's a gap obviously. Again, this is, you know people were taking on loans have the confidence and belief that they pivoted and they have the ability to repay. This is a very interesting loan I want to get into the details. But again, following direction of council and the commissioners. This is a long term loan. You know, up to nine years. But what's really unique about it it's an unsecured loan. One of the biggest barriers to small businesses and getting any loan is the need to have a secondary source of repayment and personal guarantee. That doesn't require that does not require that. So there's no secondary source of repayment, nor a personal guarantee for a small business loan and this is a I think nationally a fairly unique program so again, these programs have been have been delivered and I think one of the things that at last point I really want to make about this is we have been able to get these these these assets these capitals in the hands of minority and women on businesses. In the grant program. 66% of the grants went to minority owned businesses with the majority being black on 57% of them went to women owned businesses. The minority owned program in the 31 businesses 31 of those 31 businesses 72% are minority owned and 53% are women owned. Again, we did this very intentionally and and we did this because one in the grant program. We set aside standard of $500,000 in revenue and below. We set aside standard of $500,000 of businesses, but when you look at the data of businesses in Durham, essentially 90% of our businesses employed less than 25. And many of the minority businesses have revenue of less than a million. And so we fine tuned this program to ensure that they would have an opportunity and not be squeezed out and the results speak for themselves. The outreach and technical assistance was key to being able to do that because on the federal programs what we found is that many of the minority businesses were not prepared their books were not in order. They didn't have the financial records, nor the legal help required to be successful and PPP. But most importantly what they didn't have in the federal PPP program is that they didn't have banking relationships, because PPP was all about the businesses who had existing relationships and loans, and those have been repackaged. So, I'm going to conclude with that I'm sure there are tons of questions and maybe turn it over to Andy. The city and county over this last year have forwarded some very strong partnerships around this work and I really appreciate the leadership that Andy is exhibited and working with us in doing so. My name is Andrew Ritterball and I'm an economic development officer with Durham County. Good morning to the task force, county and city leaders and colleagues. Thank you for having us here today to talk about local economic development efforts occurring through the pandemic. Andrew touched on the recovery fund so I'll focus my comments on business recruitment and retention and the connection to workforce development. As you've heard the effects of the pandemic have been disproportionate at every level. Some sectors have been impacted head on while others are thriving. This has been previously mentioned we've had a number of unassisted business announcements including Google, Apogeec, Biogen and Fidelity. And that's truly a reflection of the quality of life that Durham has to offer and cost of living and world class workforce that make Durham a premier location for companies to locate. We've also had a successful run of business recruitment to include city and county projects, both supported in new electronics and Clorox. But predominantly we've seen recruitment and biotech over the last few years and continue through the pandemic. The chair referenced Monday's bulls presentation I'd like to talk about that briefly. I'll start off by sharing some really exciting biotech stats. For top life sciences clusters in the United States, Raleigh Durham is fifth in the country. 39% of all life sciences sites in the state are in Durham County. So nearly 40% of life sciences company sites. In the last three years, the triangle has recruited 8,900 life sciences jobs. More than half of those 4,600 have been recruited by Durham County and through our partnership with organizations like the Chamber to successfully bring those jobs to Durham County. So we've had tremendous demand for this workforce in biotech. We have thousands and thousands of jobs on the horizon which is great. Currently and in the years to come, but the question remains how do we better connect Durham residents, particularly communities of color to those opportunities. So I'd like to talk about the bulls and the chair introduced the program earlier on it and I'll expand on that just a little bit. The bulls initiative, building up local life sciences, consists of a number of local institutions and organizational partners. Through pillars of strategy are to increase awareness, remove barriers and provide support. So a few examples of awareness activities that have occurred really in the past year. This is a quick side note, we've really been working at this work intensely for about a year now. And so we had the opportunity on Monday to give a presentation to the board, kind of summarizing activities to date as well as where we see this going in front of next step. So a few examples of awareness in partnership with Select Workforce Development Board, including Durham, virtual biotech career explanation webinars were held. And through that 454 workers displaced by the pandemic registered and received $350 stipends to attend that webinar. And through that, we were actually able to enroll at least five participants directly into bio work programming at Durham Tech. So that's what we're trying to raise awareness, not only the industry, but to get those entry level positions. The first step is is enrolling at Durham Tech and starting with the coursework there to get that certificate and to best, you know, start on that path to get those entry level jobs. Additional awareness activities, the Go Durham ad campaign. So developed and launched by a partnership between NC Biotech, the Durham Chamber, and street level media. Biotech industry wraps are now circulating on 10 buses through Durham. Maybe you've seen them. These are pretty cool. And so it's a large, it's a bit of a lab scene, you've got a