Culver City's Collaborations
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is something no City can do alone. Through Collaborations with LA vs. Hate, GARE, the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission, and surrounding municipalities, Culver City strives to ensure we have the latest information, resources, and tools at our disposal.
GARE
In 2016, the City Council held a workshop aimed at preparing a Strategic Plan for the City. The workshop identified “promoting workforce diversity and development” as one of its key objectives. Shortly thereafter, various City Council and staff attended a presentation given by the Government Alliance on Race and Equity (GARE), which led the City to join the organization as an official member. GARE is a national network of local governments working to achieve racial equity and to advance opportunities for all. GARE leads with race to acknowledge that racial inequity has been built into all sectors of government, rendering disparate outcomes for people of color. As public servants, we have the opportunity to improve programs and policies that support and uplift communities instead of maintaining decades of systemic marginalization.
In late 2016, a cohort of staff representing all departments formed. Staff in the cohort attended a year-long series of courses conducted by Race Forward. In late 2017, the City created an additional cohort who completed the same curriculum. The work continues today with a GARE Core team consisting of members from both cohorts. Together, using Adaptive Leadership principles, the two cohorts have teamed up to prepare the City’s Racial Equity Action Plan (REAP), a document that aims to normalize conversations around race, organize staff capacity through training, and operationalize racial equity by embedding a racial equity lens into routine decision-making. Through the use of Results Based Accountability, the City can start to develop its vision for racial equity in partnership with the community. One of the training courses identified in the REAP is to attend staff training on implicit bias. In 2018, 173 employees attended Reverend Dr. Bryant T. Marks’s 4-hour Implicit Bias training course, which identifies the unconscious biases we all hold and how these biases can have significant and detrimental implications in our everyday decision-making.
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County of Los Angeles Commission on Human Relations
Culver City has a long-standing history of collaborating with the County of Los Angeles Commission on Human Relations to bring the Culver City community the latest hate crime reports, statistics, and efforts such as LA vs. Hate's United Against Hate week dedicated to promoting positive human relations in our richly diverse, multicultural county.
"The County of Los Angeles Commission on Human Relations works to develop programs that proactively address racism, homophobia, religious prejudice, linguistic bias, anti-immigrant sentiment, and other divisive attitudes that can lead to intercultural tension, hate crimes, and related violence. Partnering with law enforcement, schools, cities, community-based organizations, youth, academics, policy makers, businesses, and other leaders, the Commission brings key players together to resolve immediate intercultural conflicts and to work toward the longer term aim of eradicating bias and prejudice."