October Task Force Update
The Pierce County Community Engagement Task Force is making many new and exciting changes that will help us collaborate, grow, and continue to bring economic mobility to individuals and families in Pierce County.
Our main meetings will now be held every other month to provide more time to focus on our initiatives. However, we will always have spaces for conversations. Our new bi-monthly email newsletter provides information on future meetings, events, and more so we can all stay connected.
We value collaboration and want you to bring your own personal strengths. With this in mind, we started a new onboarding process to meet new members and reconnect with current ones. If you haven’t had the opportunity to set up a meeting with us, we would love to connect with you by setting up an engagement time here. These meetings are not just for new members – we want to connect with you all and make sure everyone can participate in the Task Force in a way that is meaningful to you.
We are also excited to introduce our Initiative Committees. Previously, we have worked on our initiatives through three subgroups: Outreach & Engagement, Organizational Structures, and People & Providers. However, we realized that we could avoid working in silos by changing our format and have even stronger communication and collaboration.
With this in mind, we decided to remove these three subgroups and instead hold meetings based on our initiatives. Leadership, Outreach & Engagement, Organizational Structures, and People & Providers will continue to be pillars of the Task Force and aspects of how we work together as members of LOOP City. This change will provide more time to work on our initiatives and continue to grow as a Task Force.
Information on our three Initiative Committees can be found below. If you would like to join an initiative, please email Chloe Wilhelm at cwilhelm@workforce-central.org.
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- When it comes to creating change in the community, it’s important that we gain an understanding of how we got here in the first place. The Speaker’s Bureau brings our community neighbors with lived experience in the system to the table and helps us figure out how to make the system better. The Speaker’s Bureau offers speakers who have lived experience with homelessness and other challenges to organizations and agencies for presentations. Our goal is to use these stories as a sounding board for new ideas and initiatives to better serve our community.
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- Collaboration for a Cause was started to fill the vast need for disaster-relief goods at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. While the initial focus area was in Tacoma’s Eastside, it soon became apparent that more communities were being impacted as the crisis continued. As word of Collaboration for a Cause grew, the Pierce County Community Engagement Task Force joined with Goodwill to continue this large-scale collaborative event to provide much-needed resources and services to Pierce County’s most hard-hit areas.
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- The Lens of Equity initiative focuses on how promoting DEAI (Diversity, Equity, Access, and Inclusion) in an organization can serve the community. How can we meet the needs of the community? How can we increase access? How can we keep a DEAI lens in the forefront of what we do? Earlier this year, our Lens of Equity Mini-Series discussed these questions and provided great resources and tools (a list of which can be found here). Moving forward, the Lens of Equity initiative is planning an October 2022 Summit that will continue this work.
In addition to the initiatives above, we also have our series The Corner, which highlights our partners and their work in the community. This series, along with our initiative committees, will help launch us into additional workshops and conversations within the Task Force.
All in all, we’re here to make Pierce County a better place. We are looking forward to working with you!
