General Agreements About the Nature of the state Funding

Extremely Significant discussions were held during the November ILF related to the management of funding and the scope of work that would be undertaken by the ILF during the remainder of this 3rd year. 

What follows are summaries of key agreements. Due to the significance of the topic, these are intended as first drafts - any feedback should be forwarded to me so we can build consensus for final drafts in an upcoming ILF. 

1. We agree that the funding from the state should be seen as a collective grant to fund the work of 9 counties toward a shared objective. It should be seen not as 9 separate grants to be used individually, but rather as a pool of money to be managed by the ILF in ways that yield the biggest bang for the buck.
2. We agree that money can be spent in 2 ways - toward collective work managed by he ILF, and toward individual work, managed by individual agencies.
3. We agree that counties should be able to spend some of their allocation on things that are internally focused. We also agree though that the other partner counties should understand how the money is being spent, and that the ILF has a responsibility to help leverage as much collective benefit from the expenditures as possible. 
4. We agree that since counties have tackled different things in the first 2 years, that there might be an imbalance in the amount each counties can contribute toward collective work. For example, if county A has already done major OD work and county B has not,  then county B may need to spend more of its allocation on internal OD. We agreed that this imbalance is OK, as long as the ILF is aware of how the money is being spent and has a chance to leverage it toward collective benefit. 

Specific Agreements About the Scope of Collective Work

We agreed to collective fund 4 teams to work on further development of the model:

1. The ILF team
2. The Measures Team
3. The Practice Track
4. The Handle Track

The Following Table illustrates cost estimates for these teams, assuming that there are 6 months in which to do this work (December - May:  leaving June to develop Reports).

We Agreed that each county should set aside $3,500 to fund this work. We also agreed each county should set aside $150 to supplement the $2,000 one of our partner counties is able to contribute.

There are some additional potential costs that we should not lose sight of:

1. There will be a need to pay for some sort of collective report to supplement the 9 separate reports the state has asked for. The 9 separate reports speak to individual accomplishments, but remember, this is about a collaboration, and we should issue a report (it can be brief) that speaks to the collective and collaborative nature of our work and its collective results (the website may make this a simple and inexpensive task).
2. Remember that my quote for the website covers the creation of the initial site. As I mentioned I have 67 hours invested of 170 quoted. My intention is that I will continue to develop the site, long past the original scope of the quote, as long as I still have hours available. At some point, I will have reached the 170 hours I quoted - by this time I will have greatly exceeded the deliverables I promised, but will have honored the fact that I quoted 170 hours and will have supplied all of those hours. If we get to the point before June where the site needs to expand beyond where it will be at the end of 170 hours (like to add some sophisticated databases to accomplish what the data team decides to do with measures), I will need to offer a new proposal to cover the additional work. I think we will get a lot of this data stuff within the context of the 170 hour quote, but I wanted to make sure it was clear that there is an endpoint for the development of the initial site as offered in my proposal.