I always liked that better because I'm a boomer and not a zoomer, and didn't really get into the whole computer thing you folks were doing for some years here. With that in mind, I also want to thank you for your efforts to move forward post-Tubbs fire, this October marks six years since that occurred, and basically after that happened the city adopted a approach that pretty much eviscerated the public participation in a lot of housing and planning decisions. It came down to like well, we lost some houses in the fire, so we just got to go with what we're going to do, and that's the way it is. Now the fire is well behind us, and many of those houses have been replaced. You can't actually say there was a loss of 5,000 houses now. Well over 3,000 houses have been replaced, and new ones have been built, so there needs to be an accurate assessment of just where we stand in terms of housing stock. I don't take this lightly. I'm a founding member of the Sonoma County Housing Advocacy Group, which in the past actually had to seek legal recourse to get the city of Santa Rosa and the county of Sonoma back in the day 20 years ago to abide by state housing law and get our housing elements in order. It's not a topic that is taken lightly, and we try to do as much research as we can with the HAG group to make sure that our efforts can help to enhance the provision of one specific type of housing, and that is residential rental affordable housing. That is the one category, especially at the extremely low and very low income levels that is most needed. Nowhere have I found in the last 30 years looking through the different documents. Have we ever fallen short of providing housing for above moderate income? That always gets built. There's been some times when there might have been a bit of a dearth for moderate income, but we have never met the guidelines for low income, very low income and extremely low income. You folks could help to change that. It comes from you on this board, making that as one of your main goals. Please do so. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your comments. If there are any more comments in person, please make your way to the podium. Hello, my name is Cliff William. I'm a representative of the Gateway Coalition, which is the majority of the Roberts District in southwest Santa Rosa. My issue is that our properties were rezoned from TBR 2540 to the current 6.0 floor area ratio as part of the downtown stationary specific plan. The DSASP named this as part of the Raywood Square, which we are obviously not since we're on the south side of Highway 12. For two and a half years now, I've been talking to developers on trying to get a development project going. And to every one of them, I've been told that a 6.0 floor area ratio in Santa Rosa, especially in the southwest section of Santa Rosa, is not economically feasible. It will require structured parking. I know the city doesn't require parking, but all developers and financial institutions do require it. We have the burden of the 6.0 floor area ratio where the Molley properties, which is on West 3rd, the same distance from Raywood Square, has a 2.0 floor area ratio. If we had a 2.0 floor area ratio, like in Molley's does, we would be able to build at a midpoint, which would be 43 units of acre, up to 86 units of acre. Developers are looking at it and they said we could probably get 60 units in the properties with surface parking. And I represent 10 acres of property. It's all vacant or has month-to-month attendance. That 10 acres could represent between 400 and 600 affordable housing units. As we stand now, no one will touch it. My property owners are aging quickly, as I am. I've been working on this for now for eight years. I secured a grant from the EPA through the help of the county CDC. We completed the environmental assessments on November 20th, 2020. The property was rezoned January 1st, 2021, which was six weeks later. That was impossible for me to sell it to you in those six weeks. I need the zoning adjusted. If you do that, I can guarantee that we'll have housing within the next two to three years there. Affordable housing, maybe 100%, but at least 20 to 30% affordable. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you very much. Chair Jones-Carter, we don't have any participants via Zoom. Thank you. Public comment is now closed. Item 4.1, statement of purpose. Zoning code chapter 20-52- sorry, point 030F, project review. The review authority shall consider the location, design, site plan configuration, and the overall effect of the proposed project on surrounding properties in the city in general. Review shall be conducted by comparing the proposed project to the general plan, any applicable specific plan, applicable zoning code standards and requirements, consistency of the project within the city's design guidelines, architectural criteria for special areas, and other applicable city requirements. Item 4.2, board member reports. Are there any board member reports? I just wanted to address the second gentleman's public comment real quick if that's okay. So I appreciate your comments, sir, and I think that's a really important issue that you're facing, but I think a lot of times we actually struggle with the balance of kind of land use questions versus what design review board it has per view over. And so what you're talking about specifically is a planning commission issue regarding land use, whereas design review board is the architectural character and nature of what's getting built on those parcels. So while I appreciate your comments and I'm glad you came and told them to us, and I totally understand and can sympathize with the land use hiccup that you're experiencing, I would encourage you to go to the next planning commission meeting and get after those guys to change your zoning. So thank you for your comments. Okay. Item 6, statements of abstention. Are there any? Sorry, Chair Jones-Carter, we skipped over department reports and 4.3, which was actually, sorry, that's sorry. 4.3, we have none, but department reports. Sorry, Amy. Thank you, Chair Jones-Carter and members of the board. Just a brief department report for today. One is that we do plan to have a meeting on July 6th, and I know that that's close to the July 4th holiday. So if you will not be able to attend, if you could send Lonnie and myself an email, that would be great, so we don't proceed with noticing for that meeting date. And then we also plan to have sort of a special item on July 20th, so that's the 2nd July meeting. We're working on evaluating what's called the Resilience City Development Measures Ordinance. This was adopted not long after the tubs fire in 2017 and addresses really a number of issues. One of particular interests to the board is our process for what we call reduced review authority. And so it used to be that the design review board would act on all projects that were 10,000 square feet or larger, a building area. Once this ordinance was adopted, housing projects and lodging projects within the city's priority development areas that typically would have come to the board would actually now go to the Zoning Administrator for action. So we have a planner, Christian Candelaria that's working on these changes. And so we'll have a presentation on the 20th and are hoping to get the board's feedback just on the experience of the mandatory concept review and going to the Zoning Administrator. So I hope most of you are able to make that meeting as well. And that concludes my report. Thank you. Is there any public comment? Yes, that will be a regular design review board meeting. So it will be agendized in this chamber at 4.30. Is there any public comment? I don't see anybody in person making their way to the podium. And we still have no participants via Zoom. Thank you. Public comment is closed. I am skipping to item seven since I already did six consent items. And there are none. Scheduled items, we're moving into the first scheduled item. Item 8.1, a report from House Santa Rosa presented by Connor McKay. Great. Thank you, Chair Jones Carter, members of the board. I really appreciate you being here this afternoon for this item. I'm very happy to be here as well. My name is Connor McKay, senior planner with the development review team in the planning division. I'm here to present the House Santa Rosa project. So the House Santa Rosa project is a grant funded initiative to accelerate the production of housing and help local jurisdictions achieve compliance with the regional housing needs assessment. So this initiative, like I said, is grant funded and this grant is called the LEAP grant, which is a grant made available to local jurisdictions to, like I said, facilitate the production of housing in the city and assist them in achieving regional housing needs allocation, which if you're not familiar, that is basically the number of housing units that cities are provided to accommodate for the development over a six-year cycle, five-year cycle. So the timeline of the House Santa Rosa project is we were awarded the grant in January of 2022 due to some staffing and some scrambling around of assignments. We really went full steam ahead in July of 2022 with this project and in December of that year we distributed surveys to the community about the trajectory of the project. We targeted the developer community and also just your average resident of the city of Santa Rosa. And then the surveys that we distributed received approximately 500 responses so we were happy with that turnout and response rate. In September of this year the grant must be expanded so I'll go into what it actually is that we're developing now. So the first deliverable is a development feasibility map and dashboard and I don't know if you're familiar but we developed for the resilient city combining district. We developed a tool where a user could search a property in the city of Santa Rosa and zoom into that property to understand what are the setbacks applicable to this project of this property? How tall can I build? Are there landscaping requirements? Is there a need for a hillside development permit? So basically this project is scaling that to the entire city of Santa Rosa. So ideally you could enter an address and you can really understand how can I maximize the development potential of this site. And then the flip side of that is they'll have a dashboard and I'll go into that now. So this is we have a very bare bones kind of build out internal tool that is just available for staff to kind of play with at this point and this is generally what it will resemble but there will be a lot more flushed out user interface kind of tools and but so on the right side you can see kind of a menu where a user can enter certain criteria of a project and then if they entered in that information you would click search and get specific parcels throughout the city that fit those criteria and then alternatively you can scroll around on that map and zoom into a specific property that you might have in mind or alternatively enter that APN or address in that search field in the top right of the map and zero in on a parcel and see those development regulations and incentives. So just to run through kind of an example so say I'm a developer who would like to build 25 market rate units with five units, five units dedicated to very low income households and 10 units dedicated to low income households. I'm looking for a property that is currently vacant, allows for a 35 foot structure and is located in a specific plan area so I can take advantage of environmental streamlining measures and be located in an area that does not require on-site parking. So I'm a very picky developer but this is kind of the reality of the market for development these days and there's a lot of factors that affect financing and things of that nature so that's what I'm after. So I would go to that menu I kind of flipped it from left to right to show the sequencing of it but I've checked the vacant parcels only box I've entered 