dlanc diversity and other issues
don garza speculated about the downtown los angeles neighborhood council board elections and complained about how his neighborhood is represented. no comment on the speculation, but as i have gotten more involved with the neighborhood council, i am more and more disappointed with how disengaged most of the business and social services stakeholders are. besides the planning committee, none of them are involved in any of the other board or ad-hoc committees.
i hope we can do a better job of reaching out to more business and social services stakeholders in the upcoming election, and get some people on the board who want to actually be involved. right now the executive committee can’t really take action because it has an over-representation of residential stakeholders, and the executive committee was unable to appoint members to the rules, bylaws and elections committee because that too would have been dominated by residents. (the bylaws prohibit board committees from being having a majority of any one stakeholder group.)
most of the board’s standing committees have fallen in status to ad-hoc committees because they don’t have the five appointed members necessary to constitute a standing committee.
as for the strangehold that people from the midnight mission have on the social services seats, perhaps the board should look at a bylaw amendment to restrict the number of seats that can be held by people from any one organization. even if you think the folks at the midnight mission are great, and even if they were engaged, i think it would be healthier for the board to have a more diverse composition.
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Jim,
I am one of those that think the Midnight Mission is great. They are pretty busy over there and their residents have to be back at 9pm or they turn into pumpkins, so they are pretty difficult to get out and do things with DLANC. They used to be one of the most active members of DLANC , very active.
I have no idea what has changed. You are absolutely correct , a by-laws change might be in order about how many people can represent from any one organization.
The whole point,when I was there negotiating alongside the midnight mission and SRO , was to allow those in the missions and transitional housing to run for the homeless seat or run for the central city east resident representative seat. But somehow the Midnight decided that it wasn't fair for a resident to run as social service providers unless it of course is the midnight mission.
They have people in their program that get paid. So in essence every one of them can run as a social service provider representative. This should be changed to allow for other organizations to get on the board.
The way it works is that the Midnight Mission will bring their residents and employees and program clients to the voting site and they vote for their Midnight Mission slate. SO they will get those seats everytime.