Good morning.
The March 11, 2022 regularly scheduled meeting of the Neighborhoods Education Civil Rights Culture Committee will come to order.
It is 9.30 in the morning.
I'm Tammy Morales, chair of the committee.
Will the clerk please call the roll?
Councilmember Lewis.
Aye.
Councilmember Nelson.
Present.
Councilmember Strauss.
Present.
Vice Chair Suant.
Present.
Chair Morales?
Here.
Five present.
Thank you.
If there's no objection, today's agenda will be adopted.
Hearing no objection, today's agenda is adopted.
At this time, we'll open the remote general public comment period.
Before I go through the very long script, I want to confirm that we don't have people signed up this morning.
Is that correct?
There are no public comment registrants.
Very well.
In that case, I will close the public comment period and we will move on to our agenda.
Devin, will you please read item one into the record?
Agenda item one, 2022 Office for Civil Rights Work Plan Presentation for Briefing and Discussion.
Thank you.
Before I introduce Interim Director Wheeler-Smith, who I do want to welcome this morning.
Colleagues, as I've said before, our role as council is to provide oversight to our city departments, which I know we all know, and really to strive for greater transparency and greater accountability in how the city serves our residents.
I also think it's really important that we highlight the good work of our city departments and our city workers inside those departments.
So today we'll be hearing from the Office of Civil Rights, a department that's doing really important work for our neighbors and for our city.
And I just wanna share that I think it's really important that our city staff who work very hard to implement programs and policies are doing so right now in time of crisis, and especially while they're trying to address some of the most pressing issues that we've had in at least a century for some of these issues.
So I think our departments deserve our respect.
Obviously, in our role as oversight, if we believe that they could be producing better outcomes, we can certainly ask for process improvements, and that's part of the role that we serve here.
And I think that kind of transparency and accountability is really how we diminish public cynicism about the importance of local government and the role that we play.
As public servants, our city workers deserve our respect.
and respecting our city staff and the work that they do is also important to reducing cynicism about how local government works.
And I say that because for this department in particular, I've seen sort of the inside workings in 2017, 2018, when I was a human rights commissioner, I WORKED CLOSELY WITH MEMBERS OF THE OFFICE OF CIVIL RIGHTS TO UNDERSTAND THEIR ANTIDISCRIMINATION WORK, BOTH THROUGH THEIR ENFORCEMENT AND THEIR INVESTIGATIONS.
WE HAVE 19 PROTECTED CLASSES IN THE CITY, YOU'LL RECALL, SO THERE'S A LOT OF WORK FOR THEM TO DO.
I ALSO WANTED TO UNDERSTAND HOW THE RSJI TEAM IS WORKING TO ASSIST OUR CITY in our effort to end institutional racism within city government.
You may recall that last summer, seven black women in one city department alleged discrimination in the workplace.
It wasn't the first time that a city department came under scrutiny for discrimination against women.
And so I'm looking forward to hearing this conversation today.
Director Wheeler-Smith, you're stepping into a really important role Enforcement and investigation in discrimination cases is important work.
The Race and Social Justice Initiative is important work.
And you and your team at OCR play a critical role in helping our departments understand what it means to be actively racist, and to be actively protecting gender justice in our city policies and practices.
So I'm looking forward to working with you toward that end.
I understand you've been on for less than a month, so I appreciate you joining us today to share your work plan for 2022 and look forward to learning more about what your vision is for the department.
So with that, I will hand it over to Interim Director Derek Wheeler-Smith.
Good morning.
Good morning and thank you for the warm welcome.
It is a pleasure to be in space with all of you on this morning.
I am going to.
Pulled up the PowerPoint here.
And I'm gonna work through this PowerPoint so I am really excited and honored actually to take on this role as Director of the Office for Civil Rights.
This incredible opportunity, I believe, speaks to my passion, skill set, and the guiding principle that all people, especially those historically impacted by racism, should have equitable access and opportunity to thrive.
And I'm excited to be able to partner with all of you towards that end.
And this morning, I get to share the work plan of some of the amazing folks who are leading this work out of the Office of Civil Rights.
Attached here is the mission and vision for the Office for Civil Rights.
