photo by: City of Lawrence

The Lawrence City Commission heard an update about goals related to arts, culture and inclusivity at its Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2023 meeting.

To get a better idea of how Lawrence is progressing in its arts, culture and inclusivity goals, city staff says it will need to get more feedback from the community, including bigger surveys and new ways of tracking how many people attend community events.

At its meeting Tuesday, the Lawrence City Commission got an update about the “Unmistakable Identity” goal in the city’s strategic plan. To see how well it’s doing on that goal, the city intends to measure three “progress indicators”: the percentage of residents who have attended an event in the past year; the percentage of Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) residents rating the community as welcoming; and the percentage of residents who believe their culture is celebrated in the community.

But the presentation from city staff on Tuesday said that right now, only the third indicator has data that’s solid enough to track. The presentation said that in a survey about the goal areas, 40.7% of Lawrence residents said their culture is celebrated in the community, and the city’s goal is to get that number to 60%.

Kalenna Coleman, organizational equity coordinator with the city’s Equity and Inclusion team, said there was some preliminary data on whether the community was welcoming for BIPOC residents, but that the data wasn’t statistically valid yet and that staff was working to get a larger pool of responses. Specifically, Coleman said the survey data was filtered to capture nonwhite respondents, resulting in a sample size of 332 people. Of those, 69.7% said they were “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with how welcoming Lawrence is; Coleman said the goal for that indicator was 75%.

Even though there was little concrete data available, commissioners seemed happy with the work city staff was doing to get more feedback.

“This is promising,” Commissioner Amber Sellers said. “I think we have some ways to go, of course, but I like what this team is bringing in front of us, and they’re challenging themselves in that capacity.”

Sellers said the numbers on whether the community was welcoming, while not statistically valid, were a “good incremental start.” She said she’d also like to see more detailed statistics about how nonwhite people of different ages and gender identities felt about the city. That way, she said the city could do a better job of tailoring events to more specific cultural backgrounds.

Future data-tracking efforts, according to the presentation from staff, might include developing a methodology to track attendance at events and offering something like an “exit survey” for attendees to rate their experiences.

The city’s strategic plan was adopted in 2020, and in addition to arts and culture, it focuses on four other goal areas: strong and welcoming neighborhoods, safety and security, prosperity and economic security, and functional and efficient infrastructure.