photo by: City of Lawrence

City of Lawrence Director of Equity and Inclusion Farris Muhammad discusses the city's equity efforts as part of the City Commission's meeting on Feb. 8, 2022.

The city’s first director of equity and inclusion told city leaders Tuesday that advancing equity would be a collective process that went beyond the city office and involved the community.

As part of its meeting Tuesday, the Lawrence City Commission received a presentation from Farris Muhammad, who has been in his position with the city since November 2020. As part of the presentation, which the commission recently requested, Muhammad discussed some of the city’s current and upcoming equity and inclusion efforts.

Muhammad said that as part of a collective impact approach to advancing equity, he’s been making many community and organizational connections to get a more accurate and honest view of the city as an organization and the community as a whole. He said he’s been making those connections using the framework that advancing equity is everyone’s responsibility.

“Not just an equity director, or not just the city, or not just various advocacy groups,” Muhammad said. “So I’ve been exploring ways we can foster better synergy throughout our organization and community at large.”

Muhammad considers both internal and external equity and inclusion issues as part of his position, meaning those related to how the city interacts with the community and issues related to the city’s nearly 900-member staff. He said one way the city was working on equity internally as an organization was through the city’s various teams that are working across departments to address equity and other goals laid out in the city’s strategic plan.

Equity and inclusion is one of six commitments in the plan, meaning it will be one of the considerations as the city seeks to make progress on the five goal areas established by the plan. The plan comprises goals related to arts and culture; strong and welcoming neighborhoods; safety and security; prosperity and economic security; and infrastructure and transportation.

Muhammad said he believed the city’s strategic plan was designed to address equity and inclusion at the system and structure level. He went through various “progress indicators” in the strategic plan that address equity and inclusion and discussed how those indicators would be used to collect baseline data and measure progress.

The city will be collecting data related to equity and inclusion as it relates to each of the five goal areas. For example, the city will look at several data points and how they vary by race, including median income, the perception of safety, and the percentage of residents who rate the community as welcoming. Other data points include the percentage of women- and minority-owned businesses; the percentage of households spending more than 30% of their income on housing; and the percentage of residential units within a half mile of a school or library, city green space, and a city walking/biking trail, among other data.

When it comes to the external part of the city’s equity work, Muhammad said he’s had meetings with different organizations, such as the Lawrence branch of the NAACP and the Lawrence Juneteenth Committee, as well as different marginalized groups in the community. He said he’s been having lots of conversations to get a better representation of how those groups see and rate the community in different ways when it comes to issues of equity and inclusion.

Going forward, there will also be a second member of city staff who is fully dedicated to the city’s equity and inclusion work. Muhammad said Kalenna Coleman started as the city’s organizational equity coordinator on Monday.

Funding for that position was approved as part of the 2022 budget. The position will help with the design and implementation of the city’s equity and inclusion initiatives; equity and inclusion training; organizational development; and leadership training for city employees, according to the position description.

Commissioners said they appreciated the work Muhammad has been doing for the city and what he’s bringing to the community.

In other business, commissioners received a presentation from LiveWell Douglas County regarding the group’s youth tobacco prevention efforts. Commissioners expressed interest in LiveWell’s proposal to create a tobacco retail license that would increase the age of sale for tobacco products, including vapes and e-cigarettes, to 21, and ordinance changes that would add e-cigarettes to indoor smoking bans. City legal staffers said they could bring forward a proposed timeline for when those discussions could occur as part of the commission’s meeting March 1.