This was created by the staff in 2018. And over the course of several months, staff worked together really to identify this as a North Star and how we hope to get there and that mission vision is a city of liberated people where communities historically impacted by racism oppression and colonization hold power and thrive with the goal to end structural racism and discrimination through accountable community relationships and anti-racist organizing policy development and civil rights enforcement here are the established values from the Office for Civil Rights.
And I believe that values are so important.
It's something that should anchor us.
And ultimately, we want to lead from our values.
And in those moments where we're not leading from our values, we want to make sure that we're able to have courageous conversations around what pivots need to be made so that we can function and be in alignment with those values.
And so authenticity and working toward racial equity and practicing and applying principles of anti-racism.
We really want to be able to move collectively and purposefully in the direction of racial equity by sharing and planning and decision-making and power with organizations and anti-racist communities of color.
We want to be able to ensure engagement with communities that are most impacted by institutional racism and believe that that is important work.
Our second value of community-led solutions and accountable community relationships is really about acknowledging and doing the work to repair city government's role in causing harm to communities most impacted by its policies and practices, and being able to consistently ensure high levels of community input, participation, and leadership in policy development execution, as well as implementation.
Our third value really centers around integrity.
We want to be able to operate with consistency, accountability, and in alignment with our stated values, being transparent and making information available to the public, both internal and external, recognizing that there has to be accountability with all of our stakeholders.
And then collaboration.
We really believe that it's important that we're able to work regularly and communicate across functional areas as we think about the work that Councilmember Morales mentioned, policy enforcement, the Race and Social Justice Initiative, as well as commissions and the administrative divisions, and really work together with communities most impacted by our city's policies and practices.
And then lastly, it's really about thoughtful planning for us.
We want to be able to take into account the historical harms, the impacts of those harms in working to achieve our goals, and responsibly maximize the resources that we've been given and ensure that we're being great stewards over those resources, while at the same time analyzing and strategically navigating power to develop support for racial justice strategies across multiple stakeholder groups.
These values have been created alongside the mission and vision have really been a part of helping staff to get clear.
And again, it's important because it anchors us in the work I want to share this by way of just communicating what our org chart looks like in the Office for Civil Rights.
We have a staff of around 38 folks or so.
And what you see here is myself.
We really function, I would say, as a network more than kind of a hierarchy.
But what you're seeing here are the great folks that are leading this work, Civil Rights Enforcement and Mike Chin, Policy Cadman Cahill, Race and Social Justice Initiative, Jennifer Chow, our Community Investments, John Page, Operations, Latrice Robara, Communications, Nona Rayburn, and then our Advisory Commission work is led by Meredith Stone.
Here are the highlights for 2021 around work that our office has been leading uh in december of 2021 the community investments division announced uh the awardees for the 2021 collective network um that collective network centered around community alternatives to incarceration as well as um policing requests for proposal and this really had a focus on uh black transgender and gender non-conforming community And there were worries to that RFP and those awardees were the black trans sovereignty, our origins and histories of medicine proposal of $500,000 was submitted by the Liberation Medicine School.
And the second awardee was the black trans lay organization capacity building and indirect intervention of carceral systems experienced by black trans and gender diverse communities in the Washington State proposal.
They also received $500,000 and that was submitted by the Lavender Rights Project.
There was also work done or one of our other highlights was the Racial Equity Research and City Racial Equity Action Site.
This was a collaboration between RSJI and Seattle IT.
And this work really sought to gather technical data around racial equity.
The website launched and it provides some data as well as some analysis It also includes the community stories, which we believe are important, about racial equity topics like the well-being of young people and things like food insecurity.
It also highlights the racial equity plans of our different city departments, and it provides transparency around the specific actions that city departments are taking towards achieving their racial equity goals.
One of the things that is mentioned here in the third bullet point is the resolving that had to take place around the backlog around cases.
And so there was a case backlog that actually started in 2018. There were a mix of things.
There was, of course, the staffing issues that we encountered.
And then due to those staffing issues that existed actually within our investigations teams, But through some major dedication and then, of course, even having to navigate the challenges of COVID-19, the staff has been able to clear the backlog in 2021 and entered into 2022 with just the most current caseloads.