25 units I've indicated that I want to include affordable housing I've entered the affordable housing unit breakdown this tool also auto calculate the density bonus units that are allowed by the state density bonus law which has just been updated to include the updated percentages of affordability that grant me additional units I've also checked the no parking requirement and I clicked search and then you can see those two blue properties are currently the only two parcels in the city that fit all those criteria and as you as we develop the tool further we'll have a list of those parcels and specific attributes below the map so you can also scroll through a list of parcels instead of seeing them all spatially on the map interface so say I zoom in I click one of those properties we can see that it's currently vacant we can see the zoning district we can see the max market rate units and then we see that actually has a max height of 45 feet and then we'll also be including those incentives that I discussed and then we'll also be including what we call warnings right now but we'll probably come up with something a little bit more refined and as I know there the length this all this language is to be refined expanded upon so we're thinking about fault lines we're thinking about floodplain we're thinking about all those other warnings but they're actually more of like obstacles or things to kind of navigate so part of this presentation is we're hoping to hear from you about specific things that you've encountered in your work or you've heard from the community that is important for developers or for residents to understand how properties can be developed okay so the second deliverable of this project is a real-time development map and dashboard and we've already developed something that generally resembles the final product but the remaining effort is primarily refining the type of data that we provide to the community and going back to old housing data and making sure that we have data that has been identified by the community as important to know about about housing projects and that the accurate that the data itself is as accurate as possible so this is what that tool looks like as it stands today so you have a menu on the bottom that shows all developments with filters you can then filter it by districts with those tabs below but you can also report you can do filters of the you can select filters on the bottom right in the orange drop-down menus that further refine the data that is shown to you above and all those projects so on the top you can see the list of projects in the bottom left you see those maps you see those projects on the map so going forward we are refining how we collect data so our internal permitting system has seen a lot of improvements and refinements so we can capture specific data like what type of density bonus concessions or projects receiving how many parking spaces are these projects having what is their reduction of parking spaces that would typically be required but has been approved as part of a concession so we can really tell the story about how development is happening and where it's happening in an over what time frame and as I said there's there's more filters to be added so maybe we want to see how many buildings above 35 feet have been developed over the past year in this specific council district so yeah so here I've outlined some objectives but basically we're really trying to help community members and developers understand how parcels throughout the city can be developed and while creating greater transparency regarding housing projects that are both proposed and approved and then also the development dashboard will really create some efficiencies for staff required to annual reporting for hcd right now it's a very manual task of running a report and then sending it out to all the planners and saying hey this is what we have but can you make sure it's accurate based on your experience with the project and then another big piece of this is that we can simplify any analysis that we're conducting of state laws assembly bills or even our own general plan update to say okay we really are prioritizing additional housing in this area with this tool we can say okay since this new general plan update how many new housing projects are in this area like we are you know was included in the vision for this update so um it's been a really great time I've had the pleasure of working with a broad range of folks across the city it's been a super super engaging and I've learned a lot throughout this process and you're also part of this team so like I said I'm hoping to seek some feedback about what you've seen today and maybe provide some some additional comments based on your expertise so the next steps were like I said we're going to refine those incentives and those regulations that you would see when you're clicking that parcel to see how you can develop a property for housing and we're also introducing additional filters like I mentioned about those housing projects so it's we're really transparent and we also are showing the community data about the housing production that has been identified as important to them and then this is actually an updated slide we're planning on going to planning commission next week but we're pushing that to July but next week I'll be going to the cultural heritage board to solicit their feedback and in early July I will be going to planning commission so y'all have the first bite at this apple so yeah the requested action like I said is just to ask any questions that you may have about what you've seen and then provide input on those regulations and incentives that might be important in determining development feasibility project details if there's something that we maybe haven't thought of about you know something like parking spaces you know or another characteristic of a proposed or approved project that would be important to share with the community or be able to easily provide reports for elected officials or anything else so there's my contact information if you think of something later on and you have some questions or some comments this is we're trying to be as transparent and engaging as possible in this process thank you very much any questions from the board yeah I'm gonna do that after Vic I can start with you right so this is comments not questions or questions questions and questions yeah not comments yeah okay um you said you got 500 surveys back and you said it was a good return rate how many surveys we mainly we have a broad kind of reach it's hard to quantify how many like unique individuals have the opportunity to respond to the survey because we posted it on our the house center as a website and we distributed it throughout various means of communication like certain providers throughout the community we used the developer round table contact list we had the a qr code to the survey at the front counter so if somebody was there to talk about a re-roof permit or a contractor was there talking about building permits for an approved subdivision or multifamily project we trained our front's counter staff to kind of give it a plug and say hey like maybe while you're weighing while we research this question that you just asked us to take this five minute survey and give us some input about this tool so unfortunately I'm not sure how many exact we sent out because we didn't really send them out but yeah that's kind of like a silly stats question but I had to ask it because I have to ask these kinds of questions you will be I mean I have comments on what is you know things we might add but I know that that's later but a question that I have is is there a key um to the items in the drop down menus because I think not just drop down actually in all of the is there a key because some of those terms will be familiar to certain groups of people as you're well aware and some of them might might make people wonder so is there a key yeah so I think what we're thinking at this point is we have a little question mark next to a phrase and you can mouse over it or click it in a little speech bubble pop up will say this is what this means and kind of more non-technical language as an example so but so you don't have the little question mark yet not yet but that's that's in the plan okay thank you where to come later earnest yeah I I I just had a wanted clarification so the way I understood it is that it could actually potentially be two uses and there's one where you're providing someone could do a query for I want to develop something under these within these you know relevant size or you know use or whatever was the second part then also creating an inventory of it's not like there was at least an inventory of housing that could be provided and people could search for is that already available or is that going to be something that's going to be coming out of this development so if I'm understanding the question correctly you're asking if there's tools as it stands now to see approved projects for like inventory of housing that's been approved or more than approved projects but existing projects as well so if it's part of the existing housing program that you guys are identifying that and it could be part of an ongoing thing yeah yeah so that map will also include approved and constructed projects as well with with data about that units and things of that nature that answers my question okay thank you cool Michael yeah I think it's I think that it sounds like some of the groundwork for this is the data collection that you've improved over time and I'm sure you're adding things now that you know what you're looking at that's great that that data exists and can feed into a system like this my question is given the LEAP grant and given the ability to develop this program now I don't know what the term of that grant is when the money runs out on the development of the product and just wanted to ask the question about if there's a way forward these things continue to need attention and staffing and money and I just am interested to understand you know that this is not one of those things that operates for five years and then we drop off or is the grant in some kind of a is there a longer time frame to it or is there going to be city will there be city funds available are we counting on other grants what's the what's the life of this look like in terms of being funded yeah no great question so the LEAP grant itself the grant that we're charging against the development of this project is supposed to be spent by September of this year so at that point we're hoping to have tools that we can look to and say hey developer community residents of city Santa Rosa here are very well functioning tools that you can use give us your feedback and we can then look to see how we can technically the technology liaison for the planning division and I'm hoping that we can kind of say look I'm in in the capacity of that role I can do projects like this and hopefully you know if the grants come along in the future we can look at those but ideally we kind of set we built the foundation and then future refinements maybe there's new state law that comes out that gives us more incentives for development or the zoning standards change we can make those minor adjustments and it won't be a huge lift on staff I don't know if you have anything to add got it and my other question was will this have the reverse search effect that it as a community member they spent a lot of time talking to community members who are confused about housing vix question about having the the layman's terms to explain some of these topics if we've got the community looking at this and not not those of us who understand what's there but is there a reverse search feature you tap on a parcel say that you get interested in properties around a property that you own or live at that you'll be able to tap on parcels and get that information in reverse and I'm sorry if you said that I just the search feature was more