The Issaquah City Council voted unanimously at the Dec. 5 meeting to provide $371,500 in Human Services grant funding to 53 organizations in 2017.

The Human Services Commission worked between May and September of this year to determine which agencies would receive grant money. Human Services grants are given in two-year cycles, meaning that the same amount of money will be recommended for the same organizations in 2018, but that this will have to come before the council for approval again in a year.

The $371,500 total in grant funding represents a $50,000 increase from the Human Services funding given out in 2016.

However, despite the funding increase, certain longtime recipients of funding were left off of the list this year, as Councilmember Mariah Bettise noted. Bettise specifically brought up Athletes for Kids, which partners children with disabilities with a high school athlete as a mentor, and Life Enrichment Options, which advocates for the rights of individuals with special needs and helps to provide them with housing, employment, recreation and educational opportunities.

The two organizations had each received $5,000 in grant funding in 2016. Athletes for Kids had requested $5,000 again in 2017, while Life Enrichment Options had requested $6,000.

“There are a couple of programs and agencies in my review of this that are long-term grantee recipients of the city of Issaquah … that were not funded, and I would like to discuss the potential possibility of putting $10,000 in the budget to cover Athletes for Kids and Life Enrichment Options,” Bettise said.

Councilmember Bill Ramos made a motion to amend the agenda bill to set aside $5,000 for each of the two nonprofits.

Athletes for Kids Executive Director Melissa King spoke during the 2017 budget public hearing at the same meeting, requesting that the council reconsider the decision to leave out the mentoring organization. She said that Athletes for Kids has received grant funding for the past eight years.

“The impact of $5,000 on a small nonprofit like ours is huge, and it’s going to take a lot to make that deficit up,” King said.

She explained that the program, which is found at Issaquah, Skyline and Eastlake High Schools, can change the lives of children with special needs.

“It improves their self-esteem and social skills, it improves their attitude towards school, and it also increases their happiness and well-being,” King said. “It gives them hope for life through the power of having someone there for them … it’s often times their first time having a friendship.”

David Fujimoto, the city’s sustainability director, stated that it was very hard for the commission to choose among so many worthy charity organizations. A total of $694,792 had been requested in funding, he said — nearly twice the amount of money available.

“Our commission had a very challenging job of sorting through all those proposals and identifying the needs and the ones that stood out … that was a very difficult job to do, many agonizing hours of weighing the different services,” Fujimoto said.

He explained that “a new approach” to the commission’s review process this year created a new method of streamlining the deliberation. This year, the commission fit applications around five goal categories: food to eat and a roof overhead; supportive relationships within family, neighborhoods and communities; safe haven from all forms of violence and abuse; healthcare to be as physically and mentally fit as possible; and education and job skills to lead an independent life.

This goal-oriented method for determining grant recipients had been previously used by the cities of Bellevue, Redmond and Kirkland. One of the objectives of the new improvements to the process was to eliminate redundancy, so that two organizations that both fulfill the same function do not both receive funding.

“There are a number of mentoring programs that were proposed — Athletes for Kids is just one mentoring program that’s out there, there are others as well,” Fujimoto said. “And LEO [Life Enrichment Options] is a program that serves individuals with disabilities and there are other programs that serve [the same] individuals … those individuals are being covered.”

Another strike against the two nonprofits may have been the amount of money requested. During a presentation of the grant recommendations by commission members at the Nov. 21 council meeting, Elizabeth Maupin explained that applications that asked for small amounts of funds were not granted funds because the amount received was not worth the paperwork.

“In the case of very small grant requests, much of the money would have been consumed in administrative costs,” Maupin said. “This led us to eliminate some worthy organizations with the hope that they would easily find this funding elsewhere. But it allowed us to make more meaningful grants to some good organization whose ability to provide the needed services has been limited by inadequate funding.”

“If you’ve gone through an extensive process and you believe in that process, is it the painful outcome of the very first year of the new process that someone who has received funding is really left in the lurch?” Councilmember Mary Lou Pauly asked. She later added that it’s “very hard in that transition year to go from your old process to a new process without making very hard choices.”

Council members said that they did not like the idea of denying funding to deserving organizations, but that ultimately they found it more important to respect the commission’s painstaking labor and resulting decisions.

“We have a Human Services Commission that works several months to go through this process and I have a tough time ending that process … It has nothing to do with those valuable organizations,” Council President Stacy Goodman said.

“It is a very difficult spot for anyone to be in, to say one particular organization will not receive funding,” Councilmember Eileen Barber said. “I think we need to honor their very difficult work … LEO is a very special organization for me, but I honestly have to honor the process.”

“I know both organizations … but I’m going to put the integrity of the process that we have through the commission in front of my own personal wishes,” Councilmember Paul Winterstein said.

The amendment to fund Athletes for Kids and Life Enrichment Options failed 4-3.

In total, 21 organizations were denied grant funding, with five having previously received funding in 2016. The other agencies that had been awarded funds in 2016 but not in 2017 were Healthpoint-Primary Dental Care, Pediatric Interim Care Center and the Sound Generations Volunteer Transportation Program.

The agenda bill had previously come before the council on the Nov. 21 meeting, but the council had deferred a vote until the Dec. 5 meeting so that the administration could in the meantime provide a chart showing the different organizations, as well as the money being requested and received.