Olympia City Council approves resolution to be more inclusive
The Olympia City Council continued its push to be more inclusive for all communities on Tuesday evening, adopting a resolution to recognize injustice and harm against Black, Indigenous, People of Color, Transgender and Non-Binary people.
“We know we are undeserving,” said Olympia Mayor Cheryl Selby. “We just don’t know how much we are undeserving this community.”
Part of the purpose of this resolution is to make sure the new Social Justice and Equity Advisory Committee, previously called a Human Rights Commission, also focuses on serving the needs of BIPOC transgender and non-binary people.
City Manager Jay Burney worked with Gender Justice League, Heartspark Press and Mercy Kariuki-McGee with Amplified Voices of Olympia to draft the resolution. Both Tobi Hill-Meyer, co-executive director at Gender Justice League and Amy Heart, co-executive director at Heartspark Press addressed the council Tuesday evening.
“I know this will have a concrete and significant difference in Trans people’s lives,” Hill-Meyer said. “... We look forward to working with you and continuing to push. … I’m really optimistic that this can make a really powerful difference.”
Heart said that when she and others addressed the council last year that two of her friends, both Black trans women, were harassed for months after.
“There needs to be real change that’s measured so that this time next year I’ll look back and go ‘This is worth my time and my sisters might have a chance at living in this town,’” Heart said. “Right now they don’t.”
The city will also begin tracking data regarding people’s gender identity to make city hiring more inclusive and to make sure people in that demographic are getting adequate access to city services.
“I was really glad to see that they are really asking for data, that we start tracking these marginalized populations whenever we do any of our survey work,” Selby said. “That is something that we’ve missed.”
The city hires outside firms to conduct surveys and polls, administering them every three to five years, Selby said. The surveys have demographics that they track, but have not previously tracked BIPOC transgender and non-binary people’s responses as a demographic.
“That’s something that is super low-hanging fruit that we can do immediately,” Selby said.
The resolution also includes a provision that the city will provide its staff and contractors with access to “comprehensive workplace diversity training that includes gender identity, transgender equality, implicit bias, and the intersectionality of race and disability.”
“A lot of this work was ongoing before the murder of George Floyd that brought the whole country’s attention to the Black Lives Matter movement in a bigger, broader way,” Selby said. “... While we are looking at all these other examples of racial inequity and oppression of marginalized people, this is a group that really doesn’t get enough attention.”