emphasized in your presentation right yeah so that map interface is like you can pan around and zoom so if you know what neighborhood you're in or you can find your house say on the map you can zoom to your house and then you can look at parcels around you and thank you for that question because I I previously conceived a use case for that development tool that's not strictly developer so say there's a house across the street from a vacant parcel that throughout the generations of that of the family that own that house it's been said oh yeah that parcel is owned for open space which is something that we hear sometimes when we're going through the entitlement process for a new project they say what like they're not allowed to build there because my grandfather told me so and I think the idea of this is that that's exactly right you could zoom into that parcel and click on it and say oh wow it's it's owned for multifamily housing development they can build a 45 foot building and I think that that gives the community a leg up in terms of engagement in the development process and they aren't blindsided when they receive a notice of application postcard of the mail that says oh my gosh they're building this massive residential development across the street and in a parcel that I previously thought was open space so great thank you yeah I mean I I think I probably may be most familiar with kind of the backbone of how you're building this I mean this looks to me like you're taking GIS data and just reformulating it in a way that's specific to development right so because each parcel obviously has all this information already associated with it within the GIS system right it's already going to have the flood plain overlay it's already going to have potentially you know a seismic zone it's going to have the woo-wee zone you know listed on top of the one you open up a GIS map and you can click on individual parcels and get a parcel report in a GIS map right but to most people that don't kind of deal with entitlements on a regular basis like I would as an architect I think utilizing the GIS format to analyze different data sets that are more palatable to the public I mean that to me I know sorry it wasn't a question but it is actually kind of a question so so tied to that my question was Connor about the city of Santa Rosa pending development tool I was poking around the website and it looks like there's only like a PDF report so there's not a is that tool not available to the public it's an internal tool right now currently an internal tool okay plans to turn it outward okay and so then obviously the PDF that gets generated on the city's website is based on the internal tool which you showed us in the presentation right and this tool will provide accurate and more granular information that is currently being even being collected at this point so and we generate those those PDFs every quarter now right and that has proved to be an extra lift for staff because previously we would do it when hcd requested it and ideally this tool will make it just a press of a button and we have the PDF and then while I was poking around this is kind of somewhat off topic but the city does have a housing dashboard sir you were asking about that they've got a housing dashboard here shows all of the current development structures complete and construction permit issued construction pending and review and process and it's got a running total of everything to date so for instance there's 1,911 housing units in construction right now for a total of 4,011 active units so I thought it was kind of cool while I was trying to find the pending development dashboard yeah the city of Santa Rosa has an exciting turn towards data and trend data transparency and I think that data is building permit activity so this is kind of more focusing on the planning entitlement so you can see kind of further down the road because once something is approved for planning then they come in for building and then it's in construction and pops up on that dashboard cool and then I guess the other question I had would be about I mean so you're leveraging GIS which is great and I mean you know that your GIS is very similar to the counties right I think you guys all share it really at the end of the day but I guess the only thing for me is you know graphically there's a little bit to to kind of you know from a use from a layman perspective I mean for me I poke around and stuff all day long all the time right so but somebody who may not be as familiar with it may struggle graphically a little bit and so I mean I guess the question is is what kind of feedback are you looking for from us in terms of that specifically all of all of the feedback is very welcomed okay cool those are all my questions okay I just have one if you put in say information that's not possible what happens say you want to build a building that's 150 feet tall or I don't know what happens so as it's built right now you would press search and there would be zero parcels available to accommodate that development but it doesn't tell you why yeah yeah so that's that's what we're working on is improving the messaging and kind of still giving you a path and say well there are building height concessions available for density bonus so you could go up higher if you do x y and z pursuant to state density bonus law so that's kind of the in progress nature of that we're we're refining the language and connecting projects to actual outcomes and not just saying sorry I can't okay thank you um are there any other questions before we move on to public comment yes super short and I I figured I was going to look it up but you asked so I'm going to ask where is what does leap stand for and who is the granting agency leap stands for local early action planning and the granting agency is housing and community development from the state state of California okay thank you if you're in person and wish to make a comment please make your way to the podium hello my name is Dwayne DeWitt one of the founding members of the Sonoma County Housing Advocacy Group so that was like oh 25 years ago actually no isn't it closer to 28 years ago people been looking into this idea of getting more affordable housing so I congratulate and salute the staff for trying to pull this together and making it palatable that's the term for the layperson basically there's a lot of folks out there that would like to have more housing but they're not real tuned in to all the computer stuff that you folks have the access to and you folks are deep into it so to perhaps follow up on some of the comments made from the board please do make it as simple as possible for what's called the graphic user interface I guess I just call it the finger on the mouse and understanding where to go to find the house so mouse to house make it really simple and then once you get this thing rolling advertise it really well not just in your typical occasional announcement in a newspaper that might not be seen because I knew nothing about this until just seeing the agenda a couple days ago and you could actually put it out on what are called public service announcements for free on radio stations and you could let the public know that hey this tool has been developed specifically as it reads here to facilitate the production of housing and provide feedback to interested citizens that's the good stuff right there not a lot of us are a part of your house Santa Rosa team but there's a lot of interested citizens out there and I can definitely point out that on Monday at the homeless action meeting those folks who interact with a group called Housing California up in Sacramento I don't believe any of them knew about this yet and this is something that could be helpful at all ranges of the income spectrum for the housing provision this is really important stuff and I think it's great that you're doing it and I want you folks at the design review board to be really empowered by it to embrace it to say hey this is our way to interact with the community maybe do an open house and set it up so that the community can come here and visit you and learn from the pros from Dover how to move the mouse to the house on the dashboard and find out what's going on otherwise no one's really gonna teach us but you could be the ones and start there make it happen thank you kindly thank you good afternoon my name is David Harris I live at 355 Gemma Circle here in Santa Rosa and I've spoken to design review in the past primarily on the topic of getting across what I call the Berlin Wall of Santa Rosa highway one-on-one and that came back I don't know that it was design review but you know they've made a lot of progress in replacing journeys in in building there but when I asked about well this looks like an excellent site to do a high rise and they said well the city told us that they were concerned about evacuation of that site well if there were more over crossings over 101 people could get out of there it's a type of location that there isn't a lot of nimbies to complain about a high rise and that along 101 is a place that I don't know whether the general plan is getting to that topic but housing excuse me sir yes so this is public comments on item 8.1 well which is housing in Santa Rosa and housing in Santa Rosa we could do more with high rises of the topic I'm trying to get to here is is the high rise topic which you also asked about 150 story buildings there have been obstacles put in the way of places that could that are ideal for high rises that I don't know where they're coming from whether it's design review or some other part of community development but high right I came to Santa Rosa back in the 80s and the one building that had view apartment I lived in Honolulu went to University of Hawaii and view apartments were very desirable and when you find that the only view apartments in Santa Rosa are in Bethlehem Tower senior housing you know that was more than 30 years ago and we're still there that we have not done enough high rise development in Santa Rosa in my opinion and I think this tool is just going to be another barrier for people being able to visualize high rise development I don't know I can't tell but that is a topic that I think is timely for us to get more concentration of population in the city center and higher density is gradually coming but it could come faster thank you in the future if you have something to speak about that's not related to the item that we're talking about the first mention of public comment is when you should make that thank you okay are there any comments to make a chair chair Jones Carter I just wanted to let you know that we don't have any participants view zoom thank you public comment is closed we'll start on this end thanks for the presentation and I actually I'm into it I think it's great that to be able to ease the you know ability to navigate and get information easily if we do have resources available where you can you know see what's you know scroll over something and know what the zoning is but to be able to do a query where you're able to identify I want to develop this and it pops up you know some options I I think it's great um let me know if there's appropriate is it okay to comment on the inventory type list that's created along with this and I you could I'm open to feedback is loaded of when I hear that that there would be an inventory that is showing existing and also proposed developments stuff that's exist stuff that's already built stuff that is in planning stuff that is being permitted and is constructed you know my background is in accessibility so it make it flashes my a little trigger me that's this could be an opportunity to make the create inventory of what our programmatic access for housing in Santa Rosa is um it just when I started seeing the inventory list it reminded me of uh an article I read recently about the city of Los Angeles who are going through a massive lawsuit related to accessible housing and their public housing program and