Next week: Bloomington to send invites to nonprofits to apply for $350K in social services grants

Jack Hopkins committee, starting at the near corner of the table: going clockwise: Nordia McNish; Eddy Riou; Hopi Stosberg; Isak Asare; Andy Ruff; HAND department staff Cody Toothman and Anna Killion-Hanson; city council attorney Stephen Lucas; assistant city council attorney Ash Kulak. Seated against the wall in the top corner is chief deputy city clerk Sofia McDowell.

The red bar indicates the $350,000 that is budgeted for 2024. The bump in funding for 2020 and 2021 reflects additional funding during the COVID-19 pandemic to try to address the increased needs.

Next Monday (March 4), the initial invitation from Bloomington’s city council to apply for this year’s round of Jack Hopkins social services funding will be emailed to around 350 nonprofits.

That’s according to Bloomington city council staff attorney Stephen Lucas, after a Thursday afternoon meeting of the council’s Jack Hopkins committee.

According to the invitation letters from past years, the funding is intended to support “projects that have the potential for lasting change—projects that will improve the human condition of Bloomington residents in the long run.”

The committee, which is made up of four councilmembers and three other residents, makes recommendations to the full council for its decision on the distribution of the funding.

The amount approved in the 2024 budget for Jack Hopkins social services awards is $350,000.

The program is funded through a general fund appropriation, but the expenditures are directly under the control of the city council, not the mayor’s office. That makes the program somewhat unusual.

Chairing the committee this year is councilmember Isak Asare, who is joined by his colleagues Hopi Stosberg and Andy Ruff on the city council. There’s one vacancy among the city council’s committee membership, which was left when Shruti Rana in mid-January announced her resignation from the council.

That vacancy on the council will be filled this Saturday (March 2) at a Democratic Party caucus, to be held at city hall starting at 1 p.m.

Council president Isabel Piedmont-Smith had appointed Rana as chair of the committee at the council’s first meeting of the year. She has appointed Asare to replace Rana as chair.

Resident members are: Camryn Greer; Nordia McNish; and Eddy Riou.

The committee’s Thursday meeting focused on scheduling of future meetings and potential revisions to the criteria for the grant awards.

The committee also discussed adding a “rubric” for the committee to use to assess the applications. That discussion ended with a consensus that this year there is not time to sort through what such a rubric should include, and at what stage in the process it should be applied.

Asare said that he had put together a draft rubric for inclusion in the meeting information packet, partly in response to the feedback from applicants last year who wished for more transparency about the decision making for grant awards.

Asare had modeled the draft rubric on public procurement processes, where an applicant is given a score, and it is clear where the applicant ranked, because they received a certain number of points.

About the specific draft that Asare had created, Stosberg said, “I really dislike this rubric!” She added, “And there’s a lot of reasons why.” She said in some cases her dislike was based on the format of the rubric, not necessarily on what the words said.

The committee concluded that it would be a futile effort to have a rubric in place before the invitations to apply were sent out in the coming days.

Last year, the amount of total Jack Hopkins awards since the program began nudged over $6 million.

The basic criteria for Jack Hopkins social services funding were first written down in a 1993 letter by councilmember Jack Hopkins, after whom the fund was named. Hopkins was a professor at Indiana University’s public and environmental affairs. The resolution that named the fund after Hopkins was approved by the city council in 2002, the month after Hopkins died.