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TO: Mayor Richard Irvin
FROM: Adrienne Holloway, Ph.D., Chief Innovation Officer
DATE: March 5, 2020
SUBJECT:
Consideration of a revised grant agreement between the Cities for Financial Empowerment and the City of Aurora to create a Financial Empowerment Center (FEC) in the city of Aurora.
PURPOSE:
The City of Lights Financial Empowerment Center, the only FEC in the State of Illinois, will be part of a growing network of FEC's embedded in local governments across the country that have committed to providing free, one-one-one financial counseling, delivered by professionally trained counselors, to low and moderate income residents. By offering this service to our residents, we will assist them in becoming more financially stable, thereby, improving upon the economic profile of our city (see Attachment A "Aurora Implementation Proposal").
BACKGROUND:
Based upon successful planning activities, staff submitted and successfully received an implementation grant to establish the City of Lights Financial Empowerment Center in Aurora. In December 2019, a grant agreement between the Cities for Financial Empowerment (CFE) and the City of Aurora was reviewed by the Law Department. The Law Department identified routine areas of concern with the agreement and provided the Innovation Department with specific redlines and rationale for its proposed changes. Those proposed changes were not subsequently forwarded to the CFE for its review and, in fact, the CFE did not review nor consent to the changes prior to City Council action.
Following the Council's approval of the agreement which contained the changes that the CFE had not seen, the CFE raised the issue with City staff. The Law Department worked directly with the CFE to address the outstanding issues as possible in order to produce the revised agreement attached to this Resolution.
DISCUSSION:
The revisions to the grant agreement are as follows:
Modification of indemnification language, so that our obligation t...
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