one of the things they that came up is when they were asked well show us where the accessible housing is you know where's your inventory they were not able to produce that and this is you know a little bit Los Angeles is big and should be well organized it so when I see the inventory list and it's something that's growing it's something that's populated something that we can easily track things my mind goes to well maybe that's something where we could be transparent with the community and track these kinds of items but um that's really the only thing that came up for me I think it's going to be a really great tool thank you Michael great thank you yeah I think this is a really vital tool developers you know are in tune with a lot of this and like like Drew shared I work my way through GIS cities doing entitlement for much different kind of project but I do find my way around but I have staff members who are graphic designers bright people college educated they struggle with just understanding all the layers of that language and I train them you know when they need to when I can't have all that work on my desk so you know at the one end it doesn't I want it to be very user friendly and I think that it really should be something that the public could use easily I would love to be able to as I said before and you can probably figure out this is a little bee in my bonnet I have a lot of conversations about housing in Santa Rosa with folks who don't have any background what they see right now in front of them is 1900 units being constructed you pretty much can't drive through any part of the core area from out highway 12 to downtown to Roseland to Santa Rosa Avenue to not see significant projects being built and the honest to goodness truth is is that it is freaking out a huge part of the population of Santa Rosa right now I over you know cocktail party over dinner we'll share the some of the logic behind it the the depth of the planning process the time frames within which areas were rezoned and there was very little public input I don't think I don't think all of that is because of not being transparent I do get I get a lot of I get a lot of emails and and Dwayne to your point I recognize that not everybody is is necessarily digitally I mean there's a huge range right but city connections that I get it's funny it always comes in a half hour before this meeting on a Thursday and I don't think that's the only day that city connections comes but all of that information you know the information about these meetings information is about these programs they're they're there people have to be willing to consume that information what I was going to say Dwayne as I completely agree with you I don't know where the outreach is and to the point of the surveys I don't know where that outreach in those how do we engage the community beyond friends of mine who know that I'm on design review asking me what the age is going on with all these buildings and that's that's anecdotal but it's real that's what I really hear so having a tool that they can use being able to send people to that tool the I've sent people to the inventory list that Drew showed because I've said go take a look at this because there is some easy to distill information but I do know people who would accept the technical approach better and if it was technical and detailed but it was also user friendly it would be a big deal I could maybe continue to enjoy dinner and just give them text them the website and we'd go from there but you know having it be vigorous and having it have enough information for developers to use but then also really being user friendly would be great and I just I love the direction it started Ernest you comment about the accessible element being part of that it's it's great it's really really critical so yep those are my comments yeah and to to that point so part of the refinement of our internal permitting process is adding fields that we enter when we receive a project maybe it's specifically for senior housing maybe it's for people with disabilities we enter that on a product specific basis and say 10 of these 50 units are dedicated for seniors or for people with disabilities and so that would be one of those filters that you can say okay let me see all of these projects that have this characteristic so we are we are working towards that end thank you I I see the I see the center the focus of what it is you're doing and what the grant I think supports which is development and in particular pending developments I also see the incredible potential and and we've heard about it from public comments and even and from fellow board members the idea that other people in Santa Rosa are not only interested in whether a project has been approved but is it under construction is it nearing completion has it been completed so and that might be like a further step it might not be September because September's not very far away but when you think about what will serve the citizens of Santa Rosa I think that so the ability you know building this these these tools so that they can grow as we find out what people want that's not already there you know to build it specifically so that it can grow would be really super great I'm just I was looking at a project that was approved in 2004 and I'm like that's a while ago like what does that mean is it there is it you know and so yeah there there's there there's so many opportunities if you build it so that it's designed to grow as you know more about what people want that would be so great thank you so I mean yeah so a lot of what we do when we look at parcels for development right if a developer comes to us and says hey we're going to design or we want to we've just acquired this property we want to do xyz so we'll do a feasibility study right we'll look at the density of the zoning all those sorts of things so anything that can make that process more simplified is I think from a AEC community right is fantastic make my job easier right but I think at the same time if you can provide robust information that's easily digestible to anybody where that you know they can look at the you know the ramshackle house across the street that probably needs to be torn down and how is that parcel zoned to the empty parcel to the underutilized parcel in downtown Santa Rosa right that makes it there gives there's I think in many ways you know I mean a great example of a project that could have benefited from a tool like this is what is it 420 Mendocino right I mean you had three different parcels with three different property owners right that I think came together and said hey we're going to do this project together but you know it would have been kind of interesting had they had the ability to look at like oh well this parcel has this on it this parcel oh what if we did this and so I think the ability to combine information from adjacent parcels is a really interesting thing that could be added I don't know if environmentally streamlines the right title I mean there's an entitlement component I mean a lot of people don't understand sequel you know I a large part of the test to become a licensed architect in California includes information on sequel so I feel like sometimes I know more than I should about sequel right but I think sequel is not easily understood by a lot of people and so under you know sequel is a huge component of development and entitlements period but I don't think people like environmentally streamlined it may not be the right term but I think you know understanding what limitations are on a project I think is really nice because then that to me that's a design challenge right like if I've got a riparian corridor if I've got a fault line and I've got to figure out how to get you know I've got to figure out how to pencil the project from a design perspective if I've got a client say hey I want to build 50 units I'm like hey well there's a 200 foot riparian corridor that I can't do anything you know so then it becomes a you know kind of discussion point with staff and a design problem and maybe we go after a variance or maybe we go after something else or changes the design right so I think putting the boundaries is really nice but understanding that they're not the end all BL I think Tiger Salamanders are kind of end all BL in many cases unfortunately but there's a lot of other boundaries that are not massive obstacles I mean they're huge but they're they can be worked around and so I think just providing a way to show all the information in a clear and concise way it's easy to navigate that you know someone could spend a couple of minutes and figure it out and not be frustrated with it I mean I think a lot of people know how to use Google Maps these days or Apple Maps even if they aren't hugely tech savvy and you know GIS operates very similarly with a few caveats so yeah I mean I think this is really great and I'm curious to see how the two kind of the two datasets are kind of going to maybe merge together because that in and of itself is a really interesting way to look at property value and development potential right because if you build you know if you build a project on parcel A and parcel B is underutilized and that parcel B becomes potentially more enticing to a developer to acquire because they're like oh wait they just built 150 units next door so why can't I build 150 units here is there something unique about this property that would prevent that or no I could actually acquire it and kind of go after that so I think having the two datasets together is is powerful and I think you know we're seeing a lot of unbundled parking and so understanding that parking is not required and that that sort of development is a potential and you can make it pencil without parking and just having it really cleanly just defined is super helpful so I'm just kind of waiting to see like the beta test let me know I'll test drive it I'm ready I think yeah this is I think this is gonna be really nice because because I think it'll I hope I hope it will entice folks to look at the possibilities of different areas of town and I think some of the development that we're seeing now was kind of hard fought because of the lack of data but now that they've kind of broken that barrier now it's like hey wait there the data is coming guys and they made it work without the data now you can make it work with the data so your job is easier there's less upfront cost there's less this there's less that that that I think is exciting so yeah and on the beta note we're hoping to have something available by the end of July or early August anyone else before me okay so my the echo of everyone else is it just needs to be simple to use and it needs to have explanations for the late person so a prime example is the auto calculation of the density bonus you need to know what that is what does that get you when you're filling this out and then the last issue I have is that that I hope that there is funding to continue this I mean I know you have the grant but we it would be a shame to get this going and not have the funds and support of staff to keep it updated and continue it once people start using it so hopefully that's in the plan I heard you say that you're hoping but I hope that there's funds available actually you know that density bonus thing that made me think about something so like right now you're just showing like what percent density bonus can be granted on a parcel right so like let's say it's zone for let's not try to use the FAR let's just say it's zoned for 40 40 units right so it would be I think it'd be cool to say hey it's zoned for 40 units and then you say 65 density bonus and then below that you could say maximum units x right like in the interface that'd be really cool because it's I think to understand the density bonus well 65% like what does that mean and nobody you know I know what it means you guys know what it means but not the average citizen right so knowing like I think that information like the things just a clear and concise calc or explanation for how it moves through would be helpful because then you know right like hey oh the property across the street for me is zoned for 10 houses or 10 whatever but if I go it but I can get a 25 density bonus so I can add two more how two more units or whatever so that makes it more viable cost wise long term or whatever I mean I think it's really interesting and that goes to I think what Dwayne was talking about earlier in terms of that low-income housing or very low income because that's where that density bonus comes into comes into play is that if you're doing that then you get to build more other right more market rate or more middle or whatever anything else well I hope that we've given you enough comments to make this worthwhile for you and that we'd be happy to help some of us with the beta testing especially people who don't really know this stuff so all right and with that this project is for information only no action needs to be taken on this and this meeting of the design review board is now adjourned