scientist doing some lab work and the website directing you to the Bio Jobs Hub, right. And so this is a website that's been created by NC Biotech, full of great information on the industry, and really is kind of centralized website to get a lot of information on the industry and training opportunities. Additionally, we've had a number of direct engagement efforts, new veterans, nonprofits and community partners to enroll in Durham Tech's Biowork course. In the last year we've seen enrollment in Biowork and related Biowork courses more than double. And part of that has been because of virtual enrollment and the reduction of transportation and transportation barriers to the northern Durham Tech. And also a reflection of the engagement efforts as well. They're just kind of moving on to briefly talk about, you know, providing support and remaining barriers to address the, you know, the awareness. But, you know, providing support and removing barriers are critical to really, you know, getting getting local residents into training opportunities and to make sure that they have a successful or opportunities to be successful. So when we talk about support services, we see that as things like coaching, tutoring and memory. And when we're talking about barriers, we're talking about things like technology, transportation, childcare, loss of secondary income. Things that would prevent people from enrolling in coursework at Durham. So we are piloting programs through the county's nonprofit process to address this as well as through a cohort bulls Academy that made in Durham is supporting for five young adults. Receive stipends and coaching support as they enroll in Durham Tech in the fall. But to really scale this program up. Durham Tech has agreed to take on a number of these functions. That includes significantly increasing instructional capacity, success coaches to provide support and provision of stipends to address barriers from rural. And that also includes a new facility truly scale up in numbers and programming, which, which is a significant cost. But we are pursuing a number of avenues to see that come to reality. And so also we are looking to address some of these items in the budget cycle. But bulls remains committed to being a public private partnership with funding through a variety of sources at every level to truly make this vision come to reality. And so that concludes my comments and I will turn it back over to Jeff. Thank you, Andrew, Andy and thank you, Andre really appreciate your time and joining us today. I'll just make an offer of a couple sort of wrap up comments and then we'll sort of turn it over to the broader group for follow up discussion I do also know that we have a couple of other items we've cleaned up on the agenda. I hope that today really saw really crystallized for everybody. The fact that economic development is indeed a team sport. And then what you've heard today are just a sampling of the many aspects that go into a holistic approach to economic development. And as we know in Durham and we've brought many of our partners here before this group throughout the past year, there are many different organizations and government departments working on all facets of economic development. But currently they're not really coordinated under a central vision or really a strategic plan. We work great together, but there really isn't that opportunity for us to really kind of discuss on a regular basis. There's some of the ideas the initiatives that we're working on, but recovery from this unprecedented economic impact is going to require coordinating plans and is Andre mentioned for both the short and long term efforts. It's going to require a collaboration among the city and county government officials, local economic development organizations and services from agencies and organizations working with small businesses and other entities. And we're really excited about what about the introduction of the city's fuse fellow moving forward and see if and how that work carry forward with the work there we really believe that there's a lot of potential for a group like this to continue. To that end, we do recommend convening an economic development forum of our local partners to really share our respective initiatives and explore the better ways to make sure we are aligned in those collective efforts. Now we're thinking of partners will involve our city and county and economic development leaders and other agencies and organizations throughout Durham. And I think one thing I really like to point out is so many of these programs that we've discussed are already in place within all of these organizations that I've mentioned. And just working to have this open forum with the group can align and better collaborate opportunities moving forward. We think that a better collaboration can help us expand on proactive recruitment and attraction for businesses and industries that can further diversify Durham's economy. We think better collaboration can fortify and expand support programs for small businesses to include consultation, financial and entrepreneurial development. It can support and encourage innovative workforce development for the short term address through things like Durham Tech's Back to Work Initiative and other programs like Andy had mentioned with the Bulls Initiative. And for the long term, a holistic program can address cradle to career workforce preparation to support from local education institutions as well as the business community. I second everybody's mentioned here that we need to really make sure we're providing a multi-pronged approach for new learning opportunities and emphasize mentorship, apprenticeships, online programs in the introduction of entrepreneurship and skilled training as the clearest pathway to business ownership and generational wealth. I think the continued collaboration is also going to be critical as we work to continue to build up consumer confidence and programs and promote resident and visitor re-engagement to support local businesses. We need to get our people into work, get them trained, get them into jobs, and then have those jobs result in consumption to help support so many of our small businesses that are suffering. So with that, I'd like to thank Andy and Andre for joining us as well as the great work for this, this Economic Recovery Committee. It's been really enjoyable