 So, if you think that we're only having an influence here, you're quite mistaken, because what we do here is going to have a tremendous effect as examples to others. And at the state of the city, which I think is four of us, or at some time they would not operate at night, with a table of police commanders, and I asked for a hand up, and it was for our own protection. I can give some morality to those commanders, and he said it was a little of both, but just so you know, there are eyes on us, but not eyes on us saying what are you going to do, but eyes on us saying we need some help and we need your guidance. So once again, people are looking towards us, people may be looking towards us in a political manner, but I know all of us are looking towards ourselves in a moral manner. So I think that is the more important thing, because if we act in a moral manner, the politics will follow us no matter what we decide. Thank you all for being here. You're inside both the heart as well as the moral compass. This morning and every time, you will be in your homes, and within your homes as well. Thank you. I said I didn't have anything to say, but 50 could be a better microphone. No, I don't know what's already been said. Believe it or not, a number of people are running to each week to say, how are things coming to pass for us? How are things coming to pass for us? How are things coming to pass for us? How are things coming to pass for us? I think some people are interested. Some of them are, many of us were in the beginning, still a little apprehensive about what we're doing, not sure that we're on the right track. But I've been glad to report to them that I think we're doing great work, and frankly, we're doing a lot better than I thought we'd be doing by this time in our process. I really believe that. If I didn't, I wouldn't say it. Of course, we've still got a lot of work to do. Additional help will get there, I think. So, we'll enjoy this day and come away with something that we can use in the future. And I just want to echo what our co-chairs have said. You know, first of all, thank you all for taking the time, just taking this committee, but taking the time to be here with us today. We are going to make some admissions because I know some people have to leave early, so we're going to try to be out at three o'clock. And I know we can do that because with all of you here, there's so much strength in this room and so much experience that I know that we can accomplish what we're looking to do today. And I really appreciate that. So next on the agenda is Andrew Tucker. So, Andrew? These are the co-chairs and all of you present while we're going to start off a Monday morning. Look, echoing what has been said, thank you for your commitment, engagement of your head and your heart and your hands and feet because you've been moving. As we looked at designing this day, a public and urgent agenda aligned with the stated agenda, which the public knows. So we're not deviating from that, but we want the agenda always to be in service of you and not the other way around, that you feel captive to an original agenda. So you've got a lot of papers in front of you and there's an audio visual hookup and computer. I have an iPad, there's seven little pads and markers and people have laptops and phones. I'm going to invite you to take a breath because we're only going to use that as neat and we're being recorded. So we're only going to use that as needed. I'm already on the central part of the thing away from here so that we can be engaged here. I'm also going to invite you a few times throughout this morning to change your seats. I'm not going to make you do it, but I'm going to invite you to do it. So as the co-chairs looked at some objectives, let me just read very briefly, rather than putting it up there, just very briefly, won't come as a surprise. One, we want to continue to learn and commit to some practices in service of effectively addressing these difficult issues. We're going to open the morning in a way of inviting your voices around the difficult issues that you see. And we're fully engaging each of you as task force members and then on to engaging stakeholders throughout our community. Second, we want to develop a shared understanding and common definitions for advancing racial equity. Just saying racial equity doesn't do very much. Inviting your understanding around racial equity is how we began to frame something that works for Fort Worth. Third, understanding some promising best practices in other cities to enhance racial equity in light of the city of Fort Worth's cultural strengths, specific challenges, and specific opportunities. Again, we want to craft something that's going to emerge in the form of recommendations in the near future, but something that's responsive to Fort Worth. Identify opportunities to use a racial equity tool and data to drive results tailored to Fort Worth. You're already involved in a significant amount of that around disparities in each of the subcommittees. We're going to create some space for the subcommittees to get together and look specifically at the difficult issues and emerging recommendations from the subcommittee perspective. And then identify emerging issues that can be refined in the very near future. Alright, so I want to invite a reflection by each of you and then some conversation at your table. You've got some blank in this card that you don't have a tablet or something to write with. I want to invite you to kind of let go of some things. I think I've got a lot on your mind and your shoulders and in your heart. So a lot is going on. We have a lot of rules and tasks to play in it. The wrap I mentioned, this is very big. It's not just in our media present, but I'm from a global perspective as well. We're playing it hard. So I'm going to say if I can invite you, I feel a little stuck to this podium. I'm going to be my best to say it here. I'm sitting and wringing my hands and doing this on this front. So I'm okay? I'm going to wander a little bit. So there's some processes that we want to use. And the process is like the agenda. It's in service of fully engaging you. Whatever the recommendations might be from my perspective as a consultant, as I listen to the co-chairs, those recommendations need to have your hand print and heart print on them. Something that the task force can own fully. That's no small matter because y'all don't really agree upon everything. Y'all do a good job of agreeing and mass mostly. But I listen to you individually and you're not agreeing about everything. Which is great. If you were agreeing, I would be a little worried. How do you agree with everything your best friends say? So it's not about agreeing. It's about aligning. How many of you remember the metaphor we used at the beginning? About the elephant and the five blind men. Six blind men. It depends on what part of the country I'm in, whether it's five or six. Five doesn't work in some country. Six is odd and easy. So six blind men. Thank you, Reverend. Keeping that metaphor in mind, each of us, each of you have a perspective based on your lived experience, based upon what you cherish, what you value, how you see the world. We need that. We don't need you to let go of that. So it's not about agreeing. It's about aligning. How do we align our different perspectives to create some powerful recommendations? So here's the first question in reflection. Give you a few minutes to think about. I'll put them together. And then I'm going to invite you to talk about it with your table. You reasonably might want to invite someone from this table to join that table so we'll have three. Well, someone just came in. So you're welcome. Robert is here. So Robert, come on. Yeah. Whatever. There's some, you know, some equity. Some equity at the distribution of people at the table. And here I'm going to write, I'll put them up on the wall. But I'll just say the question. Let's see if they can resonate with you in a way that you can capture some of your ideas. You've been working in subcommittees. And part of the charge is to begin to frame some actionable items. That can become recommendations. Now being mindful of your subcommittee role and your experience and the whole task force and what you've been hearing, what you've been thinking, what you've been feeling. In light of all that, what are some possible recommendations already bubbling in you? Someone was to call you up and say, what are you thinking of possible recommendations from this task force might be? So give thought to your subcommission, but you're not limited to the subcommittee. You can reflect beyond that. And in particular, you've been serving for a while. What's really been connecting with you as you listen to the news and read the paper and have conversations. What are some recommendations that are bubbling in you? I think I will just give you that one question and let you work with that for a while. So I'm going to buy just a moment of silence because some of us can't really reflect if there's voices all around. So just a few minutes of silence and you don't have to do an essay on it. What's the tagline? What's the highlight? What's the recommendation? Just capture a few words and make that number one and go to number two. And see how many you might come up with. Okay. I want to invite you at each table. See if we can do this in about 15 minutes. Not a huge rush, but we'll see. Yeah. In about 15 minutes. Think about five minutes. Think about five minutes of work and invite every voice at the table to share what they've reflected on, just the bullet points. And feel free to add to that. Let's take just maybe about five minutes, five or six minutes to share. Making sure every voice has a turn. And then after that, and I'm not going to time you in the five minutes because we can go over a little bit. But after that, I want each table then to summarize potential recommendations and some difficult issues and questions on the flip-pad sheet. So get someone at each of your table who writes a print, reasonably legible. I know a few of you, so you cannot volunteer. You're not going to be able to read it from around the room. So any questions about that? Just going to share your reflections. And then after everybody has shared, kind of capture them as succinctly as you can. And then we're going to have a large room discussion on them so each can see what they're looking for. Go ahead. This will take us to a break. But let's kind of get a sense of the reflections and thoughts at each table using the flip-pad sheet as a kind of a catalyst on inviting the two... Well, I'll do it. I'll keep it simple. Who wants to start and just take a minute or two to talk over what you've written and then invite your fellow members at the table any comments you want to add to that. And then we're going to open up to the whole room. Okay. We want to just go through everything you have. Powerbrokers as a history of norms that exhibit values that have resulted in a serious and marginalized community through what I was talking about. I mean, all recommendations that powerbrokers and city officials have to have a company to examine their own biases and privilege as they go into reading our report. So they are willing to be open to doing that before they read the first word about our report. It's key to understand that our report won't end anything. It will launch something. Because if we don't, our process shouldn't be the end. It should be the beginning of something. Can I ask a question? Is there a way that we can bring each of them up here so it's easier for everyone to see? I mean, we found out on the housing subject that you could say, we need to meet with the economic development people. And then we'd learn a little bit more and say, oh my gosh, this is transportation. Well, at all. And we're going to have strategies that work. We're going to have to look at housing, transportation, and economic development. Maybe look at this triangle for strategies within that triangle. And then education with criminal justice and health. I mean, there are always, several ways you can set up triangles of interconnectivity to start looking for strategies to help solve some of the issues that are arising in our various subcommittees, what they all touch on one another. And just as there's an interconnectivity of oppressions, there's an interconnectivity of the issues that those oppressions raise up. And we need to acknowledge that. Our housing subcommittee can't solve housing all by ourselves because it's impacted by transportation, by criminal justice, all of those issues. So we need to name that right out and say that out loud. And then we need to frame our recommendations in a way that will be heard, owned and actionable and commit to accountability. And like I say, our report doesn't end anything. It launches a whole new process. Any questions or comments on this report? While it's fresh. Look. I just have a comment that I want to make. You know, when we started talking with the community, we started with a blank page. We got to now we're to committees and forming committee structures. So we're making this progress that wasn't talked a little bit earlier about housing. How much progress by Brady talked about. So just to touch base with the group, would you then validate just from this first report out that we have the right committees in place? And if you don't think we have the right committees in place based on the model, the model that's been drawn here, then what other, what other committees do we need? The highlighted part on that is that every single one of them is spoken about or interconnected, though maybe not showing the arrows. But in all of these issues, one is affecting the other from economic development, education, key pieces of everything, all totally interconnected. And we agree with, I'm hearing by silence that probably we agree we have the right ones and their interconnectivity is apparent. And I captured that question. Thank you. Any other questions for this first group? Excellent. Thank you. The first question was, the first question was just like frame-actual item recommendations, actions, whatever, you know, what we're thinking and hearing and feeling. And I think we all can agree that this is, even as we've broken into our committees, it's still big, it's still complicated. Yes, we've made some awesome progress. We are all, I don't want to say all committed to the charge, but we have some amazing people at the table committed to making sure we continue the progress. We agreed on that. Something else that we talked about as far as thinking and feelings, you know, the advocacy, you know, the policy change, access to my daughter is on my health committee. So kind of like you talked about, Katie, with the cross-functional, the interconnectivity is on the health committee. We're trying to discuss access, but access, we ended up talking about transportation. So now we need to talk to the transportation committee and the recommendations for all of that. And even identifying, I know we talked over here about, you know, the certain population of people understanding that there's issues. I think in our learning, we need to have to recognize our own. We use white privilege, but our own privilege. Because when you think about access to health care, we can all just pick up the phone and call and make an appointment. And think about transportation. That didn't issue how, we were sharing that if something happened to my car, the number of resources I had, if I even had to get to the T, you know, I could get a rental car. I could, you know, I mean, I could call a friend and borrow a car. I could, you know, ooh, relive. So even if I would have to even, I wouldn't even know how to get on the T right now. So just acknowledging our own privilege in having access to health care and transportation. And then the second one, when we talked about the, just kind of getting rid of the recommendations, but what difficult issues or questions are not addressed, I don't know that we talked about as we form our list of recommendations, who's