 Good morning everyone. Thanks for joining. We're gonna get started in a few minutes. I just wanted to remind everyone as they kind of come in and out that the chat function is on the right-hand side that you are on right now. Right below it is the question, the question tab. So please if you have any questions during this we'll answer them as soon as we can right after. But please put, place your questions there. We do have a poll so the third tab on your right go ahead and do the poll whenever you get the chance this morning or before we start or during it. So you should be good to go. We don't have any files uploaded so you don't have to worry about that. So but please use the second tab on the right hand side for your questions so that we can get to them just in case they get lost in the chat. Please collaborate with each other. Feel free to introduce yourself in the chat and say where you're from. Welcome. We'll get started in the next couple of minutes. Hey Craig, thanks for joining us. News of board, West Valley City, Utah. Thanks for joining. Happy to have you guys. We'll get started in just a few minutes. Give an opportunity for everyone to jump on. Good morning, Catherine. Good morning, Cheryl. Hi, Craig. Thank you all for joining us. Perfect. Good morning, everyone. My name is Ruth Aussie and with me here is Brenda Penner. We are two community engagement liaisons with the City of Fort Worth and today we're going to be talking about how engagement starts with us and the us in this case is city staff. You're going to learn about a work group that me and Brenda collaborated together along with our office and other city departments to create and we hope that you take away from it. We'll answer all questions at the very end. We're both monitoring the chat and doing the presentation at the same time so make sure that you do use the questions tab that's on your right hand side and it's the second tab and make sure to leave any comments in the chat because we'll be happy to read them after as well. So before we get started we just wanted to give you guys a breakdown of what the City of Fort Worth looks like and why this work group was so important for us to start because it really started with our demographics. Good morning, everyone. Hey, El Paso and Waco and everyone else that's coming in. So as you can kind of see one of the focuses that we're kind of looking at was where the City of Fort Worth is in general. We are the 13th largest city in the United States and growing so we're trying to keep up with everything but as you can kind of see 36.4 out of the population as of 2019 was Hispanic right and so you can kind of see on the bar graphs we can't see it on our end but I think it was like 25 or 27 percent on there but this is not counting the census information that has come out so we know that it's grown a lot more and you can see the born born population within the City of Fort Worth is at 65.3 percent so one of the focuses that we have and as you can see the types of languages that are spoken the second largest on there is Spanish and so I think this information really comes out because of that and we'll kind of talk about that a little bit more. So in comparison we really want to highlight what our employee demographic information looks like the City of Fort Worth as of 2020 and this has changed of course has 6,691 employees out of all those employees 4,860 live in Tarrant County so the surrounding cities around Fort Worth are probably 10 to 15 minutes away and 3,213 employees not only work but live in the City of Fort Worth out of all those employees 637 of them receive bilingual pay for speaking Spanish this means that the city pays them a stipend every month for either reading or writing or being able to speak to customers in Spanish or doing both. So just taking a look at the Fort Worth employees and this is as of January 2021 but it's constantly changing you can see that the city-wide totals are at 25.4 percent that are Hispanic right and so as you kind of take a look at the next few down these are constantly changing we are always getting more people who speak Spanish and are Hispanic in general especially police with their new recruits as well as fire so as far as general employees you can see that it's a little small on my end but I think it's 29.9 percent so this is kind of one of the focuses that we see is because we we do live and work for the City of Fort Worth and I think it's a big looking at the workforce and how many people actually may provide these services and communicate with residents in general it's a big deal. So you may be thinking how does your demographic information for the city and your employees matter to you and no matter how we're engaging with our community and just to give you a little breakdown of our office we office out of our communications department under communications and public engagement we have the communicate community engagement office and we have six liaisons in our office who are all tasked with a different part of the city our job is to be a liaison for those neighborhood associations to be the experts in in their area but also provide education and presentations for not only the schools but for adults and we also collaborate with other city departments to make sure that we are attending public meetings and getting this information out to our neighborhoods as you can imagine we say pretty busy with 300 registered neighborhood organizations outside of that we also have special projects me and Brenda are the two liaisons in our office that are bilingual in Spanish speaking so we're tasked with Hispanic outreach and this has grown vastly since I started with the city we used to do presentations in Spanish and I think we've grown that number a lot and when we go out and do education and presentations this is information regarding City Hall 101 civics and solid waste programs that we have stormwater and really connecting Spanish speaking residents with other services that the city has oftentimes we do take guest speakers with us and collaborate with other departments to make their services known we also provide translations for our neighborhood organizations if they are struggling with Hispanic outreach this is something that our office can help them with and it's something that we