2025-08-26 Merit Appeal Board Minutes

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Merit Appeals Board August 26, 2025 recruitment efforts, but we also want to be able to retain them so that they stay in government— at least somewhere, right—maybe not within the area that they got hired in, but somewhere throughout the County. So, that’s what we’re looking at doing and part of it is to help, like, new hires feel more comfortable, try to get them to be connected to something—and so, we’ve started by developing a number of different programs. So, one of them is our Mentor Program. We started up a pilot last year. It was very successful, so we’re running it again this year. Right now, we have about seven Mentees that applied, and I’ve already found enough Mentors—so we’re moving forward with that one. The other one that we’re going to start working on—Junko’s bringing in some speakers to do more informational sessions. And so, I don’t know if Sommer already talked about that, but one of the goals is to just bring more attention to the different services that the County already provides that we can, kind of, highlight. So, that’ll serve two purposes—one is to educate our employees on what we do—do for our community, but also to let them know what services that they may be eligible for. So, for example, one of the departments that will be coming in first is Housing. So, they’re going to come in and do a presentation, ‘cause they do financial counseling free—and that’s for anybody. So, whether you’re an employee or the public, you can attend that. And I think they might also talk about some of their other services—‘cause I think they have something on the Home Improvement Loan Program and so forth. So, we’ll get them to come on board. I think they’re the first ones we’re scheduling. And then, the second one that we’re looking at is working with either Office of Aging or Elderly Activities to, kind of, highlight some of the programs for our Kupuna and how they also provide support services for caregivers, ‘cause that affects a lot of our families here, too. So, that’s not going to be the only ones that we look at. We’re going to look to see what other departments within the County we can highlight, but also other types of programs that might be of use to our employees. So—I don’t know—we’re just brainstorming, but one might be, like, how to go apply for a mortgage loan or something like that. So, we’re going to start working on those and, hopefully, we can roll some out before the end of the year, but that’ll be an ongoing program that we’re going to try to continue on as soon as we get moving. The other one that I want to highlight is that we also do the Employee of the Year Awards. So, that’s coming up in October—Nawai runs that whole program and she told me we have about 23 nominees this year, which is kind of nice. So, those supervisors will be coming in and doing nd presentations to our committee and then it will all be presented on October 2, okay. And then the last thing that we’re working on is we brought together a group of employees through our Employee Engagement Committee and they’re representative of all different Page 7