going to fund it? When you think about some of the recommendations that we have as far as the health committee, we would think about, okay, well, you know, we all have smartphones. We talk about the population that still will get started telegram, but they're not on social media. But we identify that the majority of people do have a phone. And how can we get resources that are available that some demographic people might not be aware of? How can we do this text message? But then who's going to paper that? Who's going to, you know, create all of that? So I think our other question was, regardless of having recommendations that we put on this paper, actionable, great ideas, those things we can implement, I think we have not discussed economics. We have not discussed the funding of any of this, because it can all sound fine and say it can sound fine and good, but where's the money going to come from? And who's going to determine what recommendation is going to give certain funds? If any of them, I don't say anything to get funded, but we discussed where is this money going to come from? Who's going to pay for it? Excellent. We talked about the metrics as well. So the metrics, you know, Katie, you talked about it. How have we really talked about the issues before the forming of the task force? Identifying the fact that we have an issue here and for it work. And I'm only looking at the history of that, the making that identification, we do have a problem in recognizing that until now we can move forward, but how are we going to measure our success? How are we going to measure our success when it comes to the list of recommendations that are put forth? Are we going to have another committee in the next couple of months and go down that list of recommendations to see what progress? Yes, yes. So that would be that. Ladies, do you all have anything else to add? Excellent. The larger group, any questions for this group? Questions or comments on what you've just heard? I don't think we need to worry about that. Why not? Because I think our job is to make a recommendation and our readers figure out how to fund it if they agree with it. I mean, that's just me. Well, that's just concept to the buy-in we've got to get. I don't know what we're so concerned about. Each recommendation, each recommendation, how much it's going to cost, but again, if you think about the recommendation that we're going to present, there's a dollar sign that's going to attach you to one. So it's not a matter of saying how much it's going to cost because what we don't want to hear is here's a list of 50 recommendations but 25 of them cost X amount of dollars but we've only come straight on this 25 and we spent time coming up with 50. So I don't know that it's too deep that we have to worry about who's going to fund it but we know that these recommendations are going to cost. We haven't discussed that. I agree. There's a lot of conversation too about as we look at recommendations what are cut off the funding and what are not cut off the funding is there going to be a forum or an opportunity for all of our communities to come together to look at that? Part of that question is what's the cost of not doing it? Yeah. Well, the other part of that is what partners are out here in the city that we can partner together to look at all of these dollars? What's available? What are we all about? That sounds like we're going to be into 2020. Excellent question. Who's next? Suggested recommendations were as follows. One, that we have identified that there is a need for equity of resources among public schools. Two, that we approve access to transportation and that's all general terms in terms of health care in terms of jobs in terms of schools, etc. Also, this is a little bit harder to maybe explain as well. So really we'll do a good job of this and I need to explain it. But the excellent point is that we believe that a major campaign to better understand and embrace our cultural differences is necessary. We will continue to just be who we are but not necessarily understand who another person is, their values, their culture. We're not going to get into it. Another recommendation that we have is increase the diversity of the city council. I think that needs to be done in order to have more responsive care of the citizens that they represent. And also, and this is important, we believe that there needs to be an increase in voter turnout for the area. In terms of the difficult issues that are not being addressed, we also talked about funding. What happens after we come up with our recommendations. I don't know, one of our committees, which is education, we're saying we can't count in the school district, we can't count in the state, we can't count in the ways that maybe we as community organizations and maybe even with some city support can address some of the recommendations that we need to come up with. The funding is a very big issue and I think it needs to be addressed. I think we just put it out there. Nothing's going to happen. So, another one is what happens after the task force. The recommendations are there. It's just the beginning. It's not the end. That's well. And how the task force formulate the request for the tough questions to better gain accurate responses as we continue to do our work. We believe that we're not getting to ask. We're not asking the right questions to get the right information. And we as individuals, we think we may need to be addressing that in a better way. Can you give me a sample, please? So, we had a presentation by the district attorney's office that didn't quite go over as well because maybe there wasn't enough preparation at a time about what questions could be asked or should be asked. So, there seemed to be a lack of responsiveness and we're wasting everybody's time if we don't get responses to the questions. Excellent. Table? Any comments? Oh, wrong table. Any other comments? Questions from the Lord? This is the preparation. So, are you should we, like we have the agenda from Fernando, are we saying that we populate our questions or we populate questions for the presenters to come in to know that these are some questions that they should be ready to cover or do we just continue to let them come in and we just, what are we asking for that? Because we're not asking the right questions. We want the presenters to be better prepared for our questions. So, it's only fair that we ask the questions and there should be a mechanism to do that, whether it's following them to Fernando for them to present to the individuals or in our cases as we're starting to talk about subject matter experts in our committees, there will be addressing those specifically with those people that we're going to talk with. So, if we want to know what is the percentage of African Americans, Asians or whatever, like group in jail and what is the percentage of how the sentence is a hand in hand. I think what we're doing is we're kind of asking broader questions and what we need to be is respectful of the people that are coming to present and we need to say we want to know what are the disparities in how you pick up the trash. What is the frequent schedule so that kind of thing. But we need to be more intentional in how we ask because they're doing shot down approach in some cases and what we know, we kind of know what we want to know and so what we want to know is this. So, I think we go from let's just don't do so much broad requests but do specific requests. We know what we want to know so let's just ask it. That's right because they can't get to unless we tell them exactly what we're looking for. What was that? They can't give it to us because we don't count. Exactly. Is there a mechanism for a specific statistics? Is there a mechanism for a brainstorming activity within ourselves of all of these different issues that we can begin to have questions formulated while we're here? Yes, I think there's a ways to do that. That's a great suggestion. There's a lot of ways to do that. Say that again. Why? Well, in the areas we're focused on the secondary areas that if we all have brainstorming sessions even today it wouldn't be only these questions can be asked but it would give us an opportunity to try to brainstorm with all the different questions we ourselves have in these areas and then that does questions also guide who comes to the task force meetings and then they're prepared in their responses and then any other questions are just in addition to that particular information. Not you can't ask any other questions but at least a base that... I think I thought classic should be on this session where I'll try to come to good solution as well as to the degree that we can be as specific as we can around all of that I think we have to do that be respectful of the people who are coming so when they leave they feel like they met our goals and we feel like they gave us truth information so it's one of those respect and just make sure that we're being specific enough so people can give us what we need. It's just a lens of clarity for that and by Jennifer's voice so what I'm hearing and that excellent recommendation around the questions and thinking of the most recent experience there's a level of clarity that comes from experience with a particular system so I would think that a lawyer in Tarrant County would be able to cry out the very good question for the DA. I would think that an administrator or principal within the ISD knowing that culture can craft the questions so part of what I'm hearing that is how do we use our collective intellect we invite those broader questions but we need some kind of vetting system with people who are knowledgeable about the system so they can frame those questions in a way they're going to be answered and no reflection on our a lawyer is going to be very good at not answering the question you don't ask so that's it so how do we use our collective not only the task force moment but the resource people we can call on as well to make sure those questions are crisp. Jennifer. Jennifer. What happened? I mean maybe my mind would have been a different place but I do think if we can then get to questions before our task force meeting and there's a speaker we see that on the agenda and send in our question we would also help if we know a little bit more about when you guys are bringing speakers to why I guess. We as co-chairs will talk to contribute so that we can set up a criteria of what we can do here and what are the disparities that we think may happen. And then also send it out to you all so that you all can have those questions and get some maybe information from him at the front end so that we can share that with you all so that you all can be better prepared. Thank you. I think you had some basic standard questions that you're kind of asking people. But let me respond in respect to the specific situation of this attorney and explain how it came about that each of these situations have been different. That's what's hard to general. But in this particular case, the task force requested that we invite the sheriff. Right. And I have placed multiple phone calls that have spoken with several members of the staff that have sent several follow-up emails. I have never gotten a direct response. The sheriff knows several people have followed up directly with him. He knows that this task force wants him to speak. He has not responded. That's a response. Now, we had a discussion, the coach here had a discussion with Charles Boswell as the mayor about the redistricting idea. And we got to talking about how we can get the sheriff to come out. The mayor agreed to contact the sheriff. Mayor Price. And Rose is going to try to reach Judge Whitley as a way to get the sheriff to come and talk to us. So it's not for lack of effort that he hasn't arrived to speak to this group. So I never got a chance to talk to the sheriff about what we wanted to say because he never responded. Now, in this course of the same conversation, the mayor said, by the way, you really ought to get Sharon Wilson to come and talk to your group. And we said, great. And I can tell you, I sent her an email. She didn't respond. I sent an email to her assistant a few days later at 8 o'clock at night. And by 8.20, she had agreed to come and speak to the staff. And then I called the next day. I said, Sharon, the pastors would like to hear from you about disparities that are attributable to race and culture. And can you talk about this and that? And she said, whoa, this is a setup. No, no, it's not a setup. These are good folks and they want to hear from you. And I actually think they'll respond very favorably because you've done some good things. And she said, well, if it's a criminal, I'm going to put them behind bars no matter what. I said, we understand that. We expect you to do that. But we want you to give us statistical evidence about what you're doing, not only within your office. She was perfectly comfortable talking about her own office. But I was talking about the criminal justice system. More broadly. Is there any tendency for us to put people of color behind bars at a greater rate than we're putting others behind bars? What data do you have to share with us? I think that's what the task force is going to want to hear. And they're going to want to ask you questions. And so that was the background that I gave. In that instance, the suggestion to bring in the DA didn't come directly to the task force. It came from the mayor and the co-chairs. And the co-chairs talked about it. And they wanted to set it up so the task force could have a meaningful discussion with this attorney. But I think, well, that was right. If you have specific questions that you want to pose in advance to any speaker, then I think we share them with staff and with the co-chairs. The co-chairs meet every month on the first Monday, I think it is. And they usually meet for at least a couple of hours. And they get into all the issues that they think ought to be put on the agenda for the next meeting. So that would be a great way to be sure that we pose the right questions to all the speakers. So even if they don't answer all your questions, at least they provide you with a good basis upon which to pose additional questions to them. And they might want to follow up even after the meeting. And we've had that happen to some of our speakers that had followed up because they didn't have email. So even now, if you have additional questions you want to pose to Ms. Wilson, we'd be happy to convey them to her. And I'm sure she'll be responsible. So, Hark, how far in advance are the speakers? Thank you all with groups of email to just say, you know, April, May, June, July, here are our respected speakers. And if you have any questions of them, submit them to us. Right now, I don't think we have any speakers in the queue. If there are other folks you'd like, we're still trying to get the sheriff. But if there are other folks you'd like to come and speak to the whole task force, I think they'd agree. One of the benefits of having the six committees is that you now have a bunch of subject matter experts associated with each committee that you can bring to have, I think, perhaps even more meaningful discussions. And so I'm not sure that there may be some value in having some particular speaker come and speak to the whole task force. But I think there could be even greater value from having more folks come and speak to the committees. I agree with that. Because those are the resources that many of you all need to recognize. So our group was focused on youth involvement. The average age in Fort Worth is, like, 31, which makes us the youngest of the major cities in Texas. And I think Bob said it very helpfully. How do we get that population to own the future? It's pretty deep. But they're going to be the future, right? So that needs to stay above us. Whole leaders accountable regardless of other influences. It's not all the people they represent. So we'll come back to that in a little bit. This was an implement prior recommendations. The discussion we had with