And welcome all of you who have joined us live or perhaps tuning in to the recording. We are so glad to have you here as we welcome today's guest, Jesse Story. Jesse is the director of marketing and membership at the University of North Texas Alumni Association. And today, Jesse, you are sharing with us about time and project management strategies. Welcome, and we are so glad to have you with us today. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. Good. Well, I do think it's a topic that we all need to probably hone in on and spend a little bit of time. But before we dive into our conversation, we like to start every episode by saying thank you to our presenting sponsors. Each and every one of these companies are here in your community nationwide, worldwide, and they exist for one sole reason to help you do more good in your community. So please do find them online. They're not hard to find. Give them a like, a love, and get some follow. Again, they are here supporting you and the great works that you do for your community. So thank you to our presenting sponsors. And thank you to Julia Patrick for joining me today. So glad to have you here. Yesterday was lonely. Julia is the CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. I'm Jarrett Ransom, CEO of the Raven Group, self-professed non-profit nerd. So as I had shared a little bit earlier, today's guest is Jesse Story. Jesse, welcome and thanks again for joining us. Thanks again for having me. Jesse, we're really excited to hear what you have to say because we know that time management is really a big issue. And especially in the nonprofit sector, as things are rebounding, we're really being called to change or push through to certain things that we've maybe started and stopped during the pandemic or new paths. So let's get right into time management. Your first strategy that you wanna share with us today, schedule everything. Talk to us about that. Yeah, so now I do have to kind of start off with this disclaimer that I'm a very type A project manager, planner, organized kind of person. So for me, I probably go a little bit above and beyond. I've been called extra sometimes when it comes to scheduling everything. But the nice thing is that scheduling everything is something that can be done really easily and simply. And it's something that you can kind of start off small and work your way up. So for instance, I know that in the nonprofit world, we have to take phone calls all the time from donors and board members and leaders. Then it could be really hard to kind of manage our time when all these phone calls are coming in and people are popping into the office. We've got emails coming in and everything. And so one thing that I've had to get good at is scheduling some of those, scheduling blocks throughout the day to handle a lot of that. So for instance, with phone calls, I fortunately work in a position where I don't have to take a phone call right when it comes in. But I have realized that the mid-afternoon slump that you kind of get into a little bit after lunch and you just want to nap. And I've realized that that's like when I'm ready to go to sleep, that's the time that I need to be making phone calls because it gets me jazzed and it gets me, I just love talking to people. I'm a bit of a chatterbox. And so for me, I just kind of schedule that time during my day. So I make it really intentional that, hey, I need a little bit of a, pick me up in the middle of the afternoon. I love talking to people. So that's when I choose to return all of my phone calls and check those voicemails and everything. But the same principle, you can apply that to emails, to meetings.  If you have meetings that are four hours worth of your day, you can block off the rest of your day to get some work done. And I do that all the time. My team is constantly telling me, like, oh, I love that you schedule working time. I'm like, yeah, but the nice thing is that it's also flexible. So if we really have to meet, they know that they can move stuff around on the calendar. So, but yeah, I'm very big on scheduling everything. My phone, my calendar, it's all my best friend when it comes to scheduling. So I'm a little special that way too, right? And I literally block out everything and I'll share personally, even when it comes to my co-parenting schedule, right? What time is drop off? What time is pickup? And really all of that so that I can show up as the best professional nonprofit nerd possible. And then also take care of myself personally. I've got in there first thing in the morning, you know, block, do not schedule, no meetings. I mean, it's like bright red exclamation point. That's my me time. Typically I like to go to the gym or I like to walk, but I schedule that because before Jesse, I never scheduled personal time. And guess what? I never had any. Yes, exactly. And I'm so glad that you mentioned that because, you know, and the thing is, is I think we all kind of get into this mindset of, well, it's my personal time. I don't have to schedule it because it's not a professional in ever. But if you don't schedule it, I mean, you're right.  So for me, I do enjoy going to the gym every so often. You know, I go a few times a week and I've realized that I have to schedule it on my calendar and I have to treat it like a meeting that yeah, because otherwise we're gonna miss it. And I do the same thing with going to see my family or, you know, taking my dogs for a walk or going camping or something. Like I try to be very intentional with my time. And again, it's not to say that we have to be extravagant with the scheduling and every minute is planned for, but just making sure that somewhere in the back of my mind, I know that I'm going to be dedicating time, you know, to my professional life, but I'm also gonna be dedicating a lot of that time to my personal life. Right. I really appreciate that. I also think it's fascinating that you have looked within and determined what are the times of the day where you are going to be best suited to take on certain aspects. So I think that's fascinating, really smart, really, really smart. Okay, let's go to- Before we dive into that, so I wanna share, you know, maybe this is part of these helpful resources, but moving into knowing your style, your personality, Julia knows I am an early riser, early to get things done, come to a clock, that's when the slump hits for me, Jesse. And so those are the times when maybe I'm doing invoices or reimbursements or some emails that don't take a lot of my mental capacity.  And I found that, especially when leading teams, you know, if it's let's create a report, you know, you know this report is due on the fourth Wednesday of every month. Well, maybe the second Wednesday of every month, you're preparing that report. Yeah, yeah. Working to your strengths. Okay, talk about strategy number two, identifying helpful resources. Is this technology? Is this human paper? What is this? Yes, it is all of the above. And, you know, actually one of my favorite resources, I'm so glad that you mentioned the kind of looking within myself to figure out what times a day I work best. So I'm sort of one of these weird people where I'm not a night owl, but I'm not an early riser either. I just, I like it when the sun is up, but I love my sleep, you know? So it's, so I really had to be kind of intentional with my time. And so one of my favorite resources is a book. It's called Find Your Win. And I'll be honest, I didn't read the whole thing. I just read the parts that pertain to me, but it kind of helps you figure out your prototype and it helps you figure out whether you are kind of more of that early morning person, whether you are more of the afternoon, you know, kind of person who just loves it when the sun is up, are you more of a night owl? And it really is that also for me, it depends on what the task is. So I've noticed that I'm actually a much better writer. So obviously as a director of marketing, I do a lot of copywriting. And I've realized that I'm a much better writer around like 10 p.m. every night. Interesting. And I don't know why. I don't know if it's just the distractions are a little bit less. I'm just more honed in on what I'm writing. But for me, you know, sometimes I might flex. So if I know that I'm gonna have to write a blog article or put together some social media ads or something like that, I couldn't schedule it for the evening because I know that that's when I work best. And again, it's all about balance, right? So I don't do that every night because that would just be exhausting. You know, but I just try to be balanced with that.  I also love, I have a ton of blogs that I like to read because the way that I describe it to people is the time and project management. It's not something you can just master and like, okay, I'm awesome at it, we're done. It's one of those things that you have to continuously get better at and continue learning and you have to continue trying to work and be really great at it.  So I like to use a lot of really simple technical tools. So for instance, Trello is a really great project management tool. And they even have a free version because I know that in the nonprofit worlds, you know, we don't always have a lot of expendable income to use on things like that. So that's a really great one. I love LinkedIn Learning. They have a ton of awesome, you know, trainings that you can do. And you know, right there and, you know, in Phoenix, Arizona is the Fundrails Academy at Mirkova Community Colleges and they do a lot of professional development training for fundraisers as well. And they do focus a lot on time management and project management, especially since so many of us can learn so many different hats. So blogs, books, videos, you know, and honestly, actually one of my KPIs at the University of North Texas is once a quarter I have to take some kind of training. So sometimes for me, it's marketing related. It's more of the technical skills. But I also like to look at the soft skills, you know? I mean, we're here to be well-rounded individuals. It's not just about being great at marketing. It's also being great at communication and leadership and all of these other skills. And so that's actually something that I kind of put together just for myself. It's like, okay, once a quarter I'm gonna sit down and I'm really gonna dedicate some time to getting better at this skill. I love it. So I do too. And for those of you that might not have caught that acronym, KPI Key Performance Indicator and I love that you have put that into you. I am huge on personal and professional development. And so having opportunities and scheduling time to make sure that that happens, holding myself accountable, right? I think that's really important. And I am curious, again, one of these pop-up questions. They just come out of dialogue here in conversation. How have you seen your time management strategies and initiatives maybe take shape or get off course over the last 18 months? How have some of your best practices when it comes to this topic today of time management, how have you seen that, again, shift or take shape over the last 18 months? Yeah, that is an excellent question. And it's funny that you say that because I was just talking with a colleague and I was like, did you know that they don't make manuals for how to live in a COVID world? Like it's just something like that.  