Public equity

Tukwila adopts internal tools to help employees realize council-adopted equity goals.

By Laura Furr Mericas

In December 2017, the City of Tukwila’s council adopted Resolution 1921, a.k.a. the Equity Policy, an ordinance outlining Tukwila’s commitment to equal access and six goals to improve equity and inclusion in the community. In 2019, the city established the Equity Policy Implementation Committee, known as EPIC, to help city leaders put the tenets of the policy into everyday practices big or small. According to Niesha Fort-Brooks, Tukwila’s community engagement manager, the purpose of the policy is to provide guidance to city elected officials, staff, and stakeholders on how the city will promote equitable access to opportunities and services.

“The policy is the North Star,” says Fort-Brooks, who leads EPIC and notes that this year’s priorities include providing equity training for city staff, improving communications about the city’s equity and inclusion work, and continuing to improve city hiring practices (previous initiatives have included résumé masking—obscuring information revealing an applicant’s racial, ethnic, and/or sexual identity—and requiring new hires to watch an anti-bias video).

In addition to those initiatives, the committee is focused on developing an Equity Tool Kit and creating an outreach guide for equitable community engagement. Through the work of subcommittees within EPIC, the city is developing an Outreach Wizard and Matrix, which surveys employees about projects or initiatives they are working on, then provides a checklist outlining targeted outreach to be conducted at various stages to make sure a variety of community voices are represented.

A final component of the tool kit is an Equitable Outreach Guide, which will outline resources employees can turn to when conducting outreach. EPIC plans to present the final versions of these tools later this year to the city council for review. Once approved, subcommittee members will then roll out the tool kit and guide on a citywide tour to every department, including boards and commissions. In the meantime, a few city departments have already begun testing the tool kit, including the Parks & Recreation Department, which used the tools to help guide outreach for the proposed Tukwila Teen and Senior Center, currently under review.

“Our goal was to reach out and talk to people in the community who are not typically a part of a process like this,” explains Nate Robinson, a member of EPIC who specializes in working with teens in the Tukwila community. Based on guidance from EPIC’s Outreach Wizard and Matrix, the department hosted 73 community engagement meetings with groups of up to 40, including individuals identified as “community champions,” conducting surveys and eliciting feedback on site placement and other specifics related to the project.

“By and large, we got amazing feedback from the community,” Robinson says. But another key to EPIC’s successful test run, adds Robinson, was involvement from members of every department of every tenure—from directors to specialists and everyone in between.

“All these things create opportunities for folks within the organization to engage with equity,” he says. “I feel like there’s momentum that’s being built.”

For more information: tukwilawa.gov