the police chief and the forecasters was frustrating to me. I don't know how everybody else felt about it. But when it got to why haven't prior recommendations been implemented, there seemed to be a disconnect. People were saying, well, we're doing lots of good things. And the pastors were saying, well, not so much. I mean, there could be reasons why they haven't been implemented that are legitimate. But at least there shouldn't be a factual conflict about whether it have or not, right? So that remains on the plate. The Education Committee, Bob was speaking of this, there have been a whole lot of prior studies and reports and suggestions that address racial disparities in education that haven't been implemented. So we're in the position now of recommending him again. So what's going to be different is not, I guess, his concern. Now, we got to the difficult questions, and we talked about this a little bit already. The way I firmly like the question is, what price is the city council willing to pay to achieve equity, diversity, inclusiveness, what we're all about? Now, that's partly that's dollars and cents, because we're going to get to at some point in this process, we're going to be looking at disparities in service delivery, right? And as I was suggesting in my table, we're not going to get, we're not going to bring the service levels down in any part of town to bring them up another, right? Isn't that logical? We're going to need to be investing more resources in the neighborhoods that are disadvantaged. And so we don't have to necessarily address how that gets done, but that's, if you're not willing to make that investment when it gets down to it, don't tell me you're really concerned about disparities in service. That's just dollars and cents. There's another price. It's the political capital of it. And I don't want to be a dead horse, but one of the things that really rankles me is the less before debate. And there was a way to get there with pro bono lawyers that wouldn't cost anything out of pocket. But it was going to cost somebody an endorsement down the road when I run for another office perhaps. Or maybe even the same one I've had. I don't know. Again, if you're not willing to pay that price, what are we doing? So you're going to ask for folks to join you in reaching out to our federal representatives to come up with better solutions for our DACA student, doctor of recipients, and our dreamers. I think that's a very... I think the bottom line was just a continuing emphasis on how we provide equitable access to all elements of the community and the decision-making process. And I was just going to make a comment that still goes back to voting. We need... If the voters would vote, that's the voice that political officials will listen to. As long as we don't vote, it's a silent voice. To only 25,000 people that have voted in Tarrant County as of yesterday at 4 o'clock. That's right. 25,000. All parties. I went in to vote. I got there at 4 o'clock. They said I was the only one that voted. Oh, my God. I'm surprised. I was very full today. So, I mean, we need to stand up to vote. And we need to get that message out. Well, they don't perceive there will be a cost to not doing this. Exactly. Well, the cost is... It can't change. What is it? Well, you don't change your attitude. It's not going to change anything. Any other feedback from the table? To have you all off of the how to improve access. Our table kind of talked a lot about the state of the city with the mayor. And we kind of talked about how that's more of an inclusive type of... If you're anybody who's anybody in the city, you're there. I'm thinking to earn $150, $200 you can end. You have to be a sponsor, yada yada. People in our community don't have access to attend that event. Or it's during the day, you're going to see two or three hours of your work day. So that's kind of what we were talking about as far as improved access. And that's just an example of that. No, I'm sorry. I can see because that's kind of a question. I never would have been trying to talk to them. We were trying to say... So just events kind of like that, where maybe some of our people in the community would have benefited from... Or maybe not benefited, but improved access. They otherwise don't have access to go. They do. Robintown. It's also one of our suggestions and we'll see it. How often do they do the Robintown malls? Because they do them all over the community. All the time. All the time. She usually does them all the time. With the... Yes. The respective council. The council member of the mayor. So that's when this community can come to them. Yeah. So they're out there. And I would just add one more thing. Just like the task force works are interconnected. There's interconnectivity between the action or inaction of our elected officials. The very low voter turnout, which we talked about. And a large population of the community that feel that whether they vote or not, it will not make a difference. So somehow there has to be a change in the culture for people in the community to take ownership for what happens in the community. And turn that desire for a better future into action. Because indifference truly is the enemy of a community that wants to change for the better. And I will tell you, the North Texas Commission in front of the United Corrections Council has got an advocacy program that they're putting out to get out the vote. Not telling you what to vote on, but to get out the vote. And one of the studies that they did is if you work for a business, if the owner is allowing you to have time or telling you you've got an hour off or whatever to vote, it's 80%. It goes up. 80%. And so they're pushing this throughout North Texas to get voters out. But that's just one resource of doing something. It's everybody else that needs to be doing something too. Others from the broader area. Charles, it seems like you were going to go back to something. Oh, there was this one. What about education? Well, just the Education Committee that Paul was mentioning, they are reviewing all sorts of prior reports and task forces that have made recommendations, but those have not never gone into it on topic with the racial level. So the question is what's going to be different? Yeah, we've talked a lot about recommendations and the implementation. There's that key middle piece. Somebody has to decide whether the recommendations should be implemented. And if previous studies and recommendations have been made, but there's been no action taken on it, what's going to be different this time if recommendations are made? Right. Again, it comes down to the leaders in the city, those that are decision-making powers, having the will to take action on recommendations. We talked about prioritization. How do we prioritize final recommendations? And how do we develop the sustainability model for them as well? So I think that's out there. Now, one thing that struck me when the police chief and the minister came here was it was said that recommendations were made in a way of the Rainbow Lounge raid. All the recommendations of the LGBTQ community that had come together had been implemented. And yet, the recommendations of the Minister's report not very much had been done. And I'm sorry, it was just really obvious the LGBTQ community was large and wide. And, I mean, just to me, it was a very stark difference. One was every recommendation of the amendment. And the other, how much was added? There was one that had not been implemented. And it's still calcium. One out of... There was 19, wasn't there? 19 out of 12 had been implemented. And the one that wasn't implemented, there were particular legal barriers to that. For all of those that were actionable. The one that wasn't implemented was for the city to pay for reassignment surgeries. That was, I mean, there was some reason to do it. But those that could be done... Right, right, right. And I'm just asking a question. Is that maybe because the media was also on this so much? Because if the media is covering it, it's okay. That's pretty much it. And I'm just... The more media that's involved, it seems like that's the problem. I think that's a piece of it. I think the voting power with that community... I don't know what you're saying. In the case of the diversity task force which dealt with the issues associated with rainbow loud incident, I think we could probably attribute the success to several factors. And some of these recommendations were controversial. And there was pushback from the community and from individual members of the city council. I think I would give a substantial amount of credit to the leadership of the diversity task force and particularly to John Nelson who said this is a community issue. There were forces from outside of Fort Worth who wanted to take over the process. And John said, no, this is a food. SSU were involved... Robert, you were involved. Others in the room were involved in this process. John said this is a Fort Worth issue. Fort Worth is a good community. We're going to stand up and we're going to address the problems. And he said you folks from Dallas appreciate your interest. Don't meet you. Ironically, John said move to Dallas. Right. Exactly. Anyway, he stood up for Fort Worth and that made a difference. I think it made a difference that we had the year of the city manager at the time of Dale Kisler. And I made sure that he received regular reports and that he felt comfortable with the recommendations that we were making. And then Mr. Nelson and others were keeping the council members informed along the way and making sure that when the time came that they would be ready to stand up and vote in support of the recommendations. And so I think it took all those things and I think this task force can draw some lessons from that experience about making sure that what we recommend will actually be implemented. And I'd like some of the comments that Millie made about setting priorities. I think we'll be, and this is just one person's opinion, I think we'll be a lot better off with a limited number, maybe 10 stretch recommendations that are fully vetted and funded that can be implemented within a reasonable timeframe in one or two years. I think that'll be a lot more effective than having 100 recommendations that are not funded for which the responsibility to implement has not been identified. I think our credibility would suffer. And so if we can figure out a few big recommendations that will have a big impact on this community that to the extent they involve financial resources we've identified the appropriate funding source. It might come from the city. It might come from some other source. The city might leverage partnerships to get things done. In fact, in all likelihood, that's what it's going to take. But if we have identified the funding sources and we can say here is the responsibility these are the folks who are going to hold accountable for getting it done. And Millie's other comment, as I heard it, had to do with sustainability. I don't even make sure that this isn't a one-shot deal that's forgotten weeks after the task force dissolved. And so we need to make sure that whatever we do is going to continue. That this is just a start. I think Kay was making that point. This is just a start of the process. How do we make sure we have a process in place? A dodo is a past chair of the Human Relations Commission which Angie rushed fast. We had a commission and a dodo, you'll give me permission to say this. I don't think we listened to the commission. And I don't think the commission has a lot of clout in this community. It has a 50-year history. And it was an SSE chair from modernity Greenwich University. So you know, we've got a institutional setting in city government to advance this agenda. But we haven't used it. We haven't used it. And we're talking candidly here. A lot of the issues that the Human Relations Commission brings up are irrelevant. The task force was established to raise issues that are relevant. That are meaningful. And that's what we had to discuss. We ought not to be engaged in a debate right now six months after the fact about some resolution that the Human Relations Commission adopted and why isn't the city council considering it. That's dead. The time to join the law through this passed. That's through the head. There's a long agenda of things that we can do. So how do we do that? And in respect to sustainability, we've got the Human Relations Commission. We're trying to make sure the Human Relations Commission is as powerful as any board or commission in the city government. And has a voice that the Human Relations Commission says X, Y, and Z, the council is going to do it. And you will have that respect that you deserve. When we brought up central orientation to be a potential class with the city, eight years prior. And when we went to council to bring this issue up, it was emphatically no. Council voted it down. And most of them, Vanessa at least globally was our chair or executive director at the time. And we asked her, okay, we know there's an issue, why doesn't council? And because they were not a protected class when those phone calls came into the office, they'd told them that, you know, there was nothing that we could do about it and they'd say, they'll call your council member so that your council member can find out that there are issues. And if you all, some of y'all may remember, may not, the next time we brought it up to city council, there was a gentleman that came out that evening and said that he was gay and he would probably get fired the next day. Well, this gentleman lived in Chuck Silcox's district and he was fired the next day. And Chuck did not believe it. Chuck called the owner and the owner said emphatically that he was not going to have a blah blah blah blah gay person working for him and even though he had the right performance record and so forth, but he was not going to have the working. Chuck Silcox helped us to carry that to fruition to get it fully approved. And he was one against it. He was very adamantly against it. So, it's communication on both sides. Wow, so you're really beginning to actually dig into strategy, cross-cutting implications and general recommendations. So this is particularly powerful at times. I just want to name one more thing before we still have one more. One more thing out of this last one. Is it one? Yeah, just this group there. One more thing. Excellent presentation. You brought up voting and initiatives around the country that's brought up. One thing that I really appreciate is voting. If you just leave it with people needing to vote, that sounds like blaming the victim. When you begin to look at what are the proactive strategies to encourage voting, that message will resonate with the community and there are some things you can link up with. But voting always comes up and whether or not you take it the next step often determines whether or not you're engaged in what's a community. One of the things that I like to look up about what Fernando said was that if we don't say somebody's accountable, if we say people need to vote, if everybody's accountable, then nobody's what. We need to name specific people and bodies that are named who will implement it. Exactly. Because we had a gentleman at the chamber who had issues with zoning in his business and was trying to get educated on what he needed to do. Well, he instead went to the council and had his three minutes and pointed at each one of them. I voted for you, I voted for you, I voted for you, I voted for you, I voted for you, I voted for you. So, his friend Bill could just went out the door. Help me, help me. So, it's education. We're right at the break of break following this. The question I would pose who's vested interest in voting statistics staying the same. It's challenging and it's an illusion to think that nobody's interested in voting not increasing. Conversation often suggests that everybody wants more people to vote. That's not true. That's not true anywhere. So, what are the barriers to more voter engagement, to