The City of Richmond Human Services

Over the past two or three weeks, my boss has organized meetings in a different way and I thought it would be interesting to document what he does and my viewpoint on it. My previous posts defined my boss Reggie Gordon as a connector in many ways. Recently, I noticed that Reggie epitomizes this definition more and more. First, Reggie understands that he cannot make the change that he wants to make on his own. Since he works for the city of Richmond, he constantly interacts with city employees, non-profits, and even other counties. Therefore, many of his meetings consist of connecting (for lack of a better word) all of these people together and making sure that (1) they are familiar with each other and the services that they provide so that (2) their activities can align… it is one thing to have one non-profit doing work for homelessness but it is another to have a non-profit, ideas from a different city that was successful, and public employees all on a project. Reggie is always organizing meetings with various different people sometimes to just get to know each other and other times to really prioritize working together and strategizing. Reggie is a subtle people person which works very well for the role he is in. Second, I have noticed that these meetings majorly pay off for Reggie, even if others may not understand why. For example, Reggie hosted a meeting last week where he gathered all of the direct community partners and departments that fall under Human Services and simply had each group describe the work that they do, and introduce themselves to the group formally. The meeting was very simple but had great value because in a later meeting, a question came up about community health and Reggie was able to point to a direct organization (RBHA) and say “This person is doing this work at this organization.” In other words, Reggie noticed the value that these connector meetings have and it allows him to know more about services throughout Richmond in order to help other people outside of the Human Services office.