working with you all. Looking forward to our next conversations as we move forward with this forum concept and we'll turn it over to the group for discussion. Thank you. Thanks, Andre, Andy, Susan, Nicole, and Jeff. Any questions for the team before we move to the next topic? And I think what Jeff mentioned at the end really ties into our next topic because it really focused on the future of the Recovery Renewal Task Force. And one of the things that I heard Jeff say, Jeff, I hope I get this right, he made a recommendation about an economic forum that continues on after the Task Force. So as we think about future activities of the Task Force or after we have our last meeting and things that it will continue on, certainly want to get feedback on that recommendation but want to address any other questions that you may have about what's been presented. Mayor Shull. Thank you, Matisha, and thanks for the report everybody. It was really great. I'm very familiar with, with, with most of Andre's report, not as familiar with Andy's and really interested to hear more about the Bulls project and sounds great, Andy. And, and thanks to everybody on the group for pulling such a good report together very comprehensive and both about the things we have done through the pandemic and what we're going to do. I want to mention Jeff, Jeff talked about the Fuse Fellow and I just want to explain that a little bit. The city has been fortunate to receive a fellow position from a group called Fuse Corps, and one of the fellows will be working with the Economic Development Forum or whatever the exact name is going to be that will that will be following up on this group. And so we're really glad to be able to offer that staff support, which I think will be really a really good thing. And I just want to say I do think, you know, Matisha you asked for feedback I think it's really important that this continue in that in some form that the economic development work, whatever help, you know, we know that we've got a way to go to get through the health, the health crisis. It's not done, but we need to really continue the economic development work, the economic recovery work and the economic development work so just want to thank Jeff for that recommendation and the committee and very much supported and the city will be able to offer some staff support with the Fuse Fellow, which I think will be helpful. I also said that my happiest moment of the day so far has been to see our when Susan asked who could go who was planning travel I was really glad to see our public health director raise his hand. I'm glad to see that he is for many reasons that he thinks it will be okay to do and that he thinks he'll be able to get some time way to do it. That was a very happy making a moment for me. I want to stay married I better make it happen. I understand I'm with you. All right, thank you Mayor Scholl, Vice Chair Jacobs I saw your hand. Thank you Matisha and I just want to say all of the reports today have just been fantastic. I just want to really applaud everyone who for all the great work that you've all been doing. And I'm really excited hearing the vision that you laid out Andre, and also Jeff and Susan and Nicole and and Andy. I think one of the silver linings of the pandemic is that we have a great foundation for partnership at every level. We've been thinking about within our community the roundtables. You know Andre when you were talking about the need for the peer learning and the support when I've sat in on the roundtables that's what I've seen and heard is when you bring people together. And the different businesses and partners in different sectors what I heard so much of was and even with the education roundtable is people exchanging ideas, supporting each other. That type of support the relationships and networking, I mean you can't even put a value on that so I hope that we really do keep that going and we know that's one of the benefits of even the virtual zoom meetings to be able to make that's more flexible for people. But I want to also say that I think that continuing this economic recovery work is beyond the public health is going to be the most important thing that we do over the next few years and what I heard from all of you is that we need to commit ourselves to it we need to commit ourselves in terms of the time, and we need to commit ourselves financially to that. And that this is our opportunity to address so many of the disparate systemic issues that we have. We have this opportunity now and I'm really cannot underestimate the resources that we have coming into our community with the American Recovery Act money. We have this coming into our schools the city the county, the money that we're is going to come from the Biden administration and so many waves. And we need to really be really thoughtful really intentional about how we use that money to address. Some of the plans and issues that you've laid out because it is going to take more resources and we really need to make that happen. So I look forward to supporting your recommendations and this idea of an economic development form. And I look forward to the work ahead. Thank you. Thank you very much. Any other comments on that recommendation. So not seeing anyone else. So we actually pulled together a group because if you remember from our last task force meeting we ran out of time to really brainstorm on just work that we want to continue on after we stopped our task force meetings. I just want to say thanks to Jeff and Susan, Nicole, Katie and Amber. We pulled our we pulled in rod as well sorry run. But we had a conversation about work that we want to continue on and so we did have some conversations on economic development and Jeff and team thanks so much for bringing forth the recommendation. We also spent some time talking about budget proposals, because we currently as part of the task force we have a subcommittee that we pulled together and many thanks to that subcommittee that comes together to that budget proposals. And our thought was there could possibly be some additional requests for funding that brought forward. The current proposal as it relates to fund a request that come forward the way that we're currently constructed, we have the budget subcommittee. And once we get a proposal that we want to move forward of course we bring it to the task force if the task force endorses