more voting. If that's what we need, then we need to look under that because it's not true that everybody in Fort Worth wants more voters. No, I'm still very concerned about the stop the situation and I don't see people contacting Congress. I don't. And the deadline is Monday? I'll go through this quickly to say we're up against the break. Well, we talked about in terms of possible recommendations needing more minority leadership training. We have leadership training in the city. It's very expensive, but for the most part it doesn't include many minorities which is one reason that a couple of other groups have tried to come up with some leadership training. And rather than having citizens or residents come to the city we thought there ought to be more mobile services of the city going to the community to specific places like community centers or libraries or Y and TAs or whatever. We hit on more transportation and again funding is important. And I don't know how you get more funding. I got some ideas personally. I think you can take funding from other sources like the crime district. Don't tell the police I said that. There are ways there are ways to do this. But we definitely need more transportation and mass training. We need a positive plan maybe a task force not for you guys. For economic development in southeast Florida word you talked about the workforce mission we said there needs to be more emphasis on trade schools on education. A permanent team council somebody else is talking about looking at younger people getting involved because there are future. I think it's already evident from what we've had before the whole task force and the committee more diversity in all areas of the police department I mean it's still ironic to me that there are major departments including the game unit the homicide division SWAT SWAT have no black people in them at all so all these parents but I think you can make that recommendation without any other information and make sure that educational funding includes technology our schools have to be technologically equipped and I think we're making progress but we've got to do it in all schools and then there has to be more education on housing and home ownership and with that comes responsibility of home ownership and the responsibility of dealing with how you keep your home once you get in there and with a lot of minorities in particular in low income people in general it's difficult getting to home ownership and once you get home ownership it's difficult to maintain that house somehow attacking the game balance and I think that may help with more diversity within the game unit we think there ought to be a redistricting commission whether or not the city council goes along with it or not but we go up to two new limits of city council after the next census and as far as problems that we see that some task force members are not that committed and that we need to have an emphasis on culture as well as race that we sometimes get away from anything you all have I was just going to say I'm in the fourth police officers association Rick has just stepped down and maybe Ramirez was now taking on that leadership role Oh really? Okay I'm going to go back because Carol and Jim were the first last president so they have a minor work the fourth police officers association Rick has stepped down and maybe Ramirez is now the president and then Carol and Jim were the first last president Questions or comments? Mr. Chairman? Some task force members are not that committed Ramirez As co-chairs we've talked and we each person here is as important if not more important each person here is as important as anyone else there's no one here more important than anyone else or even more important when we're all 23 of us life gets in the way sometimes I know unfortunately I have to do something in maybe 12 we've been talking that would be nice if we saw everyone as much as possible because we think it would be much more effective if we're as one even when we don't if someone doesn't necessarily and we're not pointing fingers got from it but if someone doesn't come on a regular basis or doesn't catch up on a regular basis we can't project to the community seriousness or when someone asks that person a question are they capable of answering that question once again we're not coming to you know say you're not doing a job you're not doing a job or I'm not doing a job we're not doing a job it's for the betterment of all of us it's a huge commitment we understand that and we wouldn't have asked you if we didn't know that you guys are as committed as everyone else that's what we really need though it's a lot of time it's a lot of effort but I think if we're much stronger together than we are apart that's I know I'm preaching to the choir but uh other feedback questions thank you for giving me that committee chair you were talking about the word transportation for funding again with the connectivity with all the committees you talked about as well on the health committee as far as talking about the T did have a job there no one really showed up when they looked at the requirements to drive the bus you eliminate you know so we're going back to looking at okay how do we you know change some of the policies there was another source for transportation but the requirements for you could they could not take you to work for a doctor's visit so we're looking at some of the requirements to be able to have access to some of this so I'm not saying that the T has to change their entire job description of their requirements but if we can look at that and then you can have more people who might be eligible to drive the bus in the get more buses in more areas and all that so it's kind of just like this whole domino uh no in the schools in the schools I mean there is don't they still have a council of student council presidents who meet but you don't have a city okay yeah let's try I mean it's one of my not regardless of whether it's for what I see yeah there isn't there isn't what do they do there was there was one there is not one thanks for the talk about it I was intimately involved with it but they were only around maybe three or four years and it was a lot about getting involved in government there was a lot of training on how to become more involved what it meant to be involved that I don't remember like any specific recommendations or anything along the line coming out it's been it's been it's been at the same time that Frank was chair for work when did he serve for work? didn't they create the team one but you've advisory board was part of community relations and when they did away with community advisory board so Becky asked and used to be the base on sort of doing your city council if the district does have one they also have a group of kids that I think they still meet monthly with the student attendants yes the state's committee and then the operating team program also they don't use the superintendent but they deal with the representatives of each group that's like that we've been holding off excellent let me invite you to take a third yes so I always apologize to everybody ahead of a meeting in round walk early this morning so I wanted to get back over here round walk round walk I know what you were from our education committee that was the only recommendation we had that we put up their technology so after lunch then we were convened in the subcommittees pick up on any of this that's relevant and then began to look at the issues from the subcommittees that's going to be the question that's going to be a little challenging but maybe divide your time or maybe just stick it with one let me invite you to pause for about 60 seconds you've offered a lot you've heard a lot there's anything that you haven't given voice to pause for about 60 seconds and capture anything remaining that you would like we're not going to invite you to say it we're not going to invite you to write it down is there any error any issue any difficulty any questions let's shift a little bit before lunch always a little tricky time until about 50 minutes I wanted to start out with particular engagement around difficult issues and questions I'm going to deepen those this afternoon for your subcommittee work and to look at emerging recommendations and we've got it next to your clear feedback who has resources for your subcommittee and broad awards to spend this time are some particular practices that hopefully will engage us in ways that we can not only have some of these difficult questions and conversations in a more productive and healthy manner create some space some hopefully productive space for engagement in ways that can be productive whether you're talking about a team including the subcommittee teams gauging other stakeholders like the mayor and city council city managers office clergy in our communities non-profit execs now just looking around the room obviously some of you are very adept at that but even those of you that we use with the community conversations in a light way that we've used around the country in some light ways in some very deep ways and maybe let me hear your experience how many of you remember the movie probably have told you this now some of you I may have said that's the dilemma of speaking the people you've known for 20 and 30 years or more sorry to out you for your age how many of you have watched the movie Karate Kid Raise your hand and now yeah because it has been a long time they've got a remake of it I've been telling this to her okay Mr. Miyagi young boy he meets Mr. Miyagi a school janitor who happens to be a master karate he says sure yes I will teach you karate remember that part so far he shows up and how many have worked with teenagers there was a discipline in the technique of applying the just a gay there was a fence around the home he couldn't just slap it on precise motion then he had to watch and again this buffer and there was a certain motion he had to make to take it off and to what happened at that point do you remember what happened to show him painting the fence each of those moves and the reason Mr. Miyagi was so disciplined around that of those basic karate moves and all he needed to do was to perform perform replicate those simple tasks in the context most of what I do around the country around engagement, facilitation racial reconciliation class reconciliation all those kind of things that involve humans there's a lot of high level strategies and language definitions I've got three pages of them for racial equity there's a lot of words but it comes down to how we engage one another so here's your paint the fence and wax the cars and sand the floor it's how you listen and what you do with that intersection those are your three kates those three movements of engagement around this particular racial equity plan listening is part of an impact on the people you're listening to you know what that feels like to really be listened to there's a circle over the head to see what's actually going on inside we would really be surprised because nothing string on your attention span so listening is hard and our culture we listen before we form you know that they're going to hear you that they're not going to label, analyze or judge you but they're going to really listen to you I'm going to have one or two others in your life that you experience like that are most people with you like that's the reality check so how we can speak our truth these recommendations will be first they get animated here if they're not animated when they come out of your mouth and when you engage them together they're not going to be animated when you pass them off to somebody else so the courage to speak your truth in ways that respect the truth of others means everything and once you do those two things then the work begins so we're going to experience a couple of different to God and you've gotten these two before we work with the touch stones a little bit I'm going to lift up one of them before I do that let me invite someone actually let me invite six of you on your table you'll have the touch stones and these are kind of reverse homework I want to continue to invite you to imagine and to look for ways that these simple touch stones will be in service of your charge of your task how you engage one another how you engage yourself for a few of us our best our worst critics are who even when it's I fix readers just loud or just one at a time just to name those touch stones to be here with your doubts fears of these joys and success and action we speak our truth in ways that respect other people's truth our views of reality may differ but speaking one's truth does not mean interpreting, correcting, or debating what others say speak using eye statements if the person reading the third one if you can read it out loud we can mention of fixing advising, saving, or correcting everything we do is guided by the simple rule there is a primacy and integrity of each speaker when we are free from external judgment we are more likely to have an honest conversation with ourselves and learn to check and correct ourselves from within we suspend our judgments and identify our assumptions by creating a space between judgments and reactions we can listen to the other and to ourselves more fully in this our perspective decisions and actions are more by identifying our assumptions we can set them aside and open our viewpoints to greater possibility we ask honest open questions to hear each other into speech instead of advising each other we learn to listen deeply and ask questions that help others hear their own inner wisdom more clearly as we learn to ask questions that are not advice in disguise that have no other purpose than to help someone listen to their inner wisdom when we return to wonder when the going gets rough if you feel judgmental or defensive ask yourself I wonder what brought her to disbelief I wonder what he's feeling right now I wonder what my reaction teaches me about myself set aside to listen to others and to yourself I'm inviting you to do a couple of things with these words that you've just heard one is to find one that resonates with you find one that you have some lived experience around in your leadership one that you could easily stand up and talk about tell a personal story of how you use that particular relational norm well you're not going to get a door prize for the best one so you don't have to take a long time with it but find one that really resonates with you and as you do find one that's a growth edge one that challenges you so you're looking at for two one that resonates with you one that challenges you one that if you have the option you take a black marker and just delete it because you don't want to have to be working with that share one that resonates share one that challenges you one that resonates with you that's hard another minute it's kind of a tie so I picked him he's the one that resonates with me what is his experience number one does everyone share the touchstone number two okay now if you select at all six of them is growth edge that's cool maybe I can do it a different way and hold hold your voices around the room around what resonated and what challenged and they're going to lift up one in particular we speak our truth in ways that respect the truth of others commit to no fixing, advising, saving or correcting if that challenged you raise your hand a few observations are always touched on that someone raises their hand that resonates it's the same one that context everything just depends on where that is you see a diversity of responses across all these touchstones which is strong when you're acting as a team or community because they're assets in different places people whose lived experience have helped them hold that particular and so what you want to do in the long run is how do you align your strategies in ways that takes advantage of your strengths of a particular norm but you also have a setting so here's the one on your consideration as a practice as a tool in addition to all of them but this is a particular one and a few of you