And of course, every role is gonna be different but I think we've faced similar challenges. They're just gonna look a little different. But in the world of marketing, I was doing a lot of events and I thought, well, when COVID hit, I was like, oh my gosh, like, what am I gonna do? I'm probably gonna be out of a job because I don't have events to do anymore. But actually my schedule got way, way, way busier. Yeah, and I'll be completely honest. I actually experienced burnout for the first time in my life during the pandemic. And that's when I kind of took a step back and I was like, okay, whoa, like bring it back in. I mean, I know things are crazy right now but that doesn't mean that we have to do everything all the time, perfectly, all that kind of stuff. So I tell people that a lot of times there are a few things that can really inhibit your time management skills. So one of those things is being people pleasers, which I am, a perfectionist, which again, I am and a procrastinator. Those three things can really inhibit your time management skills. And so I took a look at it and I thought, okay, what are some things that I can do to maybe delegate certain tasks? Or can I schedule some really intentional vacation time? Because I think that's one thing we all got into is why do I need to go on vacation if we're always working from home but you still need a vacation. You need a break, we all need a break. Great, exactly. And so before we move on to strategy two, I wanna jump in here. We have one of our viewers, right? Love seeing Jessie. She has a 411 on so many great tools. Fundraising Academy and National University are big fans. That's a great endorsement. Oh yeah, they're wonderful over there at National University. Yeah, amazing. Okay, let's talk about moving forward then to strategy number three. Because I think this is something that I'm really interested in talking to you about and learning about because this involves understanding the project lifecycle and share with us what that actually means. Yes, so here's the thing with project management. Is I remember, so my last role, I was actually a marketing project manager and I remember when I applied for that role, I was like, I'm not a project manager. I don't have a PMP certificate. But as it turns out, one thing that I've learned through project management is that at the end of the day, we are all project managers. Our projects just might look different and our certifications and our education might look different from one another. So for me, and I'll be honest, if you go Google project management, you're gonna fall down a really deep rabbit hole of all project management theory and things that you really might not need to know. So I've kind of honed you down to four steps that I think are really helpful for understanding the project lifecycle. And it's not something that you have to remember day in and day out, but it just kind of helps guide you for each project that you're doing, whether it's a donor solicitation or a video or an event. To me, it's all projects and it all happens the same way. So the first step is the planning phase. So that's where you get the team together.  It's really just kind of sitting down and getting all that brainstorming done. And fun fact, if the brainstorming sessions ever get a little bit stale, have everybody stand up and change feet. And that kind of gets everything flowing again. A new perspective, yes. Yes, exactly. So once you're done with the planning part, you move to the implementation part. So just for the sake of an example, we'll talk about an event. Maybe you're hosting a pretty big fundraising gala. And so once you kind of plan what you wanna do, the implementation part is where you're gonna be creating the communications pieces that you're gonna be sending out to everyone. That's where you're going to decide on the linens and the food and the vendors and the audio visual and all of that kind of stuff. That's really your implementation phase. After that is the execution phase. So we plan the event, we start making it happen, and then we execute it. And so the execution phase is sometimes really short, especially if it's an event, it may only be an hour, maybe a couple months depending on whatever kind of project you're working on. But the execution phase is really where you make it happen. So that's where you put all of your planning and all of your implementation things together, and you've got this event. Now with projects, a lot of people think that you know, okay, the project is done, the campaign is done, we're done, we did it. But yeah, it was beyond that. I always tell people an event is basically never over because especially with an event, it's a really great way to connect with those donors and you want those relationships to keep going even after the event. So the final step is the recap. And so I always tell people, this is a really great time to figure out what your follow-up strategy is going to be for after the event. Are we going to send thank you emails? Are we going to send thank you letters and that kind of thing? Are we going to make an ask of some kind? That's also a great way to look at your qualitative and your quantitative data. So get the stories, get kind of that gut feeling feedback on how your project went, but also take a look at your expenses, your revenue, your return on investment, figure out if you made money, if you lost money, if your brand awareness was out there, just kind of figure out your ROI in terms of that. And actually one of my favorite things and my last job, which I've actually taken over into my role at UNT as well, is I love the recap phase because it's also a great time to sit down with your project team. So I have what we call our plus delta meetings. And so we sit down and we talk about what went well. So the pluses. And we talk about what are some opportunities for change in the future, our deltas. So that's kind of understanding the whole project lifecycle. And again, that's very, it's a simple version, but I think it's the kind of version that we all, it's very realistic, it's the kind of version that we all find ourselves in all the time. So like I said, you're welcome to do some more research on it and you're going to see a lot of other steps, 10 steps, 20 steps with the project lifecycle, but these four steps are really good for just kind of helping you stay on track with all the different projects you've got. I love those four. And we could absolutely have you back to talk specifically on those four. I think I have a question of, do you reverse engineer this timeline? That's typically what I do, Jesse. If I know there's an event, here's the event. So what do I need to do six months ahead of that? Eight, six weeks, eight weeks. Sometimes it is six months ahead of that, right? Depending on the event. So is that one of the tools that you recommend that we use and implement? Oh, absolutely. And especially since a lot of my projects are marketing-based, so they're very communications-based. So for sending out direct mailers, it's really important to think of, okay, when do I want it to drop? So in that case, when do I need to put it in the mail? So then in that case, when do I need to have it printed? So then when do I need to have it designed? And give yourself plenty of time. Marketing is no joke. Give yourself tons of time to get these projects in place. So one of these pieces that really makes me want to explore is your strategy number four, and that's asking for help. Because I know that when you're used to doing so many things yourself or just becoming frustrated because somebody else on the team isn't working and so you're like, I'll just take care of it myself. You know, that's a classic, classic trap to fall into. How do you determine when it is time to ask for help and then managing that request? That is a fantastic question. And honestly, I'll be completely honest with you. Strategy number four has been the hardest thing for me to learn. I mean, according to my family, I don't know what they're talking about, but according to my family, I am terrible at asking for help. I'm just the worst. I don't want to bother people. Again, it's that people-pleasing, right? So it's a big time-waster. So one thing that I've really had to do is I've had to remember, somebody explained it to me very, very well once, that whenever I ask for help, it's giving me the opportunity to grow in that particular realm, but it's also giving other people the opportunity to grow their skill set. And so I had somebody tell me once, quit taking away people's opportunity to learn. And obviously we want to be kind, right? Like I don't want to just put everything on my team and say, okay, you guys do it and delegate literally everything. So it's being really intentional. And so one other thing that's helped me is, obviously, you know, we all work in nonprofits, we're very mission-driven and that mission is something that really helps me figure out, okay, if I want to do X, Y and Z, if X, Y and Z needs to be done, is it for the betterment of our organization? Or am I just, you know, being a little too proud or I don't want to share something or just frustrated, I'll just do it myself, you know, and that kind of thing. So those are the two things that have really helped me. And honestly, there are times when I sit at my desk and I literally tell myself, don't take away their opportunity to learn. Is this helping the organization? And sometimes you really have to get, you know, at that base level, especially if you're not great at asking for help. But I've noticed that ever since I started doing those two things, it's really been easier for me to help. And I just trust that my team will tell me, like, Jesse, I'm sorry, I can't help you with that or heck yeah, of course I can. So I just trust that we're all adults and we'll all communicate with each other and we'll just be honest when we can or can extend that help. I love that. One of the things I always talk about, and especially when I work with my clients and I coach them in a team setting, I'm doing the reverse engineer and I literally have this huge piece of paper on the board and sticky notes all over.  