08-15-16 Personnel and Finance - Laserfiche WebLink

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on our cases in terms of the number of cases that we have. They are going down, and one (1) of the reasons is that we are making an impact on the community, but when cases go down, our workload goes down in terms of being able to create income from the federal government, which causes us to look at how we can better save money. We are trying to get as many grants as we possibly can and we are proud of the fact that we gave out $6,000 in scholarships to students who wrote different papers about human and civil rights, and the money was awarded in three (3) increments. Our goals are to maintain our contractual end of independence with the EEOC and HUD to reach the hours that they put into our contract. They want more for less, and so does everyone else. One last thing about working with HUD is that they pay well for what we do, we get anywhere from $2200 per case to $3600 per case. The EEOC only pays "seven - hundred and fifty dollars ($750) per case, and we do more EEOC cases than HUD cases. We're still working with the City of Mishawaka and the County about trying to go county -wide. Only EvansvilleNanderburgh County has a county -wide human rights organization, and we want to be the second in the state. The reason for that is we feel that handling cases close to home is easier for everyone. Justice delayed is justice denied. So when we are working with people in our community, we feel that we are best equipped to help people in our community. We continue to seek grants in other forms, and were fortunate last year and the year before when we received $250,000 in grants. We spent it on education and outreach, and one of the befuddling thing is that unless people have an interest in what you are doing, they will not come. But we continue to do it because we know we need to reach everyone in the community to let them know what we are doing and where we're going. In terms of personnel costs and key programs, we spend a large amount of money doing federally mandated investigations. We have to spend more money on outreach and training than we would have to spend on investigating cases, because investigating cases can take anywhere from thirty (30) to one - hundred and eighty (180) days, which is our goal. Settlements and withdrawals are worked on very hard because any time we have a case in our office, we ask what we can do to resolve it that day. If there is an inkling that we can resolve it that day, we will. Normally, the person filing the charge and the respondent are not that far apart, it is just that they aren't communicating. We take great pride in resolving charges, and we have been able to garner about $33,000 for people who have been willing to settle. We spend more money on housing that we do on EEOC Investigations. But, housing investigations pay us about the same as our EEOC investigations when you add it all up. EEOC and HUD both require training, and according to the City, there should be no discrimination or red lining where banks lend money in one area and not in another. We also work very hard against steering. We want to make sure that realtors are not steering people into areas where they do not want to be in the City. We are also spending money training our Human Rights Commissioners, who are required to do training twice a year. We also do retreats for them where we bring in people from the outside to learn more about what they should be doing. 0