 Thank you for joining us this afternoon for a very exciting announcement. I am pleased to be joined this afternoon by Kim Carson, who I am appointing to the position of Director of Racial Equity, Inclusion and Belonging and who I hope will be confirmed by the City Council next Monday night. Since creating the position within the administration in the fall of 2019, the REIB department has gone through tremendous growth and taken on numerous critical initiatives to advance equity within our local government and throughout the Burlington community. Before telling you more about Kim and next steps, I want to first recognize Acting Director Pitt Kiamanavan, where Pitt go, here she is, and the whole REIB team for their work through this extended transition period. Pitt stepped forward at a really important and challenging time for the community, before the city and provided department focus and leadership and the REIB team really stepped up and pushed forward many critical initiatives over the last six months, including hosting the second annual Juneteenth celebration hosted by the City of Burlington, continuing to implement the first-ever city-wide racial equity training for all city employees and many other ways, including as we heard just the last time the City Council met moving forward the work of the reparations task force. With their skill and dedication and with Kim's leadership, I am confident that REIB is well equipped to continue the urgent work of ending racial disparities and fostering a sense of belonging in Burlington for all. Let me say a little bit more about Kim. So she comes to the city team from Iowa, where she has most recently served as the director of education and human capital development for the Iowa Judicial Branch. What that means is that in her position she led the judicial education and professional development for nearly 2,000 employees and provided strategic leadership for diversity and equity initiatives across the agency. Kim brings extensive experience to the role of REIB director in training and social justice advocacy and an organizational cultural change. Before her work in her career in the judiciary, I think a really interesting aspect of Kim's background is that she worked as a collegiate track and field coach in Iowa and for USA track and field. This comes after a long successful athletic career in her own right where she was inducted into the LSU Athletic Hall of Fame and competed at the 1996 US Olympic trials. In my early conversations with Kim, she made it clear that that background as well as her professional work in the judiciary had made her a professional that greatly values teamwork. When I brought forward the creation of this position in my 2019 budget proposal, it was with a vision that to advance rapidly on racial equity issues, we needed an apartment focused on that issue. We had tried to do this work in other ways and we had decided by that time in 2019 that we needed the focus of having a department. At the same time, we knew that that department simultaneously needs to infuse the values of racial justice and equity across all the city's initiatives, efforts and management. Creating a department with such a broad and critical mandate is a major challenge. I am very excited to be bringing forward for confirmation an individual in Kim Carson who possesses the skills, education, training, work experience and values to succeed in this key leadership role. Thank you Kim for joining the city team. I'm looking forward to working together and very excited to hear stuff like that. First I just want to say thank you and since I came here for my interview and throughout this process, I just feel a sense of overwhelmingly feeling belonging and welcomeness here. From the people on the committee to just the everyday citizen that has spent time talking to me when I ask them a billion questions about being here, it's just a community that I feel like is very prime and open for this work and to come here. I'm at the point in my career where I can really choose where I want to be and what I want to do and I chose Burlington. And so I'm moving me and my family here. So I'm really, really excited to be a part of the Burlington community. I'll be living in Burlington, my child. My son will be going to school in Burlington and hopefully next fall my daughter to University of Vermont. So I'm here and committed to not just the community and this job but also becoming a Burlingtonian, I think is how you say it, long term. I have no desire to move and my son specifically told me he's going to middle school next year and that is not the time to change. So we're here to stay. Thank you. We'd be happy to answer a few questions if you have any. All right, good idea. So you know what? It's a sign of your commitment to the area, Kimberly, here say a Burlington flag pin here. And here, yeah, pin it on me. All right, there we go. Thank you. Thank you. Great spontaneous idea, George. Oh, it's one of the minor. I miss that too. I see. All right. You know, best late plans. It's, you know, I feel when it comes off the mayoral up how it's, you know, it's got an extra special flag. We'd be happy to answer some questions. Yeah. So we have kept most of the positions that were, that had been opened. We've kept them open so that Kim can build her own team. We have moved forward towards hiring a new manager to lead the public health equity work. And I know we had a finalist interview recently. Maybe I'm not sure if we have a commitment on that one. We will be announcing a hire there, but I believe all the other positions we have kept open for Kim to be able to fill. I don't want to add anything to the pit in terms of exactly what the current staffing is. Yes. Currently, we still have a couple of our facilitators and we have Blaine at Tensei, who is our strategic manager. We just hired a new administrative staff. So we're excited about that to help us coordinate our financials. And a public engagement, a public health equity manager will be starting with us soon. And like the mayor said, that we definitely in knowing that we're going to have a new director want to keep that open for Kim to vision out how she wants to move the department. At 14, yes. There's five. Yeah. So first of all, the search was headed up by Karen Derphe, our HR director. And Karen, do you want to talk about the process? Sure. I think we have some members of the search committee here today. Patrick Brown, Louis Cauldron, Kara Al-Naswari. We thought it was really important to have internal representation. Folks that couldn't make it because this is kind of what they'll ask. You know, we asked everybody to be here. We had a panel of about 13 people. I think out of all the people, all the interviews we had, we had about six applicants that made it through to the final round. And Kim was our last applicant. Any other questions? Six. No, there was, I think five made it to the final round. It was five. We had five interviews and two internal candidates. So, all right. I think the press release has the full committee that participate in the process. Yes. I'm initiated in the city. There's been a fair amount of turnover. And I believe there was some criticism from certain council members and the FIPOC community about how the last director left. And I was wondering if you could talk about how you're committed or what you're willing to do. Yeah. So, what Burlington has been trying to do for a long time, but with extra emphasis, I would say since 2019, is ensure that Burlington is a city that is welcoming, inclusive, that has a sense of belonging for all. We want that for the city as an organization. We want that for the community as a whole. We're committed to working towards it. I think there are few communities, few small cities in the country that have made anything like the commitment that we have made to this as a city since 2019 and then 2020 when we have dramatically expanded our investments in this area. Taisha Green served for almost two years and had a very impactful tenure here. And there's many aspects of her work that will positively impact the city for years to come. She fortunately chose to move back to Minneapolis. I tried hard to avoid that outcome. But she is no longer with us. The commitment remains. We have passed in this year's budget. We have continued to commit nearly $2 million to racial equity and inclusion. And I am confident that Kim, after a period of assessment and working with the existing REIB staff, working with the administration and the city council, will create a vision for moving forward from here that will be very impactful and successful. Areas that I know will be within that vision, because Kim and I have talked about it, we are going to certainly continue the internal work that we've made substantial progress on in recent years of creating a culture and a workplace that is very culturally competent, committed to racial equity and belonging. It has been a little more than two years since we declared racism a public health emergency right here. There was very impactful work done in the wake of that, ensuring that we had a racially just and equitable response to the pandemic and to the economic recovery. I think some of the best work the department has done is in those areas. And we know that we now need to carry that ethic and that success into all of the social determinants of health. And we're excited for that work. A third major area, which again I know will be part of our focus going forward, and then I'm very committed to, I think all of you know how much I talk about and focus on housing. I think it is the heart of a lot of our social challenges. We know that within that broad challenge of the housing shortage we have serious racial disparities, particularly in black home ownership. And I am excited about working with Kim and the team to finally, we've been talking about this for some time and I'm eager to bring forward a black home ownership initiative that builds on some of the recent policy work at the state level. So we're as committed and well resourced for this work as ever and I'm excited that we found the right leader to take the work forward from here. Okay, if there's nothing further, thank you all for being here. Again, Kim, thank you. We'll see you all on Monday night.