Mt. Lebanon Commissioners Mindy Ranney and Leann Foster along with the municipality’s Community Relations Board (CRB) put together an Ad-hoc Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) committee over the winter in response to pressure from M.O.R.E and other community members supporting the Black Lives Matter movement. The Ad-hoc DEI committee has four (4) working groups each with their own focus on “taking positive steps forward on diversity, equity and inclusion issues in Mt. Lebanon”. Their working groups are:
- Community Awareness and Building
- Diversity in Boards and Hiring
- Police Engagement
- DEI Recognition, Event Planning, and Incident Response
You can read more about them all in this document from the CRB, including details on each groups’ goal(s), input, and intended outcomes.
In December, we were assured that an effort would be made to have people of color make up the majority membership of this committee. If they couldn’t do that, they were explicit in telling us that they’d “go back to the drawing board” and try again. The roster was published in January on Mt. Lebanon’s website, and over 80% of their committee members are white. Considering their first terms are set until January 2022, it doesn’t look like they’ll be redoing the recruitment process. Even if the CRB’s efforts for putting together a diverse committee failed, it does not seem like they’re planning to rectify it.
This begs the question, what does Mt. Lebanon believe the diversity, equity, and inclusion issues even are? Their DEI committee was made specifically to “reflect as many viewpoints as possible” but this doesn’t seem actually possible when the overwhelming majority lived experiences is white privilege. Perhaps this committee is diverse in other ways but that is yet to be seen.
It appears that Mt Lebanon’s goal was to create working groups made up of minorities to actually listen and learn from them, but have decided almost immediately that it was too hard to find or convince minorities to accept committee seats (we will look at why this was challenging in a later article). Hopefully, these working groups will create focus groups with this purpose in mind and lead some safe-space listening sessions and community conversations. As we all know, the first step in solving problems is to identify them.
I’m sure the Community Building working group will create some beautiful stickers to spread awareness but we want more than awareness. We want acceptance. We want justice. We want real social change. M.O.R.E wants these working groups to be successful and not just tick some boxes to say the municipality tried, which is why we intend on working in a supportive role with the members of this committee. Let’s go Lebo!