have really focused on and have been really strategic about when we're engaging new neighborhood organizations or we're working to re-engage them we also provide translations for other city departments I think one thing that has happened since Brenda and I took this role is that we started noticing that maybe some departments are not using Burvich that is easy to understand by Spanish speakers so we're making sure that whenever this information goes out that we're reporting back to those departments to make sure that they use appropriate language we also have a community engagement bulletin this bulletin goes out with city news events public meetings that are happening all around the city it goes out every Thursday to all of our neighborhood leaders and so we told you we have about 300 neighborhood associations so you can times that times five and that's how many people receive this bulletin it is their job as neighborhood leaders to then send this information out to their neighbors whether they put it on Facebook next door and share it on their newsletters we expect them to share this information what me and Brenda started doing about maybe two years or a year and a half ago is started providing the news stories that are in our community engagement bulletin in Spanish we translate every city news story that we have that doesn't already come in Spanish I think we've seen this shift with a lot of departments and already making sure that they're providing this information in Spanish but those who don't we all translate it for them and we also provide a PDF summary to make it easy for our residents and our neighborhood leaders to send this information out by a click of a button and we've also increased our collaboration with Spanish speaking faith-based organizations and area agencies as well as other networking groups like the Hispanic Chamber or the Hispanic bonus coalition here in Fort Worth so one of the things right before we started is what what do we do about this we keep seeing different things we keep getting feedback from Hispanic residents you know I don't understand this or how can I get this information in Spanish and so it kind of got us thinking and we're like well what about getting people within the departments together right but how do we do that so one of the things was just kind of searching how we could do that reaching out for HR like Ruth mentioned was we have in the city of Fort Worth we have people getting paid to read write and speak Spanish so why not try to find that list which we got connected to and let's see what we can do from there so we kind of brainstormed how we would do this and kind of got this you know flyer started circling circling around in our heads and we were like okay so we're gonna do is we're gonna introduce ourselves kind of let them know what we're doing send out this mass email to these employees who get paid to speak Spanish and connect with residents in Spanish and so we're kind of like okay we need to find a location that is easy accessible for everyone to kind of come in and get together we're gonna do it during the lunch hour so it's not something extra that they have to do at the end of the day or kind of just like scurry right we'll provide lunch for you just come and join us and collaborate and see what we can kind of find out and so that's exactly what happened we sent this flyer out we emailed that to all the employees on that bilingual pay list about 54 employees RSVP some were kind of still skeptical like what is this I don't know too busy for that you know but at least 45 employees attended and what happened was that connection and that collaboration everyone was kind of excited like hey what you know this this hasn't existed you know what's kind of going on what can we do and then we kind of started brainstorming from there you know learning about each other's departments you know Ruth and I do work within different departments you know and assisting and kind of we have to help you know learn some of those things as well and so it kind of helped connect others to each other as well and kind of like well I didn't know that that program was available and so you know kind of that we've what we found out is I mean a lot of people were excited to kind of just have their information out there and kind of connect with each other and kind of just be able to provide what services that they did and if they are doing Spanish or how much they actually speak to Spanish speaking residents and when we started and the idea of a Hispanic work group it was really that just an idea we didn't necessarily have the permission from our city manager to create this group it was born out of our office and we just wanted to test the waters we send out some fuelers we send out the flyer made a sign-up sheet to see how many employees would really be interested we thought you know doing it during lunch the lunch hour we didn't know how managers or directors we're going to perceive this idea so we decided to provide lunch do it at a time where maybe they could just come even without having to let their managers know that they that employees were going to come out to this meeting try to do it at a central location so it wouldn't be too much of a far drive and level C spawn other Fort Worth was born and this is a name that our employees voted on and it translates over to the Hispanic voice of Fort Worth which I think is a really accurate name as we mentioned before our employees live in the city of Fort Worth and oftentimes they go back until their family members of what's happening within the city I don't know how many city employees we have with us today but you can send us a little hand up in the chat if you are a city employee but how many times have you been asked oh you work for the city right like you should know when full collection is you should know what's happening with other city departments and the truth is a lot of times our city employees are not aware of what's happening with other departments we are really missing a collaboration piece so this group has not only helped bridge that gap to now we're communicating we're talking about what we're doing and how we can better serve our Hispanic customers we have had 12 meetings since August of 2019 we've tried to be really consistent in having the