Fourth San José Human Services Commission Meeting

I’m running a bit behind today, so I’ll keep my pre-meeting notes short and sweet. We basically have three items on tonight’s agenda plus some community speakers during public comment who I am very much excited to get to hear from:

1. Women’s Bill of Rights Implementation and Improvement: My two ad hoc committees on implementing and improving parts of the San José Women’s Bill of Rights have made good progress that the committees summarized in this memo (check out page 1 if you like budgets, 2 for the fun gender policy stuff). The action: I’m asking the commission to review, provide improvements to, support and distribute a survey to gather broader community input on which San José city departments should undergo a gender analysis first.
   How you can help: If you are a San José resident, please check back here after the meeting to see if the survey was approved by the commission and if it is, please take it!
2. Holding ICE Accountable: Staff wanted to bring an update and a question to the commission about implementing our vote at the last meeting on continuing to press our invitation to ICE to explain their behavior in our community. On this, I got trained as a Rapid Responder so I can stand in support with immigrant communities under attack by ICE and hope to contribute to this important work.
3. Protecting the Property Rights of Neighbors Who Are Homeless: The commission was hoping to move forward on this after having a conversation about SJPD about the feasibility of SJPD handling the property of people who are homeless during sweeps; we likely won’t move forward with this item until after that conversation, so this item should be more a discussion and less an action. More context on this under “Presentation from Anthony King on Protecting the Property Rights of People Who a Homeless and Improving Their Services“.
4. Speakers from the LGBTQ community: Unless something has changed, I believe we will have at least one speaker from the LGBTQ community in San José present to comment in support of modifying language from the Women’s Bill of Rights to be gender-spectrum inclusive. I am 100% in support of this and am thrilled they can join us. More context on this in the description of the ad hoc sub committee and the committee’s first report.

More after the meeting!