Recommendation to request City Manager to work with the Office of Equity to identify a philanthropic or educational partner to conduct an economic equity study on the City of Long Beach, and report back in 60 days.
Thank you. And the last one of this group is 25. Communication from Vice Mayor Richardson, Councilwoman Gonzales, Councilmember Pierce, Councilmember Arango. Recommendation to work with the Office of Equity to identify a philanthropic or educational partner to conduct an economic equity study on the City of Long Beach and report back in 60 days. Thank you. There's a motion in a second baseman, Richardson. Thank you. So to plan for more equitably, economically equitable community, we first need to start. We need to know where we stand. There's a growing body of research that finds greater economic opportunity, fosters stronger economic growth, and more equitable regions. What we need is a truly longitudinal analysis that looks at how dynamics change over time. The first step is a more general top line research assessment for our current environment that can lead to a more intense study to assist communities with this process. There are many philanthropic organizations and educational institutions that conduct these top line studies to identify and measure the various equity indicators that could prevent economic vitality, for example. I know that USC, Sol Price School of Public Policy has a startup grant opportunity for a student Ph.D. student who can provide top line research and economic equity profile in Long Beach. And there are a number of educational institutions that offer these smaller $25,000 grant opportunities. And the idea is this is the smaller amount of research that sets up for the larger grant or the larger ongoing analysis ongoing. The idea here is that we can partner locally, we can partner locally with a local institution and have some tracking evaluation over a three or five year period. But we want to start with one baseline of information. And so we want to start this process of identifying funding or a partner today that can help to help us to present this top line, this top line analysis. The hope here is that we can work with our economic development folks for equity folks and maybe have an update in 60 days and where we are. Sometimes it may not take 60 days to get to get this. We have some people who are warmed up. We have we've identified some sources that might be a good fit for this, but ongoing. The idea is that this sets up for the larger, larger, ongoing funding that can help us in tracking and evaluate. And the final thing I'll say is, you know, for years we hear the term when we talk about Long Beach Tale of Two Cities. And we've we've attempted many times to try to address that close the gap address to equity. But really, this is the piece that I see that allows us to track and see how we're doing over time. So that's that's the hope here. And I thank my colleagues now for their support. Thank you. Councilmember Pearce. Yes, I. I want to thank you for explaining a little bit on the funding piece for doing the study. I know that in the past we had the Seattle study that we had asked and we had tried to work with Cal State, Long Beach. I think the number came back in the $200,000 mark. So it's helpful to know that there are grants at USC and that we can build on that. I also want to continue to work with you and city staff on this so that we can look at some of the pieces from Seattle and bring them into this hopefully , and make that a part of the grant as well. So look forward to that. And thank you for the first step. Councilman Gonzales. Yeah, this is Grant, the one group I wanted to include, and I know we didn't explicitly included. I'm sure they will be included are individuals experiencing disabilities, so I know we should definitely just include that in. That makes sense. Yep. Okay. It's Republican on this last one. Casey, nonmembers, please go and cast your votes. Public comment was, Oh, I didn't see Randall. Come on over. Sorry about that. I know time is short, but I just want to re-emphasize that again. We want to congratulate the vice mayor for a lot of these initiatives. And obviously, to really get them up and off the ground is going to take some financial resources. We're going to be looking to city staff to kind of help us through that. But to your point, Councilman Price, I mean, we want to attract financial institutions, third party nonprofits, private foundations. So we're going to go out there and look for nonpublic financial resources that really can help drive this and not only drive it to get it up and off the ground, but to indeed to be partners. I think one of the first steps is indeed going to be reaching out to the banks who do a lot of work with the nonprofit community, community development, financial institutions and organizations like that that can help spur this along more quickly. I've always thought and again, you know, I've been in the banking industry for a long time. I think one of the things that we haven't done a great job here in Long Beach is to attract that kind of attention to the city. But the great opportunities there are here on the west side, north and central Long Beach. I think we've kind of got to do our own marketing campaign to those institutions and have already begun to have some discussion with some of the banks who already see some Community Reinvestment Act opportunities in the city. Now, it's our job, just really kind of to connect those kind of resources with the opportunities we have here. So I just want to make sure everybody understood we are indeed looking for nonpublic funds to make this thing happen as well. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Great. Thank you. And with that members, please go and cast your votes. Motion carries. So thank you. Thank you very much. And that concludes the conclusion items. Thank you all that came out. For those items we're going to go we're back on the regular agenda as well here, item 21.