meeting at the same time of the month every every year or every month I apologize and we've moved to virtual meetings since June of 2020 so our participation usually ranges from 30 to 50 attendees per meeting and this is really great considering that at every meeting we have a new employee and there's a new phase in our group that wasn't there previously and moving to virtual meetings because of COVID has allowed us to be able to record the meetings and to reach a bigger audience because now employees don't have to leave their desk or they can eat lunch and be watching the meeting or have it in the background as they're working on other things to be able to participate we have had several department managers and directors that have served as guest speakers and we went from asking directors and asking managers to be a part of our group to them reaching out to us and saying hey I would really like to come out and speak to your group and get the opinions of of these employees so we've had one community event and then this one community event we had nine city departments represented and I'm gonna let Brenda talk a little bit more about that yeah and so basically I mean the the mission is to help these Hispanic workers engage right a lot of us like I said before live and work within the city and we really encourage to use those resources as well if you and your family are needing it note that you can you know use these services use the library use the community centers use the the resources and that we'll kind of talk about here in a little bit but there's a glitch and so on our and it doesn't show the Spanish version but we do have a Spanish front and back for these city services here so at one of the meetings we kind of thought hey you know all of our brains together what can we do to bring our services to the community right we're always constantly talking about well they need to come here and do this well residents need to find this is where they can find me they're not going to find that at City Hall right and so one of the things was how can we bring this and reach out to residents in general right where can we meet them where they're at right now and kind of help educate right provide these services educate them whatever whatever was needed and so we kind of threw in together let's do a city services fair so we had different departments kind of hey like I want to have a table let's do this we had about nine departments anywhere from library fair housing with diversity and inclusion the police animal control code enforcement all of these services were there right so the only thing that we've asked would have at least one Spanish speaking person at your table so you can have anywhere from one person to four people representing that table and so we're like okay well where do we want to have this so fortunately we have officer Segura and who he is is he is basically like the Spanish public speaker right he has a Spanish media platform he has the Facebook Instagram anything that he can get the word out in Spanish he does that right so whether it's collaborating with us or different departments or hey this is going on with the water department let's do a quick Facebook live about it so that we can do we can send this out to residents right so thankfully he has those connections with with Le Grand Plaza and what Le Grand Plaza is it's basically like a Hispanic mall you can find people making leather in their boots you can find Quintanilla dresses there you can find great food a lot of Hispanic stores great food Mexican candy stuff like that right and so it's kind of like a variety of everything that's two stories and one of the good things about that as well is that we do have city services within an area of Le Grand Plaza so they have anywhere from parks and rec I'm not sure if the neighborhood services is still there but they had a portion of neighborhood services and then they're actually going to be moving one of the library the libraries in there to help kind of get that access right so we focused on Le Grand Plaza and like I said we we all have like a table there was already an event going on there anyways so we kind of focused it in and around that right how can we reach people and us come to them where they're already at so you can see it was a 4 to 8 p.m. time that we did service what we had was I mean it got people curious like okay well I see all the mollies which is the city of Fort Worth logo and they're like okay they have all this stuff going library had their fun stuff you know where kids can come in and when prizes we had different information anywhere from I mean you could get pens you could get just basic flyers right because some people just moved to the city so they're like well I don't even know when my bulk trash is right we're like here you can have this with this information in Spanish and English or you just refer to the next table or the appropriate table for them right so it was really great really great feedback we were able to reach you know and a lot of people are like I don't know how to do this or you know that was when my Fort Worth was kind of coming in and what my Fort Worth is a free app where you can sit take a picture of something say there's like a legal dumping or so there's a sign thrown that somebody hit you can take a picture of that with that Fort Worth app and send it to the correct department and it's kind of like a faster way to get those those issues resolved right so we're kind of able to meet them where they're at which was super great and then as well as if any city employee needed that information or any family member needed that they'd be able to pass that along as well so one thing that I want to mention is oftentimes we get neighborhood leaders or other city staff saying you know I'm inviting my Spanish-speaking neighbors to this event and they just don't come out they're not they don't want to engage there's a language barrier there's a cultural barrier so one thing that we I think did with with this event with the city services fair is bring an event to the community we didn't look for residents to come to an event where we picked a location where there may not they may not know right we picked a location we were strategic about the time that we were going to be there we were strategic