FOSTER A WELCOMING COMMUNITY

Foster a welcoming culture within the City workforce and leadership that fully values the knowledge, skills, abilities, and perspectives of the Black community.

Actions

• Establish and implement robust search, recruiting, and hiring practices within the City of Williamsburg’s Human Resource framework to ensure the City is actively seeking African American employees.

• Nurture a pipeline/network of diverse candidates.

• Leverage specialized job searches/boards.

• Re-evaluate current interview practices to assure the absence of biased questions, processes, and environments.

• Maximize and develop talent in the recruiting system, internal and external.

• Facilitate a system to assure inclusive and belonging onboarding practices as well as an inclusive and belonging culture and environment.

• Capture and study analytics to measure efforts and outcomes.

• Use research-supported best practices to recruit, cultivate, hire, promote, and attend to the perspectives of Black employees.

• Use restorative justice practices to address racial harms that occur within the City workforce.

• Establish teams (vertical, different departments, cross-silos) to work on implementing the City’s vision as well as the City’s Goals, Initiatives, and Outcomes.

• Provide continuous training to all new and existing employees in Cultural Inclusion and Competencies.

• Establish an accountability apparatus to ensure the City fulfills its commitment to ongoing engagement, conversation, sharing of information, relationship-building, and restorative justice.

Agencies

• Human Resources Department of the City of Williamsburg

• All elected, non-elected City leaders or appointees

• All City employees

• Outside consultant to facilitate restructuring based on best practices for effective internal systems

• York, James City, Williamsburg NAACP

• Greater Williamsburg TraumaInformed Community Network

• Juneteenth Community Consortium

• Publicity/Public Relations personnel

• William & Mary Diversity, Inclusion, Equity & Belonging

• Director of Marketing Colonial Williamsburg

• Virginia Workforce Development Center

• Williamsburg Small Business Development Center

• Chamber of Commerce

Outcomes

• A continuous process of review and improvement, including regular reports on steps taken and success rates and trends in hiring, retention, and promotion of African Americans.

• At least five years of ongoing review, continuous research, and public quarterly reports measuring trends.

• A City that models the robust workforce and ecosystem diversity reflective of the One WIlliamsburg vision.