raise your hands up that it resonates and that's asking open honest questions and a few others we can probably throw on there is our capacity to a yes or no when you know the answer or when you know where you want to lead people or where you want to steer people so the first thing you have to do a good friend of mine who just happens to be attorney so why would I ask for your committees tap their collective their portion so you want it to be brief but you want it to be open you don't want their response to be yes you want to give them space and then the honesty of it you really aren't leading them you really want the responses how many have been in settings it takes a lot of conviction that that other person your committee member has something to say the reason often community people don't respond well it's because they don't think leadership not only is leadership not listening and it's demonstrated and people grow up in community say you're going to do what you do anyway so open and honest questions at the core of community engagement so that's what I want to invite you to do I'm not going to grave you you're not going to get less lunch if you don't ask many open honest questions invite that as a practice as you're engaging one another if someone suggests something which is important except for that you couldn't imagine and I think that's a leadership the second page pass out are habits of the heart take it to another level those touchstones typically helping people engage first takes it to the stakeholder level an appreciation of these is rid of kind of what holds we the people all the people, Bob the people the bike again just to read the bold appreciation of the value of otherness three an ability to hold tension and what giving ways a sense of personal voice and agency a capacity to create community okay what I'd like you to do for the next just two or three minutes I want you to read these and find one make it five minutes to keep it from you but find one of these that you have some of your life stories find one that holds some of your life stories another way to say that find one of these that you would be willing to champion as a racing culture task force member and look on that I'm sorry the holes will be well you see the holes will be right on this one so find one that has your story in it or one that you would be willing to champion and reflect on it so give you a few minutes just to read them as we turn the corner toward lunch find one and then then I'll give us the last invitation next to last invitation how many of you journal write in the journal no particular way but that you capture your thoughts in some way of writing that can be recorded as well how many of you have ever done any stream of consciousness writing you let go of all the attachments and analysis and judgments that's right what's coming to mind and coming to heart I want to invite you sort of that kind of a posture so you each selected one habit of the heart that either reflects part of your story or you'd be you'd want to champion in particular around the racing culture initiative the dialogue generally and externally with the community could be a champion I'm not going to have you sign on any dog behind anything so you found one so what I want to invite each of you to do is to take two to three minutes to share that of the heart with the others at your table the invitation for the others is to listen well to that habit their story I think of one brief open and honest question to pose to them based upon what they say but briefly and not everyone has to ask a question but we'd like at least one question to be posed to each person one of the streams of consciousness posture comes in you don't have to read, you can but you don't have to read what you've written down it's your story, it's your life experience so just talk about that from the context of how you think, how you feel and what you think don't feel attached to what you've written often kind of the early reflection just kind of opens the door for some other reflections so just be open to that as you share your story with the others questions more than a couple of minutes I know that's going to be hard for some of you others it'd be easy but try to just a couple of minutes for the others to ask a brief open and honest question let's begin okay anybody if you're trying to open honest questions, raise your hand and try an open and honest question did you see any opportunity for an open and honest question so that's progress what the invitation is is to hold the possibility of an open and honest question in all levels of your engagement some of that will take some reflection but at least you have something in the toolbox to begin to use to enhance the engagement with one another I want to continue to invite you to do that any overall feedback about a habit of the heart that resonated with you that you'd like to offer especially if you see some relevance to either the task force in general or your role and again, we're not signing you up to do that but I just want to invite your voice around that any voices I think all of this really related to the first one we're all in this together yes, related to our work here as well that's it, thank you others, what other habits were selected in the role mine was the number 5 of Casting for a community I don't like those here I think I was obligated in a way because I feel like I'm representing the Asian community I sit around and I'm the only Asian here so I feel like I have to have a voice for us thank you as a sign of hunger we have lunch across the hall let me invite a little emphasis on one of the habits and the way that I deal with the touch dogs that was exceptionally applicable to our work I don't know if some of you are African but I want to invite your consideration particularly around number 3 an ability to hold tension in life-giving ways so many of these conversations around race and culture and diversity and inclusion and equity it's going to be tension, right how many have had tension-free conversations about race and culture and differences and it's a lot of ways to hold tension but as adults we feel tension well at times and other times we went to hell on a hand back step so to be able to hold tension in a way that's life-giving for me is at the core of what the possibilities of race and culture task force and our engagement with our broader community and stakeholders is all about we're not going to get rid of tension tension has come to be a human but because there's tension that everything breaks apart there are life-giving ways to hold tension we're not compromising our diverse perspectives and yet to advance to craft, to frame an actionable recommendation so when I think about holding tension how many are familiar with paradox another way of saying holding tension and I know there's a lot of polarity management textbooks from way back modern, I know that paradox and this way of tension holding is critical to all the conversation models that we have courageous conversations and several other dialogue models it doesn't do away with the tension it's how you hold it so this is how I think of it we've got just a brief handout for your reference for later so when I think of holding paradox or holding tension it's about choosing both and thinking instead of either or thinking both and rather than either or it's not about something meaning right or wrong you can imagine some things can be right and wrong that really throws you forward but paradox works like that in our personal as well as our professional lives and I would say that most of the troubles personal and political are caused by either or thinking when I think of engaging in conversation a person who has a political or religious belief different from our own either or thinking creates a combative situation to come from the way we line up is anybody different from us is wrong creates a completely different container if I could imagine and again this is exactly the metaphor of the six blind men in the elephant to be able to hold the tension productively using then says that of the truth and that creates a completely different engagement one last little caveat on holding tension and holding paradox a lot of this is about hospitality as leaders creating spaces where diverse perspectives and voices and identities can feel not only safe be disrespected and dismissed or discounted but how many of you rush to places that they're not going to disrespect you and that's the goal right there just not going to disrespect you that's not inviting you want a space that not only will respect you but that will invite your ideas that will engage what you find important will welcome your ideas so here's for me one of the key components of holding tensions well holding paradox is that if we don't have the courage to hold tensions in our own personal lives because we each are walking boxes of paradox there are things that are happening in our lives that we hold in ways that are both and so how do we extend and that's being hospitable to our city how do we extend that same quality of hospitality to others whose ideas and identities are different from our own as leaders how do we model that so that communities of all colors and all identities see a light if you would and not that we're the first it's happening the good thing it's actually happening in our neighborhoods it's happening in different organizations and congregations so you're not inventing but we have to be able to because that says to a diversity of community well beyond our abilities to line up with just the right ones not going to be able to do that but we can create spaces where people feel value feel their voices are welcome and holding paradox holding these tensions and life giving ways is how we do that so this language that you've experienced this in the last 52 minutes in 12 seconds part of what I want to invite us to help infuse our recommendations this is the pre-work it doesn't name the strategies but it does create a certain environment of how we're engaging one another and then how we seek to engage the other stakeholders and give you some other language just briefly right after lunch and then spend time in the subcommittees hear from those different groups see what we missed in this short long day and then be out of here before 3 o'clock any closing questions I believe lunch is ready and served across the hall you have a video PowerPoint presentation and three handouts to review as you eat you don't it's unstructured we're inviting good conversation we're going to start until we get out of here earlier plus after lunch I know what happens after lunch each of the subcommittees are present but the plan was to spend some of the time for the subcommittees to kind of check in around several ways I would suggest given today particularly the questions and the recommendations that you started with this morning how some of those impact particular subcommittees some of that was informed by the subcommittees I can appreciate but make sure that all of them get a chance to kind of look at that it may help if you look at the flip pads as well in addition to your notes so that's one kind of check in around the difficult issues and questions and the recommendations from the lens of your subcommittee I want to invite the desire along with Fernando regarding kind of the framework that was offered up early around the subcommittees to have your focus and you've named some of that this morning particular around guidance toward recommendation is to be clarity around the disparities where are the disparities one sense where the data clearly points to some disparity that's one of the key areas to frame recommendations around I think the other side of that would be if where data is not what's the term disaggregated so that you can't identify disparities that's another lens to look at what's appropriate to recommend in service of addressing disparities that's one of the ways that's been named to keep from being too broad and to keep it where it can be actionable where we've got data to support so anything else around subcommittees that either co-chairs or Fernando would like to offer I think as Fernando said earlier is that we make sure that we've set those recommendations that they're realistic recommendations because we want to be able to implement and obtain and achieve some of those recommendations to make sure that we can close the gap on some of the disparity that's going on in the city we know it's there we're not going to take care of all the issues but we need to try to address as many of them as we can so let's be realistic it's amazing as a time to me a lot of things that was planned out like so is it that our first phase that we give and maybe the second phase or something where it gives people some thought that's the time to react I think it's going to be a little apart we don't want to we don't want to each committee should not be giving 200 recommendations that are not going to be ideological so we want to be able to do what we can we don't want to let go of anything but in case this is getting done this first phase then there's a second phase that can be and partnerships we can get partnerships it needs to be corrected at some time and so I was just saying hopefully we wouldn't have something we just put aside because maybe it's more difficult for them to deal with we're not saying if it's difficult put it aside needs to be addressed additional questions or tensions now so that each committee can hear together as opposed to doing that only in the subcommittees anything else that you would find helpful a question that you're carrying a suggestion, an idea anything else related to again the difficult issues the tensions and the recommendations emerging anything around that? Is it whether it's this meaning or one in the future a lot of these have interconnected issues is there going to be an opportunity for us to be able to make a range form to those interconnectedness so that we're understanding that they might since it's getting six or five or all would that become part of the priority process in regard to recommendations is that made? Yeah all we might want to do is let the co-chairs and we're meeting next Monday and let us talk through that process that we can bring to our next task force meeting so because there is a lot of interconnectivity and it could be that we have the city staff comes to the clearing house to get us the answers for each committee but let us think that through I think that's appropriate and excellent and one way to think about it also is that it's not a subcommittee but a subcommittee meeting recommendations is the full task force recommendations so what emerges from each subcommittee yes it will be looking at the interconnectivity not only for maybe kind of weak areas but for strength and maybe powerful logic and aligning multiple subcommittees into one very strong actionable recommendation what else? I just have a couple of things to ask oh I'm sorry we have a co-chair sitting out here too so just thinking about the question you raised I think as we pull all the recommendations together the committees need to consider priority and I go back to what Mr. Bansby said a hundred ago you know maybe phase one phase two maybe just one big recommendation from a committee but the implementation piece comes in three or four phases has to be should be a reflection of what the community needs are and that's why so many people are coming following this while there are inviting people to come following the discussion the other thing too is the sustainability of it and getting to the point of monitoring what kind of reports do we want to see back as a result of its implementation because otherwise it will go nowhere if you don't know some of the accountable so once the recommendations are accepted then what is the city's plan to monitor the sustainability and the outcomes and be thinking a little bit about if you go into multi phase implementation be thinking about what percent of the implementation of what aspects of the implementation do you want to see