it, then we typically work with Ryan from the city and journey Miller from the county to move these proposals forward. And our next recommendation is that we're not going to have a subcommittee or anyone from the task force continue in that role, but set up a mechanism where that we can leverage Ryan and or Jodi for things that come forward. We're still trying to work out the exact details on how that might work we haven't had a conversation with Ryan or Jodi. So we have a lot of thoughts in terms of how do we bring forward a funding request that may come up related to whether it's public health or economic recovery because our thought is there possibly will be some additional funding requests. We just have to figure out exactly what that looks like and my hope is by the meeting in May we'll be able to come back to you and say this is what we're proposing as the path forward. I'm going to share and see if there's any thoughts or comments as it relates to what we're proposing for a funding request that come forward. All right. Thank you, Mayor Schul. Another topic as it relates to again future of the future of the task force Susan I know you raised early on in the meeting. Some thoughts about the back on the bull campaign so I'll let you talk a little bit about that. Sure. What we were thinking about is how does this ramp down the media portion of the campaign the part that was funded by the city and the county is due to run through mid May, and then it ends. And we're not recommending at this point that we come back for additional funds to extend that campaign. We feel like by that point. It may not be necessary but certainly if our public health group disagrees were open to further conversation but but we're not planning to put forward another proposal. However, there is a back on the bull website. There are businesses thankfully all over town that have back on the bull signs in the windows. There's just a number of components of this that are still live out there beyond the campaign and the question we were considering is, how long should those stay there stay in place. And our thought was and recommendation would be that we have the back on the bull website in place for as long as there are public health mandates, whether that's mass or limitations on capacity or anything else that that hub site is something that could be a central point point for information and Durham, and we think that it would make sense to stay there as long as there's information like that that needs to be shared. The other consideration a couple other considerations here. One is a lot of the material that's out in the market signage and such points to that website so we don't want things out in the market pointing to the website if we take the website down. We also know, and this is based on some of the traveler sentiment research available that travelers and meeting planners are really intently interested in how a community is has responded. And whether it is taking action to be safe and so there's a value from that standpoint to have that information out there. So we'd we'd advocate for it. And then another thing, which is just something I'm not clear on myself is how long the ambassadors will be in place and want to be able to point business owners to the website that has been an active question. So, when you consider all of those points, our thought is that we leave the website in place and we encourage businesses to continue to leave their signs up and whatever the other manifestations of the campaign are till about the end of the summer. And we're thinking by that point our hope is that we won't still be having government mandates on things like mass and capacity, we recognize that may still be the case but for now, we're thinking let's plan on leaving it in place through the end of the summer and then we can reassess it later, as we get closer to that date, but wanting to open that up here if there are any other considerations maybe we hadn't thought about it. There's certainly there's a ongoing commitment required to maintain the website make sure that it's remains viable and up to date with the latest information that's that we need to have up there. Thank you Susan. Any doctor comments to share from anyone. I'll just mention, I really do think it's important that we keep the website up through the summer. For all of the reasons that Susan has has stated, but I think this is, you know when we initially conceived of this campaign and this approach, and last summer. It really was to help with that confidence and that consumer confidence and people being back. We haven't gotten to that yet. I'm hopeful that we will begin to get to that in the coming months. But I think we need the website to be there to continue to support the work that we initially set out to do last summer. That was somewhat delayed because of the public health crisis. We're still in, but, but hopefully we'll be coming out of as more and more people get vaccinated. I feel like this is a worthy continued endeavor. And the messaging needs to can to remain strong. People have a tendency to, you know, again, live in a moment so to speak and have short term memory so if they're able to see and constantly have a presence about what they need to do. It further helps out efforts as far as curbing the spread. We're doing well, but again, you know, more messaging we never heard. Alrighty. Thank you for that. Susan, do you want to mention the awards submission that came up that you became aware of. Well, we raised a question about whether we've heard gotten great comments and feedback on this campaign. We know we're not the only community in the United States that's done a campaign but we think we have one of the better ones. And then we're not taking any credit for this as you know McKinney was the agency who did the original graphics and the Center for advanced hindsight, who informed the messaging of the campaign and our team has been more aware about executing and evolving it but the question was, do we want to submit this campaign for awards. There are lots and lots of potential awards out there as a marketing campaign and and we've been looking at with Amber's help at what kinds of there are several award categories related to municipal and governments and things like that so the feedback that we got overwhelmingly was yes there would be some interest in doing some submissions. So