2015, 06-017, Committee on People with Disabilities Minutes

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His short time goal is to make sure that the staff is in compliance with giving everybody the “AHA” experience because the customer matters. “A” stands for Aloha everybody. “H” stands for Help them. Make sure they leave like they got their problem solved. And the other “A” stands for A Hui Ho, which in Hawaiian means come back. So we give everybody the AHA experience and we make them feel comfortable and make them feel like they belong. Kimo doesn’t want anybody to feel disrespected in this agency. The second thing is to build bridges. These hallways connect us, they don’t separate us. The offices in the building need to work together as one. We are all here for the same reasons. And then we need to have each other’s back. In government, we cannot have all the answers, but at least he’ll be willing to talk about it. He’ll put it on the table and brainstorm. Budget is slim, but that shouldn’t stop us from caring. It shouldn’t stop us from solving problems. His long term goals are that the office has an Area Agency Plan that we’re developing and now we’re an ADRC, since our Federal government has tried to merge the disabilities with aging. So we just have to honor the D in the ADRC. It is basically goals that have been developed from the Feds, but we have to figure out how to implement it. So, we’ll keep you informed on that. J. Floyd stated that one of the things that he looked at the ADRC as being is it’s an organization that gathers information from a lot of sources. It’s an information gathering and disbursement organization. He feels the ADRC has been tasked with developing and/or collaborating with agencies to provide services. Wesley Tanigawa According to Kimo, a big prize for the ADRC is who came from ARC and is a developmental disabilities kind of advocate. Kimo is in Mental Health and we have Aging. So we’re trying to put all these different entities into one place. The funding stream is Older Americans Act. So right now we’re Information and Assistance. We can give information, we can give assistance, we can help with applications. I think we can be the hub. We’re not perfect yet, but I think we can get to that. When somebody has a question with disabilities, at least Wes has that knowledge. If they ask about mental health, I got that knowledge. So, I think we can be a hub at least for information and assistance. As far as transportation, maybe we can bring people to the table. Our targeted money is not targeted for transportation, but we have this building. We can bring people together. We can coordinate the meeting. Dr. Alameda stated that another important thing is the continuum of care. So on one end we have Elderly Activities and they’re responsible for the active seniors, seniors who can live independently. Right now they have 11,000 -15,000 seniors. But when they become frail, when they have one or two major life activities that they can’t do, then they come to us. They are a separate entity. And the reason they’re put under a separate entity is because money flows down to us, and if they were under us, we cannot give an award to an entity that is hired under us. So when a senior has a disability, and they come into our building, then they are our kuleana. We have about 1600 of them. And if they are too severe they go to long term care, the state hospital. So, it’s like a continuum of care. And our job, we try to be the hub, but our funding 4