Date: December 4, 2018

To: The Honorable Members of City Council

From: The Human Services Advisory Committee

Re: Roles of HSAC and United Way of Greater Cincinnati staff support for City of
Cincinnati Human Services Funding

As citizens of Cincinnati who volunteer our time and professional expertise as members of the
Human Services Advisory Committee, we, the undersigned, are writing to give you the facts on
the processes we follow in order to make funding recommendations to City Council. We are also
objectively describing the role of the United Way of Greater Cincinnati staff assigned to us to
help facilitate the HSAC’s work in evaluating and recommending grants.

The HSAC Chair and Co-Chair, the majority of our active members, and the assigned United
Way staff professional are African-American. Although United Way of Greater Cincinnati
receives a small portion of the Human Services Fund strictly to administer the HSAC program,
United Way nor any of its staff have any decision-making role in the HSAC process. However,
the United Way professional’s role is vital in ensuring a fair and efficient process for the City of
Cincinnati, its taxpayers, and the grantee non-profits who serve its residents. The United Way
professional supports the process in a variety of ways:

 Facilitates the overall process

 Oversees data collection
 Develops and audits outcome reports
 Conducts regular site visits
 Ensures that HSAC members are included in the site visits
 Coordinates meetings
 Provides updates to council
 Provides whatever additional staff support and guidance the committee needs

We all share – and many of us experience painfully in our professional lives – your concern
about the pervasive racism afflicting work in institutions throughout this city. But we all agree
that the Human Services Advisory Committee process helps counteract bias and favoritism,
which are byproducts of racism, by ensuring that grants are awarded according to fair,
transparent and evidence-based criteria. This process protects the City’s human services grant-
making review process from power plays and lobbying which can create significant
disadvantages for small qualified grassroots and minority non-profits.

Contracts awarded at the end of the process include performance measures. These hold the
funded organizations accountable to deliver results for the vulnerable people who so desperately
need services. The process also protects taxpayers by building in accountability for the use of
scarce dollars.

Finally, this process protects Council from charges of cronyism.

Here is an overview of the current Human Services Funding process, with the roles of HSAC and
the United Way staffer:

1. City Council sets the funding priorities and the evidence-based criteria by which
applications must be evaluated. Applicants have to document that they have the expertise
and track record to carry out the work.

2. Council sets a funding total for each of the human services priorities they’ve chosen.

3. The United Way professional issues the Request for Proposals to the widest possible
array of qualified non-profits, giving all an equal chance of applying.

4. Once the proposal deadline happens, the United Way staffer distributes all the proposals
to members of HSAC as quickly as humanly possible, providing rating sheets based on
the criteria spelled out in the Request for Proposals.

5. HSAC members read and rate the proposals, using the same criteria for each application
within a given funding priority. We meet to decide as a group on which programs to
recommend for funding to Council, and the size of the grant for each within the amount
allocated by Council. The United Way professional never influences these decisions.
HSAC’s Chair or Co-Chair lead the allocation meetings.

6. City Council decides whether to approve HSAC’s funding recommendations.

7. The City Administration develops contracts for each grantee. The United Way staffer
works with grantees to provide the City performance measures from the grant
applications so that accountability for impact is built into each contract.

8. The United Way staffer coordinates mid-year reviews and site visits of all grantees. She
informs all HSAC members in advance of these site visits and invites us to attend.

9. All HSAC members commit to making at least one site visit a year.

10. The United Way staffer collects demographic data on the people served by each grantee
program and the impact documented by the performance measures in each contract. For
each funding priority, she combines these data in a summary report which the HSAC
Chair or Co-Chair presents to Council after the conclusion of each funding year.

Qualifications of HSAC: HSAC members represent a wide array of experience in human

services from grassroots non-profits, public health and community policing to the private sector.
We are appointed by the Mayor and approved by Council. We evaluate the proposals on their
merits without political pressure or lobbying, make recommendations to Council for funding, and
monitor program results.
Qualifications of HSAC’s current United Way staffer: The current staff member working
with HSAC brings over 20 years of experience in a community non-profit empowering low-
income people for financial stability, followed by serving as a program manager for a grassroots
philanthropic organization. She has a huge heart for the people the grants are designed to
strengthen: people facing an array of perils including eviction, unemployment, violence, and
addiction.

The key partnership between Cincinnati City Council, HSAC, the City of Cincinnati Department
of Community and Economic Development and United Way of Greater Cincinnati play a vital
role in ensuring the successful implementation of the human services fund and its process for
allocating funds. In fact, since HSAC began in 2010, we’ve presented recommendations for
hundreds of local non-profit programs to Cincinnati City Council for its approval and we are
very proud to say that HSAC has a 100% approval rate. Additionally, HSAC would like to
make perfectly clear that the recommended funding goes directly to the agencies through a
process managed by the City’s Department of Community and Economic Development and has
never gone to United Way. We thank you for your time, your concern with the pervasive racism
in institutions throughout this city and most of all for your dedication to the vitality of Cincinnati
and all its residents.

Human Services Advisory Committee Members