about who we were collaborating with Brenda mentioned officer Segura and he has been really instrumental in helping us bridge the gap with the media one really good example of how it's going is that we have seen departments collaborate together he has a really good connection with one of the Spanish-speaking stations with Telemundo and they were hosting a phone bank and they needed a time slot to fill we had already created this group so we were able to partner with neighborhood services and and their team to talk about priority repair and they went over to Dallas started the phone bank and got phone calls and got residents engaged in a service that they may not previously have had so we like to take the little wins that we have like the city services there like the phone bank to celebrate the little success I think you have to take the wins because it can be really overwhelming to say you know we have a whole lot of Spanish-speaking residents that we're not reaching but what about those that we are because they go back and speak to their families and we know from being a part of that community that we talk and we gather and that's something that we like to do and we like to share information and resources so how it's going department director CS as an asset and winner opinion we've had several program managers and directors come to our meetings and what they do is explain their their roles right they talk about their division or their department explain every single program they have under the moon and then we have a Q&A one thing that we ask him is how can our group help you with your outreach efforts whether it's just getting ideas whether it's collaborating together for an event they want to hear our opinions so that has been really encouraging and really vital for our group because now you have a group of city employees who are admins who work in the field in water or transportation and public works who didn't have that platform before and nobody was asking them what they thought and how they should communicate with their own community so it's been really really cool for us to see that grow and those partnerships develop there's an increase in departmental collaborations like I mentioned before and we love it when people know the name of our office we love it when they say oh you can just call community engagement they can help connect you and we've have had more staff reach out to us and say hey like I have this event happening how do you think I can better promote it or who can I reach out to who can I collaborate with in the city to make this event great and we continue to be a pivotal tool for engagement especially during COVID-19 so at the beginning of the pandemic we were able to utilize our work group to do translations that our office really didn't have time for because we were being pulled into different directions we were able to compile a list of area agencies that serve Hispanic residents and faith-based organizations to which they attended to so our network grew even more when we were trying to collaborate and get messaging out most recently we had the director of our co-department come out and speak to us about vaccinations for COVID-19 vaccinations and it was really cool to see that he wanted our opinions some of the things that we throughout there were doing vaccines on site for workplaces where they have a large Hispanic workforce doing vaccination sites in grocery stores doing neighborhood vaccination sites and I'm not going to say the ideas came from us we're not going to take all the credit but a few weeks later we had community members who were telling us there was vaccination sites at grocery stores we saw there was a city news story about neighborhood vaccination sites so that's really cool to see and it really empowers an audience that wasn't being reached before with our employees and another thing on that you know the the way that we are trying to reach obviously it's the focus of how we're trying to reach that but a lot of these ideas go go for anyone you can use these ideas with with any any targeted group if you if you you know you're trying to reach the Asian population and you have speakers you know or people that can actually translate that as well you know we encourage you to use that and use different ideas like that use your departments that can that can do those things right so what's next we're obviously looking at more cooperative events and like like Rick said we you know what we're trying to be in the community more you know we obviously are with our neighborhood associations and HOA's and everything else and sometimes you know when we do help with those public meetings and everything else but we are trying to to to explore more ways to reach out to the community members and to see what else we can provide great so we're going to continue to give feedback on everything we mentioned before it you know it's not just Spanish right we have um people from Puerto Rico or Colombia or you know anything that you can kind of think of in all those language um types of Spanish that we speak we have to make everything accessible to where that neutral understanding of what something particularly means because um sidewalk can can be placed in what three different three different ways so which one are we going to use which one do you feel comfortable using and getting that um consistency with with everyone that's using it and it's different for every department and so finding those consistencies and giving that feedback to each other um transition one of the things that we've really been thinking about is how are we going to keep this going are we what do we what can we do to transition um this work group to an actual organization and what we mean by an organization is do we need to put some bylaws in place um and not keep this in our office because the more collaboration we have and the more it's accessible to everybody else we don't want to be in the front lines all the time right we don't want to be the ones having to okay because if we don't have time then what happens right so we want to give the opportunity to other city employees and departments to kind of step up and be part of the board and put their ideas more and be another face that people can kind of recognize and reach out to and so those