come forward first, second third what's most important but I think it's a lot to think about I don't think that we need to take anything off the table and I agree with what was said earlier we shouldn't come forward with 50 or 60 areas because that really distracts from everything we're trying to accomplish maybe a couple of things from these subcommittees that can be aggregated in some way that makes sense actually here emerging from various perspectives kind of a matrix we get a laundry list of recommendations and we have a matrix of criteria owned by the full task force coming out of that we're looking at maybe 8 to 10 highly recommendation with sufficient ownership from each of you anything else I want to say or ask a portion of the agenda I just want to name and we've got the handouts but I want to invite you to take that for reading and review later but I want to name them because they have the service of the agenda items around normalizing and operationalizing racial equity, racial and cultural equity in ways that so we passed out a two page common definition share language and I revised it now it's three pages it could have been 12 just to give you an appreciation of what I was trying to do and let me give you just some I named on here that I took two of the national initiative that have been working actually one big national one and one with a kind of a local expression they were pretty pretty good and consistent glossary of terms that have been used in a long setting so that's what I started with and then what I was doing was gleaning concepts from your task force meetings words and concepts that you offered up I brought those in to help me kind of glean down these that you find along with some that are more role-play with racial equity racial and cultural equity planning so that's what you have it's not intended to be exhausted it doesn't name everything a great number of provocative concepts and ideas to give us again some shared understanding this is not a politeness test this is not to say you sign off on agreement every definition of every concept and idea it's not like that but with appreciation and understanding language is going to serve us well in crafting not only some racial cultural equity plan but in looking at the recommendations these are pretty established mostly pretty established a few of them that I don't know if they're established would be a word that you could put with it they're still a little bit on the edge but insightful and provocative and I don't know that you can pick up a newspaper finding some of these related so rather than have you go through them now I just want to invite you to familiarize yourself with these concepts where there's an edge that's an opportunity for discussion within your subcommittee in the larger task force if you think our concept is not useful or not helpful and the opposite is true this language is powerful language but you have to own it if you don't own it it doesn't matter I just want to say I think this is wonderful language my question is this if we're going to be really looking at this very within the city of Oklahoma where's the cities where's our cities so we have disparity reports for our city that's going to be the data points we'll do some kind of comparison there right and actually that's where the recommendations and these concepts are going to be framed around our data so it's a strong point I just use that city and I've got three others as a resource of best practices it won't be identical just gives you a frame of reference and that's Portland, New Orleans Louisville and Seattle and three of them are actually I've had some level of involvement that I can at least speak to, yes Kate so it sounds to me like one of the things services you may use to provide the city is a word to the philosophy so we've named a resource we've named a resource guide for the city so everything that we're gleaning best practices, processes will be kind of a resource guide for the service of the cities racial and cultural equity people who do not have everyone who likes the tip we do not have that we just have reports that we can look at and review and compare we have human relations commission right, the commission has some of these services that there are portals on this you just don't call it this but you have human relations that's the way of the possibilities but I thought to Mr. Danthery's question of the city of Fort Worth like the EEO office within HR isn't that more what we were asking what are there from an employment standpoint as far as the disparity assessment that includes all of the it's not just that area for the disparity maybe that we're going to be going to be referencing it includes all the portals and I think this came up this morning that in a sense we've got an entity but how it's used and how it's reinforced in a way to make it more more resourceful or more powerful that would be a question because I would say that Portland's Office of Equity and Human Rights they've got some particular teeth and theirs that our HRC doesn't have but that's the makings of a recognition does our HR, does our new religious commission still have to be about what time to do it, where is the payment that significantly changed, I don't know yeah, I don't I'm sorry does it have significant power of field? I'm not sure that might be there it's probably I don't know yeah, I don't know either it won't have to be it's been significantly downsized in the last where we have the structure of the human religious commission and talk about that why it was started because it just celebrated what, the 25th year? the 25th year so that we're going to talk about the past and HRC and the current if we invite the Chris Trout who's the lawyer for the human relations commission to come and brief us about the powers of the human relations commission and you can decide whether you want to make recommendations to strengthen it sounds like we even know what is in that space what is in the city's HR department space and what doesn't exist at all is what I'm hearing the city's HR is very conventional it doesn't include the elements of HRC but yeah we've already met Brian Dickerson he gave a talk about the city government workforce so disparity in that category is one of the areas that recommendations can be formed from we look in the other departments and see where do we have sufficient disaggregation to determine disparities if we can't that's a question and a recommendation and when we can, that should lead us to some recommendations not exactly those same names but they all have a fairly high level department level entity that's responsible and accountable for the equity point other questions? that's something we need to capture just a point of clarification for me the commission itself is appointed by city council members by the mayor it's subject to approval by the full city council it is not appointed by anybody they are appointed this group we're talking about here they're actually staff so does Fort Worth have a staff? well Angie Rush and her staff support the commission that is a staff they enforce their civil rights Fort Worth had a department of employee advocates and even during that time they've served the same purpose of this community as in Fort Worth the city they work with the commission but there's no reform that actually puts everything overseas in the city and as far as employment opportunities and all everybody goes with human resources when it comes to equity there's nobody that we have a human resources department that doesn't work internally we have a human relations commission that deals with community bodies let me be more specific whenever there was a job open in Fort Worth these folks had to be a part of the panel they did not vote on me they oversaw the process to make sure it was fair and accurate that's our human resources department and so that's the same way when we looked at contracts and everything else and so now that's the human resources department within the city of Fort Worth and they're responsible for ensuring that the process is open and inclusive so the question to answer is no Fort Worth does not have an office of equity and human rights not by that name but they have a job department that oversees the HRC we have a human relations department a human resources department that deals with all hiring procedures and equity on the job and we have a human relations commission that deals with civil rights across the community so their number of ordinances right, like the HRC and where is the Tisha Brown just came here from a lot of parts so I was going to ask her to answer the question the staff that you're going to see important fair housing public accommodations the investigation that happened in those areas and they're stamping supporting those areas so that part we have I think what I hear you saying from the dance is that around accountability is there a high level accountability that's good Tisha this year to answer all your questions the questions was about the subpoena power of the human relations commission Chris Trout, one of our attorneys he's double checking this for us but his understanding is they have limited subpoena power under housing issues but it does not go to places of public accommodation thank you thank you so what I'm hearing from several vantage points is that it would be important and informative to be clear about the particular functions and at what level of functions our human relations commission has compared to other and what their functions are and at what level they are and if ours is departmentalized and not cross-buddy then that's a different level of accountability and responsibility so we can look at that in a specific way thank you what else anything else okay anything that jumps out at you that's real important to name from those three simple pages of concepts and definitions that you have again I can think of at least a half a dozen of you that offered up some of these concepts as potential training on orientation I just want to invite you if there's any that really that you deem are very important for us to look at and if you see any on that you think it has no value at all why fragility and why privilege we don't talk about that you know you gotta help people understand that and we have to help people understand what systemic racism is that you can not call someone the n-word or be terrible to them and still benefit from racist structures and systemic racism those are two of the ones that I heard consistently from the task force and that's why they're on here along with again kind of opening up racism at the individual, institutional and structural level to bring some distinctions between them we heard that also from our community conversation that they were kind of collapsed and there wasn't a lot of distinctions so this gives us clarity about what we're talking about and as you move toward franken recommendations pointing toward any other questions just high level things you want to flag about these that you're going to read, review and memorize and be tested on as the next task force so we look at the practices that we went through with the touchstones and the habits that inform us how we might want to consider engaging not only one another but different stakeholders we started with difficult issues and questions and potential recommendations and then we got some additional language I also wanted to say if there's another concept of definition that you think would be helpful to email us and we can add it and go from there what I want to invite you now to do is to get into the subcommittees I want to just almost tongue in cheek say you know who you are you do know who you are you are I'll see you in one year yeah you got more than one I'm going to assume you're equally committed to all the ones that you signed up for so I want to invite you to go where there are the fewest people so if one of your committees has six people already here I would suggest that you consider going to one with fewer numbers so with the subcommittee chairs kind of rally their troops at their tables so let's move toward a wrap and get a kind of a brief report out saying I want to test with the particular with the different subcommittees I know that you all have feedback but just for you to be thinking about as you schedule your individual subcommittee meetings one thing that I was noticing is kind of the intersectionality and the actual recommendation there's some energy around the intersectionality of the members so what might be the of one of your future meetings particularly as we get close to framing recommendations having a one date all the subcommittees are meeting you break out but you also come back together and summarizing that may facilitate the kind of intersectionality and framing of the recommendations that you made and also when y'all have your resources in front of y'all if you know that this is something that's really near and near to the health organization and the donors we're at the committee I'm sorry invite them to your meeting so that way you're all here you know from here so let's kind of go around the room as we did before and by kind of a report out first from that group whoever wants to lead off and then anything else to support and then open up to the whole room any questions y'all want to show us the PowerPoint presentation that uh is that education? yes so good benefit ok so discussion here was to continue talking about the disparities that the committee identified and then possibly some of the recommendations that are easy I guess low hanging for each judgment so the disparity with literacy is one that we've been talking about with K through 12 so literacy and talking about how our library city libraries can support that out of time out of school time so after school in the summertime often our libraries and our community centers what recommendations can we make to the city to support that recommendations like totally relevant content in our library making sure black and brown children see themselves relevant in the literature and if that literature is not there why is it not there how do we get it what are some things that our libraries can do to make sure that uh that it's something that's included in the neighborhoods where it's one of the same universal pre-paying thinking how can we support that with our community centers what's out of school how can we mobilize all of the different community schools so again with the literacy and the pre-paying how can we mobilize some of these groups that are around so many of the cities that really do want to bring everybody together and all be in the same conversation so that's more of the cities are us saying the city could be more aware helping with the where yeah and we were also talking about our other disparities in college and career readiness is one of our focus on so how can the city use our partners like the TCC to talk about where we know what economic development is going on what companies are trying to come to the city what industries are booming what or not we have all that information can we use that to mobilize our Fort Worth ISD partnership with TCC or whoever else in the city needs to be partnered with to move that forward so we have a better track of the kind of career readiness excellent fellow leaders any comments further she covered it well we have a lot of work to do we're starting to narrow down our paths where I think it's helping excellent, a larger group any questions or comments just help we talked about health education as well we said really deal with that because we have I don't know anything particular we had a big cultural shock back then in Katrina and the systems that some kids came from versus the system of text were very much different in its disciplines the way things are handled they're here now they're here as parents and so I think we need to do something at least for them this is all about adult education excellent any others have you guys reached out to organizations and after school programs is that on your list they'll be presenting to subject matter