We also have developed and implemented restorative justice practices through our mediation program.
The preliminary data actually for 2021 shows that parties reached an agreement 89% of the time when they agreed to mediate a pre-charge inquiry.
So lots of good work happening there.
These types of alternatives to the investigatory process of civil rights enforcement culminated after the community actually requested solutions that better met the needs of those most affected and impacted by racism.
In 2020, our policy division actually did some work to convene a task force.
And the purpose of that task force was to look at alternatives to the criminal legal system.
In 2021, the task force released their report, Centering Impacted Voices, Community Task Force Legal Report on the Criminal Legal System, which included recommendations to policy changes in the criminal legal system uh with with uh the city within the city of seattle the eight recommendations that came forward from the task force included a range from addressing the root causes of engagement with the criminal legal system uh to electronic home monitoring and that being something that should not be used as an alternative to incarceration as you've witnessed almost a rise in almost 300 in the use of electronic home monitoring One part of these recommendations took immediate effect after the city's attorney's office and then city attorney Pete Holmes met with the task force where there was an order that came out ordering prosecutors to stop asking for stay out of areas with prostitution known as SOAP and stay out of designated areas known as SODA orders.
And so these are the highlights of 2021 and grateful just to be able to share some of those highlights with you today.
Here is the 2022 budget for our office and our budget breakdown by percentage, including kind of our salary and labor expenses, which you see there.
And our salary and labor expenses actually are at about 5.3%.
$8 million, which is about 67% or so of our salary.
We have community investments, which is about 16% of our budget, and that sits at about $1.4 million.
And included in our community investments, just for clarity, are the participatory budget outreach, and Cadman, you can correct me if I'm missing something here, but the participatory budget outreach, the collective network, our racial equity fund, as well as our policy outreach work.
You'll also see in this budget our operational expenses, which is around 17% of our budget, and that also sits at about $1.47 million.
We've got fixed allocations in there, which obviously would include things like our lease and work with some of our other departments within the city, FAS, But there's also some restricted programming, the testing work, Human Rights Day, our MLK Junior Unity Day, the RSJI Summit, the work that happens with commissions as well as the OCR change team.
And then you'll see also reflected in this budget the daily expenses for our office, which sits at around $150,000, and that makes up about 2% of our overall budget.
Moving on from the budget, as has already been communicated, but just wanted to kind of frame, I think, the next portion of the conversation as I take kind of a deeper dive, if you will, moving from the balcony to the dance floor, looking at the main areas of work from our office, and that's civil rights enforcement, policy development, the Race and Social Justice Initiative, community investments and commissions.
And these are the main areas of work divided by our divisions.
So first I'll talk a little about the civil rights enforcement and the 2022 priorities for this body of work.
So there's the education and empowerment, as you can see here on the slide.
And our civil rights enforcement division is responsible for multiple things.
and I'll walk through some of those things.
So one is really eliminating discrimination in housing, employment, public accommodations, and contracting.
The second body of work that the Civil Rights Enforcement Division is responsible for is educating the community on civil rights protections and responsibilities.
We also are doing the work to build accountable community relationships, and that happens through outreach and public engagement And then lastly, it's really promoting equal access to city services, programs, and facilities.
And for 2022, the enforcement division is going to be really locked in and focused on three areas.
And those three areas are the areas that are mentioned here on the slide, education, empowerment, resolution, and advocacy.
The civil rights enforcement division is going to be developing information on civil rights protections, developing community partnerships, self-help resources, pre-charge mediations, and conflict resolution, as well as civil rights advocacy.
Next up is our policy division.
And that division is led by Cadmium Hill, who joins me today.
This body of work, in addition to really being able to provide technical assistance and feedback on city legislation, our policy division is actually engaged in several major projects for 2022. The overall goal of the division's work really is to ensure that the folks who are historically absent but most impacted by institutional practices are heard, their needs are prioritized throughout all parts of policy development and process, and that we are centering them and the lived experiences of those folks and really working to close the gap between the values that we have and the lived experiences of people in communities.