are kind of in the works right now um you know just thinking about it because if something happens you know um how's it going to keep going and so when you make it into an organization it's it just kind of builds from there right you're able to reach more capacity um and so we encourage and empower um to engage city staff and so that's what we mean by that is if we make it into an organization we feel people would have more opportunity for it um we love and value everyone's ideas so um being able to do that it's kind of going to be a big deal and you know like um like miss emetha said some of the greatest ideas you don't have to ask permission for you know so that's one of the big things that we're trying to work on right now um and as we still continue to encourage um city staff to to use those resources as well connect yourself with your own resources and kind of go from there so we have definitely have time for your questions if you have any thoughts comments on what we're doing what we can improve this is um kind of our baby we haven't had um a whole lot of time with it probably about a year and a half or so that we've been working and then cova kind of put a um a hold on a lot of the meetings that we were holding before we went to virtual and we had a turnover um and staff and the staff that we were seeing participating in the meetings has changed since then so we're looking forward to meeting with them again um hopefully they understand that we had to denuce that so we couldn't host our meeting yesterday but we look forward to providing them with your with your feedback and with your questions and and your thoughts and i think a lot of the importance as well is our neighborhood associations that we have assisted in in the past in helping with those translations a lot of the people don't they don't realize that they're doing this and i thank them for it but a lot of them i've noticed that they have taken the time in to um get someone and ask you know like hey you know collaborate with me be a part of this and get their own translations and a lot of them um you really don't think about it but they they are doing the work they are asking those questions like hey how can i engage my neighborhood as well um in doing spanish speaking and so a lot of the times if i go drive by or i'm doing um something in that particular neighborhood i'll see that a lot of the stuff that they put out isn't spanish and english sometimes they'll do it you know they'll they'll try their best to do it and be like hey can you print this for me and change anything and explain how you know why so our neighbors and our leaders are definitely doing the work um they're engaging more which is great you know like i said as as city employees we because we already somewhat know a lot of this it's easier for us to pass along information but if our um city employees have that just think of how many more that we can reach through our just our neighbors and our families one thing i want to mention before we um ask the questions is or answer your questions is that even if you're a neighborhood leader um and you're not within the city of war this is an idea that you can bring to your city and say is this something that you're already doing are you having conversations about engaging hispanic or minority residents what are the types of things and tools that you've utilized your employees for so um one of our questions here is officer segura with the police department um yes officer segura is with the city of Fort Worth police department and he actually has a really wide audience um and a really large facebook following with the hispanic community not only within the city of Fort Worth but i hear even in mexico city so um he's been really pivotal and has really pushed forward a positive relationship with the police department um with the hispanic community they really see him as an asset and as a resource um he also handles all media relations with the police department with the spanish-speaking news media see do several of your departments have their own public information officers or is this a central point of contact they do a lot of um different departments have their own some not so much it just depends on the sizing and everything else but usually we can connect um to a direct um pio and then just kind of go from there i think that's the really unique thing about um our office is that we're housed under the communications department so we're able to easily connect with other communication specialists and give them ideas on what other city employees are thinking so yes we have communications specialists with almost every department in our city there's there's a few that don't like my friend mentioned did you hear that yeah it was in the chat okay do you work closely with your school districts and engage residents yeah we do we um obviously we've had to move to virtual and and everything else but um our within our districts that we do say for example i'm in the north northeast and um all of east side um and then we kind of collaborate after under kind of top six is kind of where brief comes in and then so we're kind of like everywhere but we do focus on those um schools so when career days come up we are in there doing stuff parent as teachers programs which are um spanish um we kind of help focus on those as well whether it's giving them you know doing a small presentation for their child and then kind of focusing on them and kind of seeing what they're needing and just kind of helping educate and keep them connected like hey did you know you do have a neighborhood association here this is when they meet this is where you can contact um you know if you're needing spanish just say so and you know things like that so um and that goes for all of our teachers as well you know all the presentations that we do if they're in schools they are um what is it called toss or tax ticks um correlated correlated so all that curriculum goes with the stuff they're learning um within certain different times of the year um so anything that we do is correlated to to what they're learning whether it be the water cycle um about you know water pollution and storm water um recycling anything like that and we also have a really positive relationship with Fort Worth Independent School District