experts resources and support work but our communities are not getting of our ideas where there is a next door app that's being utilized so maybe you have a more robust program adding more to that sense of serenity there for something different to that that can be localized to your community information but health care can come along that you know about it the other thing a troniment version of the Parks and Rec book they spoke to us a great book that highlights all the community services in Fort Worth but they have very limited resources to put that in and set it up and so maybe having one that is just again for your neighborhood what's in your area that's more economically feasible we talked about community health workers and getting them to increase their kind of the boost in the ground and their great way to get information out especially about health but really increasing the numbers that's out there and informing them with the right information so a lot of them are siloed in different areas but I know they have more lines in that work they're really being a little bit more robust or strategic with that alliance and then also information that does go out having a health literacy that is more able for people to reach and understand so more of that lower level that's maybe more pictorial sort of areas for Hispanics and things like that the other barrier that we talked about a lot of people as well in the other groups is transportation so cross breadth we're seeing it with the T committee of what's out there and some of the requirements for some of those programs like Yolanda Hetzer earlier is not to work and not to use to go to the doctor so that's some of those issues that kind of prohibit us from getting healthier and then also not only the T, but cap services so similar to even a health worker say that yes they're voucher, you get a voucher but it's very limited if you have to bring your family along with you then that cap service is now $100 so the vouchers go very limited so instead of being able to hand out 10 they're only able to hand out 1 because of the cost so looking at partnering with those agencies to lower and give discounts we talked about there's a lot of initiatives that help had went out to the food carts being healthy food carts discounts were given and fees and all of that but a lot of people still don't know that's an option for them to gain a business and also provide healthier options JPS Connection is a great program but I think it's very hard to utilize it's very hard to access so maybe reviewing some of their intake process and reviewing those forms is our way of making it easier maybe less than the requirements and then also having more intake counselors who are just more numbered and also more in the community to come to JPS having them in those community centers so that they're going to the community and now that we talked about community centers also having more in health and wellness means they have different blood programs but nothing that when we looked at the program that said about diabetes about high blood pressure how do you go to the doctor what questions to ask when you get there and then waving these having a day where we can wave these for enrollment because it's still for a family of four or five that's still very costly and then they can't access and utilize that and then having an inventory of offerings and looking at it being equitable some community centers have a full gym and some of them have one little treadmill in the corner so looking at the the resources that are each at each of them and then maybe even having a blood pressure PSA as a way for a community center to have resources that go along mortality has been around for 20 years and it's still after 20 years seems to be effective so we're looking at lots of initiatives is it far moving is not why they will co-leaders anything you want to add excellent larger group any questions or comments on the health what was that part about that part was about number one the community and one of the the community health workers with the advocacy is what she talked about the example that she gave was say for instance you have a resource you can go to a doctor you have that taken care of but just have an advocate to go on your behalf for the voucher so the example that she gave was say for instance there's a young mother she was married they did not have a vehicle the husband went to work by public transportation but she had two babies who were under school age but she just had twins the voucher to take a cab that cab was still going to cost her about $100 because now the cab service is charging every individual that's in the cab so if you don't have someone who's advocating for you just for that one doctor's visit then what you end up doing is cancel your visit so have the advocate is very important and we need more but then it goes back to what Sharon Wilson was talking about last week with those court advocates they have to have a degree in psychology or whatever and it's like can we remove some of these requirements so those people who are eligible or can do these jobs can get in there and assist to help any others a larger group the cab is on the 20 or whatever they charge but the cab charges for passenger isn't that something that can be addressed so I can explore the voucher cost of the mobility you know we don't know I guess we could I don't know the cab service and what their requirements are but I think every time we get in the cab they do charge for additional for the number of people I don't know probably it's distance wasn't it because wherever you're going to take it up to wherever you're going and then you go back because it's a round trip so even though you get a $25 voucher it might not even cover that whole round trip but your question is could we incorporate a recommendation to address those fees that the cabs charge yeah okay like this per person charge that is so moody but it's almost as if they're taking advantage of the government programs it's not specific to the vouchers it's changed now to where it's like you get in if it's mileage but at the same time if you have 34 people in the truck you reserve charge per head it's not specific to the vouchers just the way they run your business sounds like an invitation for Uber who regulates that yeah there is regulation for that so that would be a question and part with the disparities that the data will come in on a quarter of it although the vouchers paid by it was a station it was a different organization but they only have so much cheap they might only have a hundred but then out of a hundred thousands then who do you give the hundred to because I have the question of who do you give which voucher to give and do you have to be sick or what does that level look like and those with the advocates are more likely to get the vouchers than those without so that's going to be probably a very powerful intersectionality piece because the way fees are generated from a very host of services across all these subcommittees is going to be similar so that's next it's only two of your left so we had housing in criminal justice so we tried to kind of co-mingle and see some of the problems that we had as a whole so for housing some of the issues were obviously like we were talking about the vouchers and so we said how does criminal justice affect the housing or the vouchers that are given out what we notice is people are gravitating to certain areas and that obviously leads to a high crime area just because of the people who are living there and so one of the suggestions was called Van the Box I think that it was brought up that they are exercising this in other cities so rather than on a home application someone asking are you a felon or a convicted felon they take the box out completely and you're no longer allowed to ask that and then for housing and employment correct and then one of the other issues was it goes right back into that and I know or two are praying on affordable housing vouchers meaning they're not necessarily calling in the police when something happens they want to keep receiving their money and just kind of taking advantage of the people who need it that creates a law-based trail in kind of an area I'm not on the housing committee so I'm just but I am on criminal justice committee and some of the things that we've been working on there we've had a lot of different speakers come in some of the things we've noticed so far disparities of FTO so the field training officers that we have 300 300 plus they're right around 330 I think and at 330 18 of the field training officers are African American and 30 I think 23 so the disparities vary greatly and so what that causes is we are no longer having a diverse group of like FTOs are not training the trainees in a diverse situation so we've got two white officers training in East Fort Worth and we're not seeing any kind of positive movement on that so we suggested that the FTOs need to be trained on top of that we're noticing that they need to be trained and execute uniformity so we talked to some of the FTOs they came to one of our meetings and what they said was each officer is trained when they first come in not every officer executes the way they were trained meaning I'm an FTO and I have a rookie and I perform a routine stop I may perform my routine stop different than you will perform yours and that's how I train that's how I train my trainee therefore we don't have any uniformity across how our rookies are being trained so people are just kind of going out and doing whatever they feel see fit in whatever the situation is also to caveat off of that trainees need to be trained with different races we asked if we had any kind of mix with white officers, black officers, white officers, Hispanic officers and they said that's not necessarily happening they're putting white officers with white officers across the city and one other major thing we noticed was they said that cultural training the way they conduct their cultural training is they'll select an officer they'll send them off to get trained and he will come back he or she will come back and train their unit or their force we're suggesting that bring someone from the outside in to train our force I have one question how do they monitor the classroom training and how they're trained versus how they perform in the field training officers they said to us they're trained with some of the higher ranking officers and what was said there is that they have a standard training but that's not to say that when they go out in the field that they actually execute in the same way because they take their personal experiences from the training of their field experiences and that's how they teach the other officer and an officer may not be getting the proper training that's standard for the department and I understand that so how do they monitor that how do they say for instance we get this situation that the DROPOL stopped it so how does that get measured when you take apart how they interact with the community how do they measure that we ask for a methodology actually evaluating officers and they did say they're doing some things they'll come up and look at incidents and they'll evaluate the incident now the way to your question the way they find out certain things is how that happened within the context of an arrest or a stop that may come up as questionable and then that's when they really know what they call a procedure now kind of not it doesn't really come up unless someone makes a complaint is kind of what I gather from Army I'm going to interject just a little bit here maybe around the time there's been a push to get supervisors to routinely audit by cam so that they are monitoring the by cam which there was honestly a push from the union when we first went to body cams not to do that and so now they supervisors are required to normally base this to randomly audit body cams does that mean you're going to find something but yeah we do I advise the police department that they really depend on citizens to tell them when something goes wrong but this audit process should be helping a little bit that was just what I was going to bring up I mean this technology wasn't used ten years ago but the fact that we have it is how to be used as a training to both ways this is how they did it wrong this is how they did it right and you can learn from that someone did suggest the citizens council as well as opposed to the chief's council how do those people get selected but how about we create some sort of citizens council that comes in citizens review board to come in it got a little controversial that's one of the main things on this we've been talking about and how that happens I know there's something there chapter 143 that may be problematic I know they're working with you on that the other thing when we talk about the new technology now also when an officer leaves the vehicle that automatically comes on before they had to turn it on that automatically comes on so that's something new here in the last year how about internal affairs what complaints come in and how those look I think they spoke on it vaguely I don't remember what the question was about internal affairs what did they say about internal I know we spoke on it but I can't remember exactly so here's what happens with the internal affairs you call the number and it takes them two days to get back well it was discussed I don't have my notes here there doesn't work their way up to it I talked to I just happened to run into Friday evening and he basically explained what his process is they're working their way up to that so they're starting off with what happens how do we train them at the start and then they're going to work their way up to the disciplinary part but it helps to know if that's taken if the citizens are being asked to call and report who do they report to what's their process because if you call and nobody calls you back for two days that's apathy or it renders you irrelevant to that conversation yeah, Ty's been having some really good speakers a whole panel more than task force members there so it's been pretty good we were invited to take part of the de-escalation training how many people in this room went to do that I did I don't I'll make a message to Ty I went on morning it was done by an outside group out of Washington do you remember the name of that group anyway they used as part of the training footage from dash cams and body cams none of it was from Fort Worth but they did use that training and this was an outside group and now this was a four hour segment it was a short and it was I thought pretty well done and the fact that they did bring an outside group to do this de-escalation training I thought was a good idea it sounds like we could build on that and say good on ya you did it for this why can't you do it for the cultural training as well I agree and I think there needs to be where they actually really review the interests of Fort Worth as examples from Fort Worth rather than looking at it from other sites because that way there's a better understanding of who they're going with here I have a question about the band box thing a question is is it something that we can regulate for the city to expand the box question both for employment and for rental well that was what I told them that I thought that may be a legal roadblock but I don't know that we can we have any authority to tell employers and we're basically the main public one and we can certainly police ourselves we are doing that but I don't know that we can help private entities what they can do short of they can't discriminate based on protected class but we're going to look at it we also asked about if they can offer incentives that was a barrier that was removed in their incentives for employment or employment and I asked about a program that I've been seeing on social media it's Clean the Slay where it's a lot of homeless the city for worse hiring homeless I thought it was a grant so it's not direct it's a contract so we're trying to you know those kind of