And so some of those policies or priorities include the Gender Justice Project, the elevation of community voices and solutions, The Community Legal Systems Project, which is connected to jail usage and monitoring and increasing accountability.
And then lastly, the SMC Chapter 14 review.
This really centers around ordinance analysis and the fortification of that review.
The third body of work that I'm sharing with you today is our Race and Social Justice Initiative.
And this body of work that comes from our Race and Social Justice Initiative for 2022 is going to center and continue to focus really around three primary areas.
That's engagement, convening, and outcomes.
And so this Our priorities for 2022 are really focused on relationship building for sustainable change.
And so I'm gonna talk a little bit about each of these three areas.
The first being engagement.
We recognize the importance of being able to connect again with both internal and external stakeholders.
And one of the ways that that happens is through trainings.
RSJI provides foundational and advanced racial equity training using tools like race, the power of an illusion, and internalized racial oppression.
There are events that happen, like the RSJI Summit and the MLK Unity Day.
The RSJI Summit is a gathering for the City of Seattle staff who advocate for racial equity.
It typically includes keynote speakers, panel discussions featuring city staff, as well as community organizers, and interactive workshops.
The past two years, the summit has been virtual due to the pandemic, and event recordings have been shared out with the public of those events.
Lastly, it's the website that RSJI has been in the process of developing and continuing to produce more content, content that intentionally spotlights the racial equity work that's happening inside the city of Seattle.
Chair Merrilees, With the goal really to be able to incite and inspire city employees and to be able to develop trust with the city of Seattle and the surrounding communities.
Chair Merrilees, Excuse me, director wheeler Smith, it looks like Council member Strauss has a question.
Director Wheeler Smith, Thank you, thank you chair, thank you director wheeler Smith.
I really enjoyed this presentation.
I have a question about the RSJI engagement and training citywide.
Is my understanding that your department is charged with providing the staffing for RSJI trainings across all city departments, or do each city department have their own staff to help you accomplish this work?
My understanding is that we basically staff the entire city but part of the role is mentioned really here in this um you know second priority around our work which is convening um because as you can imagine that's it's a huge undertaking to be able to support uh all of this work and and to be able to do it with um fidelity and to really think through strategically what it means and looks like for us to be able to institutionalize the work.
And so with that said, there are great folks who are also engaged in this work, but they're doing it from a volunteer base in terms of being able to support their different departments.
Is there anything that, Cadman, you would add that I missed?
I think you're right, Derek, in everything you said.
I think the only thing I would add is that our RSGI team is not that big.
And so while they would, I think, like to provide training citywide and they do it in some larger training sessions, it really, as Derek said, is incumbent on these change teams and these departments to support capacity building to get some of those more targeted trainings done.
So while the RSGI team is in charge of kind of leading efforts for citywide trainings, it really to do this well requires each department to also pitch in like Derek said.
And I'll just add on top of that, that the folks who do that work within each department do that work on top of whatever their regular duties are.
They don't get extra compensation or really any other recognition.
They just get more work.
So it's important to understand that their capacity is limited.
And in my mind, that reflects our need to...
commit to really doing this work well if we are expecting different outcomes in our departments.
Thank you, Chair.
Just to piggyback on that, and my apologies, Director Wheeler-Smith and Cabinet, I should have led with a statement rather than a leading question.
I just want to highlight the fact that we have six people on your team that are responsible for an entire city's worth of work.
that is then based upon the back of volunteerism on top of everyday duties for their job.
And so if we truly want to take this work seriously, we need to invest in the people and the budget to get this work done.
And it's just something that I've seen time and time again.
We want to do this work.
Departments want to do this work.
And there's just not enough capacity because it's resting on a very small team that is hardworking, dedicated in getting things done for our city to the best of their ability.
I just wanted to take this moment to thank you for that work.
Thank you, Cadman, and your entire team.
We've got six people doing a lot of work.
Thank you, Council Member Strauss, for the question, and thank you for those, just for the accurate words that you're sharing right now.
I am all about having high expectations, but I believe we want to make sure that we have the kind of support that matches those expectations.
And so to your point, salute to the amazing folks who are holding that work, those six folks.
We're actually short right now.
It's not even totally six.