um we have a good relationship with their family communications liaisons um they will invite us to any fears that they're having if there's an issue that a family is facing with the city whether it's code or they just need connections and resources a lot of times they'll refer them over our way um one suggestion that I would give is that you find people within your ISD to connect with and have a conversation about how you can collaborate and engage with a lot of our um Fort Worth ISD staff um was and did presentation so we try to attend their meetings and collaborate with them as well um another suggestion I have for that is we have found the ESL groups within our city and we'll reach out to them we'll just send them an email and say hey my name is Ruth this is Brenda um let's work together let's collaborate and we can do our Spanish or presentations in Spanish and we would love to come out um we've had a really we've been really successful in reaching out to those groups and the first time that we'll go to an ESL group or a parent s teachers group everybody's really timid um they don't ask a whole lot of questions but as we keep showing up they'll even want to see the same presentations again just because we've created such a positive relationship with them we keep showing up we all follow through on concerns that they're having to create that trust so whenever we do start to tell them about how they can engage with neighborhood associations they know that that's coming from a trusted source or that's coming from Brenda and I know she'll follow through with what she's saying I know that there's a good relationship there yeah and even bringing other speakers you know when I do my the paul's presentation which is pets are worth it and when I do that you know I'll bring Kayla Gonzalez with me which is with animal control and she'll bring Henry the dog so it's really just making that connection any way that you can right so if you're bringing a full dog of course everyone's going to want to pet that big ol' ham right so it's doing things like that and being able to bring the other speakers sometimes they don't want to hear from you or you're like okay what else can we talk about you know but it's bringing and connecting them to other speakers and spanish speakers like um shelly with uh code enforcement and doing her um uh code ranger program and how they can you know what you know goes in you know if there's so much trash going on or there is um vehicle junk vehicles parked in a yard you know and it starts becoming an eyesore you know it's kind of things like that where you can connect them to other smaller groups or that they can engage in different ways as well so another question from julie is how do you gain support of managers to let their employees participate on an ongoing basis perfectly agree yeah I can take that question um like we mentioned before it was something that an idea that came out of our office um after we held our first initial meeting then we reached out to managers and supervisors and said hey we reached out to everybody who receives bilingual pay do you know which ones of your employees are receiving bilingual pay did you know that this was an option for you that you can put in your budget or are you even utilizing your employees to be able to do translations and to participate in this new work group um because the city has turnover and managers and directors a lot of them were not aware that they had employees that were receiving bilingual pay so they were outsourcing their translations or they were asking other other departments to maybe do some of their outreach material and translate that over or interpret whenever they have employees that are actually getting paid for that work so that was a really good um thing for us to see and for managers to know that this exists it has to be something that we continue doing um as we are as our city changes as it grows as employees leave and come we often have to refresh our list our email list and send it out again and say hey um I know maybe you asked to be removed from this list but just want to let you know that we are still here we're still going um and for new managers that's something that we really emphasize as well whenever our office first gets to meet with them for sure so what are the requirements to organize a neighborhood association on Fort Worth so I know Catherine um placed our um our website on there Fort Worth Texas dot gov slash engagement so if you go on there um there's a tab that says organization and that kind of lists all the all the requirements that we have honestly though we require um you just have one uh neighborhood meeting a year right that can be however you want a lot of the HOAs kind of just focus on one just depending on you know how much they have going on um but we I mean really that's that's it and for you to complete the annual update every year of course make these meetings um public so anyone within you know your area can attend and you know just that you're including everyone right we're not going to say only the purple houses with polka dots um everyone can join except them right um so we want to make sure that you're you're being inclusive and that you're you know just just you're there for a benefit for your neighbors and your neighborhood in your area so that's really all that we ask and that you have bylaws we want to make sure that you have bylaws as well um we assist with that and if there's uh any group that's interested in starting a neighborhood association where there's not already one and they can definitely utilize our office and we can help them with setting up a public interest meeting to seek the interest of their neighbors will help them with posting on next door doing verbal calls creating a fire and writing their bylaws and we have a lot of organizations that also struggle with leadership or volunteer recruitment so they can come to our office to get that type of at the center get workshops done one-on-one with another board and even um finding you know the areas so when we do those public public interest meetings you kind of find hey this is the area that i'm in obviously almost all of them have already have a name or have had a name in the past if there's nothing that's been active there in a while um you know