programs to have is that all planned expansion sorry they're expending academy and what they had as far as getting records expended on Monday the DA last week connecting that to focused on economic development or housing it goes back to connecting last one the other so Jim brought the word incentivize that's another close cutting all these subject matters what might be the parameters of the city incentivizing the progressive action in support of racial cultural equity plans that's something that not only lands in one area but you can look for ways to incentivize the kind of action you think supports in all of them now the last group economic development so one of our primary efforts is to build more minority businesses especially African American that's where the biggest need is to strengthen the existing companies that we have so and we had former chamber president helping us at our table so it was pointed out that one area that the city could do a lot better at is better outreach first of all coming contractual opportunities that was if you look at your projects for your bond program for example what's coming up the next quarter the next six months and it's 12 months so you're not companies are not clock on short notice where they don't have time to prepare an ad with bid so that seemed to make a lot of sense more explanation of the criteria required to be a city vendor whether that be certification or bonding requirements or whatever more education on that again outreach highlighting individuals that are successful we notice that Robert Stearns our resource person the economic development director said the city is starting a mentor project program so a more mature minority firm can help mentor a more fledgling firm to get them up to speed that we should have compile a database basically of minority businesses by discipline sort of so we know what's available locally so that yes great in some projects there's high minority contract percentage but they're not firms so that's not what we're trying to talk so workforce was a big component we have Judy on the committee with us but can you speak to advocacy here we were just talking about and we ran out of time about this time is just working more closely with some of the economic development initiatives being an advocate for career technical education which is an ongoing growing issue I think seeing how we can work more closely together we were talking about that we have an advantage here that in Texas so many of the employment training programs are together and so I think there's just a lot more we can do but we're not even having the conversation really with the city most of the time any others from that table comment a broader group any questions and I don't admit to a protege that's given it doesn't have to have to be minority to minority it can be any mixture as long as you're coming here the background experience to be exposed to I think they're looking something like red construction you know the bigger companies that's going to be all of those yeah no and it typically isn't and it typically isn't minority over minority I've never seen it like that I didn't understand some great work contributions of thought and experience and opening to some different ideas before we in terms of closing remarks and adjournment by our co-chairs just want to draw attention to them that last packet includes more details on race and cultural equity plans from the city of New Orleans Portland and Louisville and I also want to say Portland will probably reference it as a community plan based upon Seattle's so this is to give you something visual to look at as you're getting the foundations and imagine something that would work specifically for Fort Worth there you'll see some correlations between findings that they have and some of their ideas in Louisville you see that one page that shows priorities and recommendations real succinct so just move for thought now closing remarks from our co-chairs do you have any closing remarks do you have any closing remarks just a couple of things I want to say in closing and how we breathe from one of the things I want everybody to hear today is that the committees that we selected or the committees that the data drove us to select you validated that today and I think it's really important that we stay energized and that we celebrate the things that we've done well as a group so validated that I heard that comes through so now we have to get target that we have to focus on the targets and recommendations that we're going to make I think that we need a clearing house or information so as you work through these committees that you look at that information and that what doesn't fit you don't spend a whole lot of time with it put it on the parking lot leave it there and go maybe go back and move it later but don't get involved down with it because it'll still be a joy and the priority keep that in mind as you have 50 maybe 25 what takes priority and then how do we sustain it and how do we measure and monitor it measuring and monitoring is going to be really important so as you move into your actionable item kind of process how do we measure it and how do we monitor it again thank you all and we're honored to thank our city staff that's been here with us they're still as we're working progress and one of the things I know we need to look at and I wrote a few things is looking at how we connect with the issues that we're dealing with from the six committees and how they intertwine with each other so we'll be looking at creating a process to where we can get information from each committee on any of the recommendations that you are looking at or any questions or concerns that come up and again if you know that you've got a speaker that will touch a little bit of everything especially transportation at your committee that you're going to have a speaker or a resource come and visit with you ask for the name of the committees that they'd like to attend so that way we can create it all from the same skills we're going to get more information from each of the committees so we'll probably have presentations in the next meeting if that's possible so you're just referring to the committees and the resources and data is there a way for your staff to put it all in one place so that you can't make it to the committees is there like one drive or place can we just put that all together information from each of the committees or business so that we keep it up to date on our website I don't know what the rules are and all that but the information to share with the public or information just for the committees we've gotten the stuff that has been presented in our big groups here and also the smaller groups or even if we miss the meeting we've got a lot of email traffic with this effort so just to make sure you miss anything I mean we want to go back and look for something I mean we wish I was looking for something that'd be great drop off I just had one more talk with us I'm sorry this group of people created a model earlier today I'd like to request that they continue to work on that model because it's a picture of how we all function together because I mean if you saw that was a great picture to see how everything just crosses I'm going to be kind ascribing all the notes I'll get it out to everybody because that show really how it all intertwines I know earlier we had talked about redistricting and people were saying how does redistricting fit in here well it fits all those categories because it's all about representation so it is important one of the other things we talked about is realistic recommendations and looking at how we all connect better so we as co-chairs have some work to do that will bring back some information for you all we also talked about having another session like this in the whole body but working in committees I think this was immensely productive today to have criminal justice and transportation sitting with housing well it costs all sorts of things to it's good to balance things off to make sure that we're not as bad as I am so we can do it in one of our regular meetings or something and then in our redistricting our pass force meetings maybe we put 40 minutes or 30 minutes to decide for us to do that on every meeting so let us co-chairs talk about that and look at schedules because we know your time is valuable we don't want to keep you here till 9 o'clock either but we all know that y'all are very committed to this but we get a lot done we're all in the same room very true I think it's been extremely productive I would remind us in order to to maximize our credibility always to focus on race and culture and disparities that are attributable to race and culture so as a preface to any of the committee reports or to the full task force report I would say it's important to document in reference to any of the issues that we're discussing the extent to which we can attribute disparities to race and culture and the causes of those disparities in some cases these disparities are reasonably well documented in other cases they are not so well documented I think if we're going to have credibility it's vitally important that we demonstrate those disparities using hard data and once we can show look there's real there are real disparities and when they're attributable to discriminatory policies or discriminatory practices or whatever the case may be if we can document that there are those disparities then that sets a stage for us to have credibility in launching a recommendation otherwise we're just another group that's addressing issues of poverty or whatever inequity we may want to discuss so I think it's and I know we didn't have the opportunity in this setting to talk about a lot of the statistical data under modeling disparities but that's the hard work that the committees are doing with support from city staff that will give us the basis for launching recommendations that the city council will be able to implement it's going to take a lot more than that it's going to take a lot of influence on your part to get the council to support these recommendations but at least we'll get in the door I think if we can document the true disparities that existed in our community with respect to race and culture yes we have a committee report format that was consistent we have that so my next question is will we have some type of outline or draft for us to start listening to our recommendations because we want to make sure we're covering not just the causes we just don't want to put the recommendations on it we want to cover like you just said the causes the SMEs we use for that we are making the recommendations instead of just a simple recommendation so will we have a template we'll be glad to help you with that good question any other questions can you think of your good questions is there anything we need to do in regard to forming questions or something before our meetings before your meetings what we'll do is get some information about the HRC to you all prior to the meeting if you have questions bring them in to either Angie or Fernando whoever the designated person is and then by the way we can also make sure that those questions will be answered at the meeting I think LaTisha has agreed to provide us with a briefing at our March 19th meeting about the powers and duties of the Human Relations Commission and if we can send out some basic information in advance you can begin to formulate your questions and then we can as to us and Artudo and Rosa and many others who have served on the Human Relations Commission your first-hand encounter I think equally important for the staff members the value of this group when these issues first came up a year ago I told the city manager I told the mayor the group that ought to be dealing with these issues is the Human Relations Commission the group that is legally empowered to address these issues about discrimination and disparate treatment and yet I knew as I was saying it again forgive me for saying it the group does not have the political clout to make a difference on issues as consequences that is why we just bypassed the Human Relations Commission and went to create a new task force it shouldn't be that way the Human Relations Commission ought to be heavyweights that are dealing with these issues and I'm not picking Human Relations I can look at for example the city plan commission when we're dealing with major planning issues in the community do we turn to the city plan commission no we do not but that group is just an afterthought who am I offending I'm offending how does that mean the truth is we don't always take our board's information seriously enough and whenever an issue comes up we create a new task force when we've got a group like the city plan commission that's constituted and have some good folks of course and also the zoning commission it's a way to know what Fernando is saying I remember when we were on the 4th Human Relations Commission they said pretty much all the council members either came through planning zoning or human relations commission to start to be a council member so that was then back there so I don't know what it is to these are the influential groups if they're not currently influential we need to make them influential and give them the support can I say one thing part of that is we're not getting people to apply so please tell people to apply you know like the last few times that we have tried to find people to fill vacancies there were like two applicants so please get those people to apply if you're interested in applying if you know someone that should be applying you'll see me in 4 years to be supportive why would you want to at the time if it's not why are you going to waste your time or something that's not consequential that's chicken and egg that's chicken and egg that's the other chicken and egg because there's a lot of folks that can't afford to take a day out of work the current zoning chair for example has been using vacation time to come to our meetings I was always fortunate to have an employer that saw it as a benefit now I'm consulting a dependent and I can do that again but that's the other aspect of it too there has to be there's a ton of people that want to we don't need to apply 30 million so we're going to have all boards because they're all throughout the day sure they are we'll talk about the human rights at our next meeting and maybe that's something that we need to look at is representation on our boards and commissions so that we can see the timing and so forth that echoes to what you're saying but good matter is different if you're going to serve that's what happens in so many cases and remember you had a briefing from the city secretary's office several months ago about boards and commissions and those boards and commissions are generally speaking are not reflective of the population of the community obviously human relations commission should be but even the human do you know how many African-Americans are on the human relations commission today I'm looking at this right now today there's two one that was just resigned so we need an African we have one how large is the commission we have another member of commission that's charged with advancing racial equity and there's one African-American what's wrong with this picture okay well also the other question is yeah I'm not blaming anybody but it's a bad deal okay human court works after an African-American female is on there but then they have positions so there's only one person for a position so that's the position is the district not the district though the district it depends on the represent different slots number instead of the city plan commission the city plan commission is by district the human relations commission is not and their ordinance says they're supposed to represent the diversity in the city it's not too recent but it's possible the African-American male was on yeah he actually took a job in Dallas he's moved to Dallas that shows you we've got the work again thank you all for being here and then we'll see you all next time