We've got to hire some positions in that department.
And we're excited to do that and look forward to being able to add some folks to that team.
um but yes so even with six right there they're understaffed but but yet doing uh amazing work so uh thank you chair for pausing me to make sure that i got that question and feel free to continue to interrupt as i might miss uh any hands that may go up um so lastly or secondly i'll talk a little bit about the convene uh and the work that has to happen in terms of being a convener And some of that has to do with capacity.
I think that that has to be a part of the work in terms of being a convener.
But when you've only got five or six folks, that is really primarily where you have to sit.
But I think it would be important for us to build a capacity because so delicately we need these folks to not just be able to be on the balcony, but really to be able to get down in the weeds and be able to support our city departments as they're working on the implementation of these different plans and strategies.
And so really, these six folks have been gathering City of Seattle employees to collaborate, mobilize, and heal.
And that work primarily happens through the change teams.
There's monthly meetings with citywide change team colleagues who share knowledge and discuss how to take collective action for racial equity.
There are also equity leads, what's known as equity leads.
And these equity leads uh is something that the team plans to restart regular meetings for um for some of the equity leads in the city to help align each department's equity goals and then there's the work that happens around caucuses rsji helps to facilitate city-wide race-based caucuses to encourage belonging and healing for the different groups who can caucus and have capacity to engage and hold space for one another Lastly, it's the outcomes that this team is focused on for 2022. And that really is about implementing race and social justice into the city of Seattle's work and really being able to do that.
And there's a couple of ways.
And one is through the RET, the Racial Equity Toolkit.
The departments are responsible.
Each city department is responsible for submitting an annual racial equity toolkit And there are summary reports to OCR.
There's technical assistance that's provided to these department RETs.
And again, just thinking about that and capacity and what it really means to be able to lean in to this work.
And I think it's so important to continue to build capacity because we definitely don't want our work to show up as decoration or as tokenism, but we really want to be able to lean in.
And it's going to mean being able to increase accountability and reduce, I think, some of the discretion around these plans and how we're executing around them.
There's the work with the CBO, the City Budget Office.
RSJI will continue to partner with CBO to integrate racial equity into citywide budgeting policies and procedures.
We believe that our budget is a moral document.
And so how does that budget align with our said values?
And then, of course, the data analytics and racial equity, also known as DARE.
RSJI convenes departmental data analysts, and that work is really to ensure that data is used equitably by the City of Seattle.
Lastly, our Community Investments Division.
Actually, it's not last, because I believe we have our Civil Rights Commission.
But our community investments division is the newest division that I've mentioned earlier.
And we have here our 2022 priorities for this division.
The history of our community investment division really all comes from community efforts.
So I think oftentimes we could be moving so fast that we don't pause, I think, to recognize the historical context, right?
And so we definitely want to make sure that we don't get amnesia around that and recognize the great work happening in community that created and caused some of these shifts intentionally in how we function and move and create and respect to the adaptive leadership of the previous director, Marco, and team to be able to make these pivots in partnership with community.
One of the things that we're all aware of is the participatory budget.
And there is a known as PB and the PB award announcement is going to be upcoming.
There is a third party administrator that we are excited to be partnering with the participatory budgeting project based out of New York and Oakland.
And they're currently leading uh some work right here uh in our backyard with uh the king county with some with some folks in king county uh and helping them navigate their pv process folks right here in uh skyway and so um i think that provides a great opportunity um you know for us to be able to learn uh and find out some of the things that have been working um and where there might be opportunities and things for us to learn and build on with our folks right here in King County who are engaged already in this process and ahead of us.
And so that provides us an opportunity to have some great thought partnership.
There's the 2021 collective network funding.
That's a little over 1 million and that is a continuation of the 2020 collaborative grant making process.
And we are currently preparing actually to release the 2022 RFP And there were two awardees.
There's the Liberation Medicine School.
And they'll be looking at it's a, you know, 500,000 over two years.
So it's 250K actually a year.
And then there's the Lavender Rights Project, who also will receive that 250K over the next two years.
Right.
Just taking a look to make sure there were no questions.
And then lastly, our Civil Rights Commission.
