2011-03-23 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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MS. NICHOLSON: There are some existing volunteer programs already. So what are we trying to say? I didn’t know that there was a student internship program. If it’s underutilized we want to encourage the county to take advantage of that. MS. O’HARA: Does Corporation Counsel utilize student interns? MS. GARSON: Yes, not on a constant basis but depending on what semester it is. Sometimes they get credit. Sometimes they just volunteer. MS. NICHOLSON: How would we phrase this if in fact we want to encourage the county to take advantage of these? MS. WONG: The essence though is we don’t want to move this forward correct? We just want to encourage more volunteers? MR. MATSUDA: I think so. MS. NICHOLSON: Although we haven’t gotten to the community workshop for volunteer action projects which we still might want to discuss. MS. O’HARA: How does the RSVP program coordinate with the county? MR. TAKABA: They’re part of the county. What they do is they set up volunteer stations like American Heart Association or Hawai‘i County Economic Opportunity Council. All these private non-profit organizations can be a volunteer station and they have responsibilities when they’re assigned a volunteer. They’re responsible for supervising… There is an agreement that they sign saying that they would supervise and in some cases they would give them a lunch or something. So it’s an agreement that the RSVP program sets up with the volunteer station. Once they set up the agreement then they send volunteers to that station. MS. O’HARA: But who runs the RSVP program for the county? MR. TAKABA: It’s under Glen… It used to be Marc Eskaya. MS. NICHOLSON: What department are we talking about? MR. TAKABA: Parks and Recreation. It’s under the elderly activities division and it’s grant funded. MS. NICHOLSON: I wonder if we could say using the RSVP program as a model and expand that program to include other larger age groups, additional age groups. I don’t know if this would stay under Parks and Rec and so we would list this under Parks and Rec as a departmental recommendation or if we’re looking at expanding it whether we would not want to have it under Parks and Rec. MS. O’HARA: Iwould think it would be best under the Mayor’s office personally because it could goany number of directions. I mean if you’re looking for volunteers for disaster response it’s very different and it’s not a real departmental thing. But coordinating with the RSVP program using that as the model, have the Mayor’s office investigate expanding the volunteer 19