Item A: Plan for Communities of Color Meeting

Home Browse Search

ATTACHMENT A Central Services Human Resource And Risk Services City of Eugene 777 Pearl Street, Room 101 M Eugene, Oregon 97401 EMORANDUM (541) 682-5061 (541) 682-6831 FAX www.ci.eugene.or.us Date: November 17, 2005 To: Mayor Piercy and City Council From: Lauren Chouinard, 682-5663 Subject: Council Priority on Race – Proposed Calendar of Activities Based on a review of the overall action plan for council’s priority on race and on council’s additional input in the work session on August 8, 2005, we propose that the initial activity on this priority focus on an education process with two components. First, you indicated a strong need to hear from the community on issues of race. Second, you committed to self and group exploration of the topic to build a broader base of knowledge. The following set of action items is responsive to both those components. Part of the self-education process has been accomplished by attendance at the September “privilege” training sponsored by the Interagency Coalition for Diversity and Equity. That training laid an excellent foundation for understanding how individuals without privilege are subjected to both overt and subtle forms of disparate treatment and discrimination every day in our community. We are moving ahead on next steps and have invited a handful of community of color representatives to your November 30 work session to help plan a meeting between council and a broad representation of the communities of color. The focus of the 45 minute work session item on November 30will be to get ideas on a preferred structure and process for the broader meeting as well as to ask for input on areas of race relations that will be valuable to explore with a larger community group. Next, we will set up the broader communities of color and council meeting as a workshop of a few hours in January. Following the January meeting with the communities of color you will meet with the Human Rights Commission (HRC) in February. The purpose of that meeting will be to dialogue on issues of race and to develop a racism response plan. By the end of February you will have heard from the communities of color and worked with the HRC to hear their perspectives and develop a racism response plan. These steps will provide a good background for a facilitated council discussion on race, which we will schedule for sometime in April. The creation of a new Council Resolution on Race could be a product of this discussion. Several of you expressed a desire to hold a work session focused on some of the high profile race-related incidents and issues of the past. That will be scheduled for May or June. We recommend using a facilitator for the communities of color meeting, the meeting with the HRC and the facilitated council discussion on race. We are currently exploring options of facilitators who have extensive training in the areas of race and diversity. We believe it would be advantageous to use one facilitator throughout those three activities for continuity.