Our SOCAR, Seattle Office of Civil Rights, staffs actually the city's four civil rights commissions.
Those commissions are the Seattle Disability Commission, the Seattle Human Rights Commission, the Seattle LGBTQ Commission, as well as the Seattle Women's Commission.
These trainings that are being offered in support of these commissions are really designed to ensure that our commissioners and said teams and volunteers and the folks who are involved in these commissions have the tools, the guidance, and the support necessary and needed to be successful advisors, if you will, to the city.
The city, through a collaboration with Seattle IT, as well as the Office for Civil Rights, will also be providing these four commissions with the first in-city resources this year.
team sites where commissions will be able to utilize city tools with the goal to communicate with each other and really to create a centralized hub to perform their work as city commissioners.
This helps really to alleviate some of the pressures of finding collaborative workspaces felt by the commissions and allows the city to have easier access to commission documents for public disclosure purposes.
And we believe that to be important because transparency is so important.
And so we want to create processes and systems that allow us to be as transparent as possible, whether we're engaging from the grassroots to grass tops.
And so that's a commitment from our office.
Any questions?
Thank you so much, Director Wheeler-Smith.
Trial by fire, this is how you do it.
Just jump right in and share what you're doing.
So I've got a few questions.
So I'll get started and then colleagues, if you've got questions about what we heard today, please raise your hand and I'll call on you.
THE FIRST THING I WANT TO COMMENT ON IS PARTICIPATORY BUDGETING.
THAT WAS OBVIOUSLY A BIG PART OF WHAT MY OFFICE HAS BEEN ADVOCATING FOR AND TRYING TO SUPPORT FOR THE LAST COUPLE YEARS.
I THINK YOU'RE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT.
GIVEN THAT WE HAD ONE RESPONDENT TO THE RFP, IT IS THE NATIONAL PB PROJECT, AND THEY ARE ALREADY HERE IN KING COUNTY WORKING WITH THE COUNTY ON THEIR PROJECT.
I think it's a great opportunity since they're a little bit ahead of us to learn from what they're experiencing.
They are in the process with their community investment budget committee.
in the, I think they're in the idea collection phase, or maybe they're just in the education phase, but the county has $10 million that they will be using in, I think it's five unincorporated areas, Skyway, White Center, Highline, I don't remember all the areas, but that work has begun and it's exciting that the county is also interested in this work and is really supportive of the idea of trying to share power with communities.
So this division over the last couple of years, we've talked as a council about how to democratize access to power, especially for black and brown neighbors.
And I think this division is part of part of that effort.
It's new.
Part of the work here is to build capacity of community organizations so that as we talk about shifting resources, shifting toward community-based alternatives to whether it's community safety or anything else, that we are starting the work of building capacity in these organizations.
So I'm very excited about that.
I wonder if we could go back to slide 10, to the previous slide.
So, hmm.
Maybe I misnumbered.
Anyway, so I wanted to talk a little bit about the RSJI work and just kind of highlight some of the really important lessons from that work that have led to equitable development, work that came out of the RSJI programming and support in the city led to the ban the box legislation of now Mayor Harrell to protect former felons from being excluded from housing opportunities.
It's led to a commitment on behalf of the city to work with schools to end the school to prison pipeline.
So, you know, those are just a few examples of what this work can lead to in terms of how as a city we operate, whether internally or with community.
And I think we do a good job of using the information to inform policymaking.
What I would like to hear more about, and I don't know if Cadman wants to comment or maybe this is a follow-up discussion, but I think how we use this to inform internal city operations is going to be really important.
We've talked a little bit about basically the culture shift that we are trying to make within our city departments so that we don't have allegations about any sort of discrimination from our city workers.
So I wonder if Director Wheeler or maybe Cadman about how we examine implementing an RSJI ordinance.
I know there's been some discussion about that.
I'm going to invite our policy director, Cadman, to speak to that.
So what I'll share is that I've heard from the RSJ network a real desire to somehow figure out a way to legislate some of the RSJ work so that there is continuity beyond each change in administration.
And so there's clarity around what RSGI does.
As we alluded to earlier, so much of the work of RSGI is really incumbent on departments supporting this work, making sure that their staff have time to give to it.