it's considered the boundaries are open and so it's just a certain area and so when you start getting into those public meetings like that um we print out a huge map kind of about that big of just that particular area and that particular boundary and what happens is you know we ask people to come sign in um place a dot of where approximately you live so if we're all getting people from a certain spot you know do we need to just focus on that area do we need to focus on expanding more outreach through this you know the south or the east or whatever it is um you know what are we focusing on can you reach everybody in this area if you become an association are you able to communicate and put that out to everyone in that area if not you know what are the options for that so i think that's also important because you don't want to um overstress you know it can these these people are volunteers which we appreciate very very much and so we try to do different things for them too and show them that we appreciate them um but you know it's important as well because some people don't you know they think of the city and they somewhere like well i don't trust the city anyways but you know when we come in we're we're the type of people that were like hey we are here for you in your community and this is you know how we can work together this is how we can collaborate so it is um a lot of work on both ends but we are there for support for neighborhoods and we appreciate you we appreciate everyone that does it um we love our areas we love the city of Fort Worth and you know whenever we can assist others um that may need that Spanish speaking barrier that's kind of where we come in as well and see what we have on our schedule and see how we can help um our other liaisons um in their areas as well and to tie this back to our word group i think one reason that it has been successful in terms of our attendance is because our employees really feel valued um they feel like their questions are being answered sometimes we get questions that we may not have the answer for and one of those was bilingual pay and maybe it should increase or maybe employees who are not using it should do away with it and there was a lot of um a lot of thoughts i'm not going to say it was there was conflict but there was just a difference of opinions um and obviously that's not something that me and Brenda can resolve on our own we brought in HR they spoke about um who receives bilingual pay how do you get it if it's something your department can have in their budget and we just basically had a Q&A with them and i don't think that they valued the fact that we couldn't give them any uh real response to all the issues that they were facing with bilingual pay but they were appreciative that this group provided them with an outlet to ask their questions even if the answers were not something that they liked um but they come to us because with suggestions on different speakers that they want to see and then they our employees have great ideas so i think that they really value this as a as a resource to make their ideas known and i think it's great that we're using our employees in that way um and that we are really emphasizing the idea that they have to come into fruition the idea of the city services fair that was not something that me and Brenda came up with that was something they came up with that they wanted to do in all our meetings we focus on okay what are going to be your goals for this meeting what do we want to do moving forward it's always changing it's always fluid which is why i think we kind of like the idea of transitioning over to an organization because the word group is housed right now within our office and we want to make sure that this is something that employees feel empowered to have a hold of as well yeah for sure and another thing that we've seen is um you know people will have different events kind of coming up and it's getting a lot more of those departments out in the community and how you know having a table there of things that people haven't even heard of before you know and offering their services which is great you know not just at the services fair but at different things you know if if one of the crime prevention specialists is having you know a safety fair out in the community in the north community or whatever it is um they're able to kind of get that i'm like hey i know some people that can that might want a table can we do this real quick and so we'll kind of you know connect them to that and kind of go from there we do see that 10 of y'all have um answered the poll if you haven't answered the poll it's the third tab on your rot and the question was do you know the demographic make up a makeup of your city and 50 percent have answered of course we're already serving them 40 yes but we could do better 10 yes but we are not currently doing outreach and no one has answered no so yay we're glad to see that um that you know who is a part of your city and who you're serving and i hope that we were able to provide um some ideas hopefully and of things that we've tried and we're open to network with you if you want to reach out to us through email if you click on our picture you can see our email but if you just want to send us a private message and we'd be happy to connect with you we're always looking for new ideas to help engage our residents our neighborhoods um and also our employees because we know they're really vital to the success of our city and we don't see any more questions but if you do have a questions we'll we'll give you a few more minutes to to ask them but if not i mean we are thankful for y'all to um have joined us today um please don't make news since it's virtual don't you know don't think you can't come to Fort Worth come to Fort Worth reach out to our office we'll take a lunch break and show you around or just come in in general and um we'll be glad to have you here show you around the different areas of Fort Worth if you are watching those neighborhood pride tours i hope that they were fun i'm hosting one today and i know i think you are as well um so come out and enjoy those and when you want to come to Fort Worth come on down we're here for y'all yes we're here for y'all enjoy the rest of the workshop talk to you soon thanks bye