what we're going to do is compile a list of the ones that we think seem to make the most sense, and we'll run it by, I think that the mayor's office there is a little bit of funding that would be required but it's very small. And we'll just make a decision based on what we think is a reasonable amount to spend and then we'll share the results but it will not be before our last meeting so we'll have to do some follow up communication with the group. That's great Susan. Thank you very much. Other items so as I mentioned we pulled together a group we talked about ideas around things that we wanted to continue on. And now we have a lot of roundtables and as Katie mentioned when she gave the education roundtable update and that meeting last week we did talk with that that roundtable and they do want to continue on so I would imagine there may be other roundtables that may want to continue on even after we cease our task force meetings and so I would say for those of you that are involved in those roundtables if you can give that some thought ask some questions about whether or not those roundtables want to continue on. And then maybe at our meeting in May we can talk about which of those roundtables that we are aware of that want to continue on. So now I just want to open it up because we've talked about the Economic Development Forum we talked about funding the proposals we've talked about back on the bull we've talked about roundtables. Are there any other areas that anyone wants to bring forth that we should consider continuing to work on after May. And I do recognize there will be a lot of great work that will continue even after the task force so I know we're not the end of the all. But are there any specific items coming out of the task force work that we want to make sure that that work continues on. Sorry, Steve do you want to go first. Okay, no I was going to say it just, I think this has been mentioned before, but any best practices or information gleaned from this experience that could be useful going forward in terms of building collaborations and alliances. For example, you know, this group and the interaction with the different, you know, different roundtables they got started some formally some less informally, so I just say you know before we forget because you know, I sort of some of the lessons learned from this overall experience that could be useful and with whom can we share them you know documenting them some way and sharing them. I think would be really would be really helpful, not to say that this is completely unique, but I'm sort of not aware of other initiatives that have been collaborative city county that have involved so many different tentacles across Durham city and county. So I wouldn't want us to lose any, any of the education and lessons learned from this experience. Thank you for that voice I think that that's an excellent idea, because we definitely want to reflect on the great lessons that we learned as well as share lessons learn with anyone that it may benefit so I think that's excellent idea. And the only other thing I was going to say is when we can all get together in person we have to have a big big party with all the, you know, with this group and the roundtables and, you know, even if that's next year we just have to do it. Yeah, your co chairs are on top of it we're going to make it happen. We have been talking about that and eagerly anticipating the day that we can do that. But that's on the list. Thank you, Rachel. Just thinking about the workers survey and their and the town hall coming up and there may be some things coming out of there I know there will be some things coming out of the other we're going to want to pay attention to. So I just want to keep that on our radar also. I'm excited about that and I think it's fantastic that so many people have responded to survey. All right, we got that. Any other thought by Sir Jacobs. I want to echo what Lois and Steve just said, Lois, I love, I love your idea of some type of the celebration and also best practices. I mean, going back to my comments again about the roundtables, I think that we really need to figure out a way to keep raising up some of the, you know, I'm thinking about our refugee roundtable and the vulnerable communities. And then of course the workers. How do we really keep centering and raising up those voices in our community and keep keep that happening. I'd love to hear I don't know if Reverend Davis is still on, but the religious roundtable, I think is one that really struck me to is really bringing not just the churches together, but our, you know, Jewish community, the Muslim community, just in ways that we just haven't done before. And I would just hate to see us not keep supporting those new, new, new relationships and centering that in our work and also around the language equity. I don't know all that we did with four different languages and how do we learn from, you know, how we've been communicating and access and equity and how we keep doing those related to best practices that we need to all keep doing as we move forward so thank you. Thank you for that. Thank you so much for the opportunity between now and our next meeting just really focus on how we can continue to vet that out and make sure that we're not disbanding the great work that started and Dr Davis had to drop off a little bit early so just fyi. All right, anything else. Anything from you Katie that that I missed. I think you have covered it all thank you so much. I want to thank this group and looking forward to our meeting in May. Looking forward to our meeting in May as well as our celebration meeting that's going to happen at some point in the future we're going to make it happy we just don't know when. Alrighty, well I think I will give back to you two minutes for the first time in a long time so I appreciate everyone joining this morning I appreciate the active engagement and, like has been said by others I've absolutely enjoyed working with this group so closely and it's kind of bittersweet that in a month we're going to have our last meeting. We're the partnerships that we built the relationships that we built we will continue to work together very closely even after May so again just many things for all that you've done, and that I know all that I know that you will continue to do so hope you have a great weekend. Thanks everyone.