And so how do we create citywide expectations and accountability so that departments can continue growing the capacity to do RSGI work?
Thank you.
I would add that my hope is that too, we could make the kinds of shifts that moves this also out of being an initiative.
Yeah.
I think that that will bode well to our commitment to recognizing that this is a stabilized component that I really wouldn't call a part of our work, but I think has to sit at the center of our work.
It should be embedded in how we move and how we function and how as a city we move away from what I would call, I think we talk about having like a racial equity lens.
I wonder if we could get like a racial equity LASIK, right?
Like lenses can be taken off.
I can't see right now, but I can decide like when I want to put these on.
And so how do we ensure that in every facet of how we function and how we move, that these considerations are embedded into our thought processes and drive the ways in which we engage each other, which I think is really just about centering humanity and recognizing it's important that we treat each other with the respect and dignity that each of us deserve.
Yeah, thank you very much for that.
I appreciate it.
And this is work that's really important to me.
I think it's really important to all of us, especially as we're trying to move forward to dismantle some of the systems, whether we're talking about land use or housing or education or transportation.
This is at the center of all of those changes that we're talking about wanting to make.
And so each of our departments needs to understand what that means so that as we move forward with policy planning, programming, and even internal operations, it's really clear what the North Star is for this work.
um so i wonder if we could go to slide eight um uh well you were talking about um you know some of the some of the work which slide is that uh the civil rights enforcement um i'm really happy to hear that you've resolved the backlog uh in cases i know that's a few years old um and i know that last year the investigations team um was if I'm not mistaken, found evidence of discrimination in nearly twice as many cases compared to previous years.
So I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the kind of cases that you're hearing and then talk a little bit about the different options for resolution, because you mentioned mediation.
And I think it's important for colleagues and for the public to understand kind of what steps are available to folks who are filing complaints?
Yes, I'm going to invite Kevin in a second.
I think she might be able to speak a little more to this.
One of the in terms of, I should say, you know, where we're where we're witnessing or seeing kind of an increase in cases.
One of the places that there has been an increase has been in COVID related cases, workplace, accommodations, things of that nature.
There's definitely been an increase there.
In terms of opportunities for resolution, I think one of the things that has been huge is with our resolution department has been kind of the opportunity to provide folks with, you know, conflict resolution coaching and the kind of conflict resolution coaching really that centers around an opportunity for restorative justice and for folks to actually go through a pre-charge mediation process, if you will.
And there's been a tremendous amount of success with this program and with not having to have, you know, folks go through the entire process.
I think oftentimes what people want are just to find a way to get the issue resolved.
And I believe that this is a much more humane way of actually engaging with each other because it brings folks together and to collectively resolve the issue, figuring out what's going to work for both parties and really being able to kind of own different ways that folks have been harmed and talking about how we can move forward to heal and to resolve the conflict or issues Is there anything, Katmyn, that you would add to?
I don't think so.
I think you did a good job providing that overview and the move away from just providing traditional investigations but other opportunities to resolve conflict when parties are at an impasse.
Thank you.
okay colleagues I think I kind of went through my questions are there other questions comments folks want to make about what we heard today not seeing anything councilmember Nelson I thought I had heard you said you might have some questions are we I'm gonna make sure I'm not calling this short before you have a chance.
Okay.
Okay, thank you.
um very good well uh derek i want to thank you uh director wheeler smith um cabman thanks so much for being here um again i just want to thank you for the work that you're doing um you know whether it is work out in community to build capacity to support neighbors who are filing complaints because of their belief that they've been discriminated against or really doing the very important work of helping us as a city move toward um you know being actively anti-racist in our own policies and in our own internal operations i think the work that this department is doing is critical and i really appreciate all that uh all that the team is doing to to hold the city accountable too for the values and principles that we say we have um so thank you very much i look forward to working with you working with the executive to support the rsj network strategies so that we can continue working on dismantling institutional racism within the city um i don't see any other questions so in that case the next committee meeting for us oh shoot I don't have my calendar up March 25th 9 30 a.m with that we are adjourned thanks everybody have a good day bye recording stopped