That's probably one of my favorite areas. But really identifying what is your zone of genius, right? And so Jesse, if your title is fill in the blank and your job is fill in the blank, it doesn't mean that someone else on your team and again, you can put your name in there, not Jesse, but I'm picking on her right now. That I could just say, okay, I'm really good at this thing and I know that this is on your plate and I know that this is your responsibility, but if it's okay, I would love to play a part or a role in that and to be, I think not only to ask for help, but to be willing to offer, provide help, especially in a space that you are so great at because that really could be the win, win, the true piece of the recipe for the successful event. And I just think that's a great opportunity is to identify based off of everyone's to-do list, where do you really shine and where might you be able to be of service to your team? Yeah, and honestly, I'm a big, I mean, I'm sure as everyone can see here, I'm very, I love to talk and I love people and I get really energized by being around others. And so I care a lot about team building and I love Strength Finder and Myers-Briggs and I really love understanding kind of what people's strengths are. And when you have a good understanding of what strengths are available on your team, again, you're giving everybody the opportunity to grow and enhance their skills, but you're also making it for your organization is that much more efficient and effective because you're using everybody to their full potential, which is really fantastic. Yeah, you're moving the organization forward in other projects that might not reveal themselves immediately. And then you get to reap those benefits as you're moving forward in a way you might not ever really understand, but all of a sudden something just clicks or something's a lot easier to achieve. And that brings me to our last strategy and it's hard to believe that we've blown through our time together this morning, but setting yourself up for success, what does that look like to you? Yeah, and we've kind of already touched on it a little bit, but to me, setting yourself up for success kind of has two pathways to that. So first, burnout is real. I said that, you know, and honestly, it was always one of those things for me that I was like, oh, burnout's real, yeah, yeah, yeah. Until I experienced it, it is real. It slows you down, it makes you feel lethargic, you don't get as much done. And even people on my team, when I experienced it, they told me, they said, Jesse, you know, things seem a little bit different with you. And so I ended up taking some vacation time to kind of reset my brain and get back into the swing of things. And one reason that I experienced that was because I did not set myself up for success properly.  I know that we all work in nonprofits, we all care so much about our mission, which is great, but it can also be a detriment because sometimes we care, we experience that compassion fatigue, right?  But remember that your professional world has a lot of other support and a lot of other people who can help and your personal life is more important in my opinion. And it's all about creating a well-rounded individual. So taking that time to yourself and to really give yourself time and give yourself breaks, mental, physical, everything breaks. And then the other part of that is living, kind of day to day setting yourself up for success. So I mentioned that I enjoy going to the gym and I know that that's not really, not everyone loves that and that's okay, but just staying active in some way, whether it's going on a walk with your dogs or just taking a walk around the park or playing with your kids, something that just kind of gets you moving, gets the blood flowing, gets you active a little bit, staying hydrated, especially in Arizona is very important or in my case, in North Texas, same thing, stay hydrated, eating foods that are really good for you and nourishing. And I know that this kind of sounds like she's just lecturing me on how to live my life. And that's not the case. It really does make a whole, it makes a world of difference. I can feel the difference when I eat, Taco Bell, I love Taco Bell. I can feel the difference between eating Taco Bell versus eating chicken and cauliflower and that kind of thing. And sleep is so important. Don't ever underestimate the value of a great night's sleep. So make sure that you have a great bed, you've got a good sleep routine and everything and all these things, I know that they don't seem important for time and project management, but they really are because if you feel lethargic, you're not gonna give it your best. They play a critical, they play a critical role. They really do. And while, when most people maybe looked at the first slide, the visual representation here of, things to do to be successful, you might have thought that there was gonna be another professional task conference seminar to attend. And it's really sometimes just looking back at yourself, what are you doing to take care of yourself as well as your team, reminding your team the same, to take care of yourself so we can continue to show up and be of service to other people. That's been a really challenging lesson for me, especially as an entrepreneur, as a single parent, I've got a lot on my plate and I too am a, I don't need help. I can do it kind of person, I can do this. And it really does go to show that like so much of these little day-to-day choices that we have, do I drink coffee all day or do I drink water all day? Although this is actually water in my coffee cup. Today it is, but I too can tell the difference. And I too love Taco Bell, although they took one of my favorite things off the menu. But really looking at, okay, how am I fulfilling myself, my body, my nutrition, my sleep?  One of the things he taught, and I have put into practice is know your Zoom number.  Mine is three, like no more than three Zoom meetings during one given day. Now that doesn't mean that I'm done, I'm stopping work, but it might mean that we take a phone call, an old school phone call, or we schedule for another day in which I don't have more than three Zoom meetings.  So, so grateful to have you on, Jesse. Everything you shared has just been really fabulous. Jesse's story joined us today all the way from North Texas. Jesse is the director of marketing and membership at the University of North Texas. So glad to have you. And I really would like to get you back to talk about those four phases, because I think that would be really helpful and beneficial to all of us. You touched on each of those four phases, but maybe if we could break it down a little further, I think would be wonderful. Absolutely, I would love to. Great. Hey, everybody, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. I've been joined today by the nonprofit nerd herself, Jared Ransom, CEO of the Raven Group. We wanna make sure that we thank our presenting sponsors without you, we would not be here having this amazing discussion with Jesse's story. One of many discussions that we have every day, it's different. It really, we work really hard to find people that can talk about things going on in the nonprofit sector and our sponsors help us achieve that. So we wanna thank them. Don't forget, we've launched a new program called Fundraising Events TV, hosted by Jason Champion. It's an in-depth look at the actual practice and I would say specialty of operating fundraising events. We like to say from golf to galleys, from ballrooms to barns, we get you covered. So check us out at Fundraising Events TV. Okay, I got a lot to do today, Jared, and I'm thinking I'm gonna be able to do it better because I have some great ideas. Good, you could ask for help as well. And I know I am guilty. That is a really hard thing for many of us to do. You know that about me. Well, I think it's about all of us, but Jesse, I like the way you reframed it is, is this giving that individual an opportunity to learn and grow, as well as I've heard it too when someone asks for help, when we say no, we're basically shutting them down from doing something that they want to do. They want to help. And so I've also reframed it that way, which has been extremely helpful. So I know we all have a lot to do, but I hope that today's episode with Jesse really helped you. And I hope that you'll join us here back tomorrow. Tomorrow is Friday as I double check. So join us tomorrow for Ask and Answered. We are off on Monday celebrating the holiday, but until then, we ask you to stay well so you can do well. We'll see you all back here tomorrow.


Want to change direction quickly with the ball? This top-teckers is the stop turn and is a really fast turn. You need a safe area and a ball.  Use the sole of your foot to stop the ball under your body. Place your feet just past the ball. Use the outside of the foot, nearest to the ball to move the ball away. Dribble back to the start line and do the turn again. Bend your knees and keep low when performing the move. Bend your knees and keep low when performing the move. Practice until you're ready to take the challenge. It's awesome having top-teckers!


So in this video, I want us to explore the sequential model a little bit more. Just delve slightly deeper, slightly deeper level. It's all about becoming familiar with what is possible. Now if this is the first video that you see in this playlist, I would really urge you to go back to the start. Watch this playlist from the start. I'm a surgeon. I'm involved in research as far as deep neural networks are concerned and this series really is about deep neural networks for domain experts. So you're not necessarily a computer scientist or statistician. You are an expert in a field outside of that, but you want to get involved with deep learning. This is a course, a series, a playlist on YouTube to get you to become comfortable and familiar with deep neural networks and we're using TensorFlow as our back end, Keras on top of that, and we're using the R programming language for statistics, a beautiful environment, an easy environment to start learning about deep neural networks. So we're at a stage where we've played before. We've used TF Runs as far as really as the tensorboard playing with that. Let's delve a little bit deeper and I've got we can see up here. It's very small, but you'll see the tabs model one, model two and model three already created. But let's first get to grips with what's going on. I'm going to set as always my working directory. I'm going to hold down control and hit enter, command and enter. So we're going to accept that. I'm going to import Keras and I'm also going to import plotly, but I'm just suppressing the messages so that I don't get all those yellow messages at the bottom here. So we're going to have Keras and plotly here. Now let's import a data set. I'm going to use one of the inbuilt data sets inside of Keras. And it's the MNIST data set. Now I just want to move here. I'm going to go on to my other monitor. Let's bring this up. There's the MNIST. In case you haven't heard about it, it really is famous. It's the easiest data set by that. I mean, easy for a computer to learn, but to explain things. So there are many of these handwritten digits.  It's 28 by 28 pixel pixels. It's monochrome. So every pixel in this 28 by 28. I mean, remember how big the photos are that your phone can take. So these are really tiny, 28 by 28. And every pixel of that 28 is just one after the other 28 in one column after the other. And then next row, next row, next row.  So it just gives a value at each of these 28 times 28 pixels. And each of these are looked at by a human being, and a human being has marked all of these. That's a 6, that's a 6, that's a 6. And then you want the computer to learn if I give it one of these what it is. So that's what we are after. Now, the best way to do images is not through a normal multi-layer perceptron, a densely connected neural network. A better way to go about it is a convolutional neural network, and we are very close to start looking at convolutional neural networks. We are not there yet, so I'm going to do something with this data set that will still allow us just to use our normal, normal densely connected neural network, a multi-layer perceptron. So let's have a look at this. And I'm going to use my normal function that we have, or the symbol that we have here, this percent with a backward arrow percent, and it's the data set underscore mness, that's our function. And we're going to import that, and it's very nicely written in KRS that I can immediately split it up, done all for me. So I'm using C to have this list of lists, and inside of that I have X-train and Y-train, that's my X-train would just be my training set and my training labels, my test set, my test labels, and that's what I've called them. My objects I've called X underscore train, Y underscore train. So it's going to take a second or two, but let's import that. There we go. Now let's have a look at the dimensions. I'm just calling them on X-train, and right at the bottom we see they are 60,000, and then 28 and 28. So this is a tensor. It's not just a rank two tensor, it's not just a rank one tensor, or a rank two tensor, I should say, where it's just a matrix of rows and columns. We've added another dimension to make this a rank two tensor. So it's 60,000 images of 28 times 28. Now