Neighborhood Meeting with Catholic Charities

Thursday, July 17th, 7:00pm-8:30pm- Neighborhood Meeting with Catholic Charities

MEETING DETAILS

Purpose of Meeting: To provide updates on the Homeless Services Center as well as addressing any neighborhood concerns. All are welcome.
Location: :Family Service Center –  465 A Street, Santa Rosa,
Future Meeting Dates:  October 23, 2014, January 22, 2015, and April 23, 2015

Minutes from May Meeting:

From: Jennielynn Holmes [mailto:jholmes@srcharities.org]
Sent: Saturday, May 24, 2014 2:28 PM
Subject: Follow-up: Neighborhood Meeting

First and foremost I would like to say thank you to everyone for your valuable input at the Neighborhood Meeting on Thursday evening. I appreciated everyone’s time and willingness to address concerns. As a follow-up to the meeting the group had decided that a tour would be helpful so I wanted to send out a date for a tour of our facility. I would like to invite everyone for a tour of our programs on Wednesday, June 4th from 7:00pm-8:00pm. I hope this time will work for most. If it doesn’t and you would like an individual tour please feel free to let me know and I will set another time up.

Secondly, I want to reiterate that feedback is so incredibly important to us. If there is an issue in the neighborhood, we have relationships with these participants, and can often times intervene in a positive manner that resolves the issue in the neighborhood as well as resolves the issue for the participants. The best way that we will be able to make this work is if we work together and you feel comfortable to let us know of concerns. We will continue to respond. We have implemented a night safety monitor as well as the Communication Phone Tree (please see attached flyer).

We will be keeping everyone updated as we develop safe parking, especially sites outside of the City, as I heard that was one point of information people were interested in having updates. I also want to reiterate that the Safe Parking Program is not people parking on the public streets of the neighborhood. There was still a couple of questions about that after the meeting ended, so I wanted to make sure that was clear for everyone. I also wanted to address a point made by a couple of the neighbors with regards to the increased parking in the neighborhood. Some felt it was attributed to those spots being the last un-permitted/free parking spots in downtown and that when the mall began charging there was an increase. One idea that was brought up was to advocate to the City that those spots be permitted. That decision would need to come from the neighborhood, but I wanted everyone to know that we would be more than happy to help/support in whatever ways we can to create an effort that would make that happen.

With regards to the buildings, you had the opportunity to meet with Bruce Shimizu who is our Project Manager for the buildings. I wanted to make sure that everyone had his contact information. His phone number is 707-528-8712 and his email is bshimizu@srcharities.org. Please feel free to contact him with thoughts or concerns on the buildings. He is an expert in this field.

Lastly, we have moved to quarterly meetings in an additional effort to increase communication. I have attached the upcoming meetings flyer so that these meetings can be put on your calendars. Please know that outside of these meetings, if there are any ideas, concerns, feedback that come up in between please do contact us. As I mentioned at the meeting the more frequent and continued the conversation can be, the more we can do to proactively address concerns. We are open to meeting more frequently, or calling together special meetings if the neighborhood so desires. Please tell us what you feel would be best. I will also be sending out updates and invitations for community events where people can get to know the participants.

Please keep me updated with any and all concerns, and let me know which things you would like to be updated on. I want to make sure that anything I send is helpful and useful for everyone, and I don’t want to flood people’s inbox with information that they are not interested in. So if there are items that I missed that you would like to be updated with, please let me know.

I look forward to continuing the dialogue. Thank you very much!

Jennielynn Holmes
Director of Shelter and Housing
Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Santa Rosa
465 A. Street, Santa Rosa, CA 95401
707-542-5426 ext. 210 (p)
707-542-3148 (f)
jholmes@srcharities.org