what I want to do, now think of that 28, it's one after the other, after the others, in the first row, so that we have 28 pixels in the first row, we jump to the second one, 28, but what we could do is just make them all into one long vector. So 28 times 28 is 784, so I'm changing this into something that has 60,000 rows and 784 columns, and that's 784 columns. So each sample in that one long row is just all the 28 times 28 pixel values in one long row, and that's what we're doing with array underscore reshape. So function, and it's going to take X-train, and it's going to reshape it into this row and column. So the columns are easiest, 28 times 28, that's 784, but the rows are a bit different. You have to call the number of rows of X-train and put that inside of our C function there, and we're going to do exactly the same with X-test, so that now, if we look at the dimensions, we see 60,000 rows for X-train across 784 columns, as simple as that. Now we need to normalize, remember we need to bring them all down, and the way that we're going to normalize this is not by doing a standardizing it, by subtracting the mean and dividing by the standard deviation. It's because we have this very gradual, very linear from zero to 255, all we're going to do is we're going to use broadcasting by dividing every value by the maximum, which is 255. So every pixel value is now just going to be some fraction between zero and one of what it was, because we're just dividing each of them by 255. So that's one way of normalizing our feature set, our feature variables, which we haven't seen before. So let's just look at what train number one was, our training label, and our training data set, what the first label was, and as far as the target's concerned, yeah, it was a five. So now we're just going to do one hot encoding. Remember that's the two categorical function inside of Keras, and because it's from zero to 900 digits, there are 10 of them, so I'm using 10 as an argument, and we're going to do both of those. So let's look at what five was, I'm going to call y train one, the row one comma space data, show me all the columns, and look at this is zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, one. So if I count from zero, zero, one, two, three, four, five, the five is one hot encoded, so indeed that five is now represented by this 10 element vector of which the fifth one here with a starting from zero is one hot encoded. Excellent. Now let's import TF runs, so that we can actually have our tensor board to look at these, and I'm going to call mnist underscore model underscore one dot r, let's open it up and let's see what this one was all about, because I promised you we're going to delve slightly deeper into the sequential model, what can we add in the first thing that's going to pop out here as this callbacks. We haven't seen callbacks before, and I want to introduce you to callbacks here. So my model is just going to be a Keras underscore model underscore sequential, we've seen this before. I'm going to use my pipe symbol here. So I'm going to pipe model as the first argument to layer dense. So I'm going to have one, two dense layers here and then the third dense layer, my first dense layer, 256 units. That's fairly conservative, remembering that I have 784 columns. So I'm going down from, remember, right at the beginning we drew all these circles with all the lines in between them, I'm going from an input vector of size 784 to down to 256. My first hidden layers, I only got 256 nodes, whereas my input had 784. So that's dropping down quite a bit. My activation function would be a rectified linear unit. And remember for that first layer, you've got to tell tensor flow or Keras in this instance, then what the input shape is, and that's 784. It's got to accept that from there, it'll infer how big the weight matrix is, the weight tensor that it has to multiply. So my second one drops down even further to 128. Rectified linear unit is my activation. My last one is 10 units, and I'm going to use a softmax. I've got to use softmax because I want a probability for zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, and eight, nine. And the one that has the maximum probability that's going to be the predicted value for that handwritten digit. Then I'm going to compile the model. My loss is going to be a categorical cross entropy as we should do. And this type of problem, my optimizer is going to be RMS prop. We've seen that video, what RMS prop is all about. My metric is going to be accuracy. And then I'm finally going to fit my model with X train and Y train. I'm going to run my mini batches, 256 rows, over 50 epochs. Now let's get to callbacks. You pass a list of all the callbacks that you want, and I'm only going to do one callback here. And the callback is early stopping. Early stopping means it's going to run, you know that we're going to see this graph on the right hand side. But when it sees that something is happening, it's going to terminate the learning process. And the arguments that we're going to use there is what to monitor and for how long. So monitor in this instance, I'm going to monitor the loss. Because I pass validation data to this, I could have just loss or I could have val underscore loss, or I could also monitor the accuracy or the validation accuracy. I've chosen loss as my simple example here. And my second argument here is patience. So every time a loss comes up, it's going to look at two beyond that, because I've set it to two. And if my loss doesn't decrease, then for two mini batches in a row, it is going to say, hold, stop the bus. We're not learning anything more. Exit from this, I'm stopping. And that is what this callback is all about. I'm still going to set my velocity to two and my validation data. I'm going to use my test data as my validation data. So that's model number one. And I just have to write it out like this. I don't have to import Keras. It's all going to come from here and from the TF runs. So let's run this training run for that model. And because we've set the working directory and these models all live in the same directory, I can just use the name dot R. I don't have to type in the full address. So let's run that. And we can see in this instance, I can do the recording and post this to our pubs. I'm not using my GPU. I'm running this off of the CPU. So it's a bit slow, but we can certainly see things starting to happen there. You can see the little zigzag pattern there, my validation data set. It probably means that, remember that my mini batch size is too small and that we get this noise inside of it going up and down, up and down, depending on the specific data inside of that mini batch. We can smooth this out by making the mini batch size, the batch sizes it's called as an argument, slightly bigger. Now, let's just, while this runs, just talk for a moment about the base truth that we have here. This was done by human being. We're going to accept that the base accuracy here, the human level accuracy was very close to 100%. So if we think about our variance and our bias and we look at this, certainly we're getting very close to 100% in our training set. So that's going very well, but there's between that and what we expect the ground truth to be, the real truth is very small. And so we're probably dealing with a bit of variance here, a bit of overfitting and we have to do something about that. But we've called TF runs and we've got called train data. So we get this beautiful tensor board illustration. But look what's happened. We see this early termination here because of our callback. So it's recognized that for two steps in a row, there was no increase in the accuracy or was it lost? Now I can't remember what I called. Let's have a quick look. We used loss. So it didn't see that the loss got less for two after one was called. So it terminated early, no problem whatsoever. And that's very good. It's very good to set that so that you don't sit with bigger models. I mean, all of these are toy models that we've dealt with. You don't wanna sit for days and have something run and nothing really is happening. Your model's not making any improvements. So to put these callbacks in, very, very good thing to do. So let's just go to our second model. Let's see what we did there. So what we've done, it's a bit more restrictive, 128. So that space, I'm really that hypothesis space, I'm shrinking it down and I'm also doing a bit of dropout, 0.2 there. So I'm adding these two dropout layers there. I'm using RMS prop still. I'm still using my callbacks and nothing's changed. So there wasn't, I don't know if one can really call this that there was high variance, but between what we assumed to be this baseline of 100% accuracy as the labels were done, the training data got very close to that, but then there was this gap slightly to to the test data, the validation set.  Basically as a reminder, I haven't introduced anything new, but let's run this model and we can see training is going on. We can see quite slow. Remember, I'm running this off of a Core i7 Intel processor, so it's not running off of my GPU. So it's going slowly, but we're suddenly getting there and we can see our model there went right to the end. So the callback did not terminate. It didn't have to, it didn't find the reason with the patients being set to two to terminate early. So we see this whole run taking place over all 50 epochs. So let's compare these two runs. We've seen that before and now we can see the two runs. So let's look at this accuracy and really for the training set went up to 99, 98 for validation. And here it was on this side. Let's have a look. Yes, on this side it was 99, 98. So certainly you must always have a look at the scale. It's deceptive, this y-axis, very bad. And so just look at that. So as I say, we haven't really improved this and whether we should call this high variance is that's also debatable, but it's about the principle you get it and then we can see the changes we made. We went from 256 to 128. All the greens are the new ones. We introduced the dropout layer there and et cetera, et cetera. Let's look at model number three, something new I want to show you here as well. So we've got our constricted model still. We've got the dropouts, et cetera. And now when we get to compiling in the optimizer, before we would have just put Adam inside of quotation marks. What you do there is you just accept all the default values in the next video. If I have time, I might show you an easy way after creating your model, how to get to what all the defaults worth, very easy to do. But here, instead of just using all the defaults by putting Adam inside of quotation marks, I can actually use the proper function. It's called optimizer underscore Adam, which allows me to add some of the default values or change them even. So if I just hover there, it's tiny. You're probably not gonna see this on your YouTube video, but it says they're learning rate 0.001. So I've changed that to learning rate being 0.003. There's beta underscore one, beta underscore two. We've spoken about that before. We have an epsilon there, a decay rate, an AMS grad, clip norm, clip values, et cetera. So I've changed three of the arguments there. And that is how we drill down deep into the sequential model, where we start manipulating things to our heart's content, and it is so easy to do. So there we go, a lovely example of drilling a bit deeper. So instead of using the default values by just using the name, and this for Adam, it would just be Adam in inverted commas, I'm actually using the function, optimizer underscore Adam, so that I can manipulate the arguments that go with that. So that's beautiful. That is something new. So let's just run this model three. Now while that runs to the end, I'm gonna stop the video here. We can just compare them. It's gonna show us the comparison. You've seen that before. But now you've seen drilling down a bit deeper, getting a bit more finesse, taking more control over your sequential models.