City councilors were approached last week by a prominent diversity, equity and inclusion leader in the state to offer suggestions and advice to the city of Concord.
James McKim, a professional consultant and president of the Manchester NAACP, expressed his interest in helping to direct the city toward inclusive belonging while eliminating systemic barriers that can hinder a growing minority population, he said.
Concord is home to a growing number of immigrants and refugees who have resettled in the state’s capital city. The Heights neighborhood is considered one of the most diverse in all of New Hampshire. While the city is 88% white, people of color have little representation in city government, an issue that organizations like Change for Concord have asked city leaders to address.
In response, Mayor Jim Bouley convened a diversity, equity and inclusion committee to discuss solutions for the city. The committee met Monday, and McKim decided to join the conversation.
“This is the challenge that we’re starting to work with – state services get somebody into the United States, and into Concord for example, and gets them to the point where they probably have housing and maybe a job, but that’s it,” McKim said in an interview with the Monitor. “Folks are on their own to really learn the way that our society works here. Not having that knowledge, it’s a barrier.”
McKim said the necessity for refugees and immigrants to often work more than one job to pay the bills makes it difficult for marginalized communities to participate in city government, which is lacking in diverse representation. They tend to work hourly jobs without flexible schedules and often don’t have access to educational resources, English-language classes or reliable transportation. Besides those obstacles, they can be fearful of government due to experiences in their native countries, which limits their willingness to participate.
Councilors were willing to listen.
“We need to put together a process that can take a hard and detailed look at the systemic barriers that might be in place and things we might not even be aware of,” City Councilor and committee member Byron Champlin said during the meeting. “There are things that aren’t obvious to us as individuals but are extremely apparent to those out there living their day-to-day lives.”
When considering members for boards and committees, an “affinity bias” often exists that prevents the selection of people who might look different, McKim said. For example, members of a board or commission that is majority white might recognize their lack of diversity, or worse, they believe that another white person will do a better job and become less likely to welcome someone different than them.
“That comes from the fact that we as a society have been ingrained to believe that people who look like us are going to be better for a position than someone that is a person of color,” he said. “These biases are a barrier.”
To break those barriers down, boards, commissions, organizations and the city as a whole should work toward hiring more diverse representation to model inclusion and acceptance, experts say.
“Seeing Black people in leadership roles is huge; people want to see people like them,” McKim said. “If you’re looking at it from the perspective of individuals who might want to apply for these positions, if they don’t see someone who looks like them, there is not that affinity there. Why would they put themselves up for that?”
Despite 12% of Concord residents who identify as non-white, diverse representation on city boards and commissions is less than 1%, according to a tally complied by City Councilor Stacy Brown, who is not a member of the diversity committee. While the city has made some effort to hire more diverse employees, notably in the police department, virtually all city department heads are white and, with a few exceptions, male.
The Concord Police Department employs six male officers that identify as part of the BIPOC community and 29 women out of about 90 positions, not including vacancies the department is trying to fill, said Deputy Chief John Thomas.
Overall, New Hampshire’s police force remains overwhelmingly white, despite efforts to diversify their ranks by hiring more Black, Latino and female officers. A few agencies have new leadership, including the first Black police chief in Portsmouth, the first Black sheriff in Strafford County and a Black assistant commissioner in the state Department of Safety.
Bobbie Bagley began working for the city of Nashua in 2007 as a public health nurse. Now she’s the director of the city’s public health division.
Her daily focus is on the needs of the entire community, she said.
“Whether you’re a person of color or not, you want to make sure you’re addressing the needs of the community holistically and with equity,” she said. “When you come from the context of being a person of color, you have that lived experience and you tend to look at how you do your work from that view.”
As a director in the city, she serves alongside at least five other women but is the only person of color. In 2017, the city began DEI training for city employees to help them understand and broaden their lens to look at initiatives through a more inclusive and welcoming scope.
“The mayor in Nashua saw that this was important and took great efforts to try to diversify the commissions in the city by increasing the number of members, which was his way of trying to broaden that and make those opportunities available,” Bagley said. “The issue or the problem you’ll find is that people of color don’t want to be the educators – city leaders need to be invested in the community and have that representation plan to have individuals at your table that represent diversity in this state and growing populations.”
That should include socioeconomic class, the unhoused population, different races, genders, ages, ethnicities and sexualities and physically and mentally disabled individuals, she continued.
Quinci Worthey, the Concord School District’s director of diversity, equity, inclusion and justice, who was hired last year, is looking forward to joining forces with the city to reach and support all members of the community, including its youth.
“There is no reason why we shouldn’t be aligned on making Concord a place where kids can thrive and succeed. From a city standpoint, they want folks to stay and grow in Concord as a whole, and we should be aligned as far as the services we are providing families and students,” he said.
Services should include transportation, summer programming, park access, food access and housing, he said.
In his position, Worthey said he acts as an advocate for students, parents, teachers. In his first year on the job, he has been tracking incident reports related to racism and discrimination to see what the progress will look like as the district advances its diversity initiatives in the next several years. To target racism and discrimination, which makes up the majority of incidents, Worthey will work directly with students and staff to address biases and micro-aggressions, he said.
The district is also trying to hire and recruit teachers of diverse backgrounds to better represent the student population. (See related story.)
The school district’s initiatives parallel the goals of the city’s diversity committee to include breaking down systemic barriers, minimizing stigmas associated with diverse populations and implementing professional development plans for staff. But it takes work getting there.
“There is no way you’re going to have these conversations about these topics and not bring up something that is going to be sensitive to someone in some way, but if it’s coming from a good place, a place of learning and understanding, we can work with that,” Worthey said.
Bouley is excited about the opportunity to work closely with the school district, which is a separate government entity from the city of Concord, a unique arrangement in the state.
“This is one of the few times I can remember in my history with city government that the city and the school district have been able to come together to reach almost every person in the community,” Bouley said.
Concord’s diversity committee, which is made up of Bouley, Champlin and City Councilor Zandra Rice Hawkins, hosted a series of listening sessions for residents to voice their concerns that included lack of representation, access to resources, transportation, housing and ADA accessibility. All the committee members are white, but efforts are underway to add more diversity to the committee.
“What was significant to me were the personal stories and the fact that there are members of our community who have experienced exclusion and harassment and walked away with the impression that they were not equal in our community,” Champlin said. “That’s something that really needs to be addressed on a long term basis.”
However, it’s important that the conversation includes the New American communities as well as people of different genders, religions, sexualities and those living with disabilities, Champlin continued.
While the city can look to other communities to advance its progress towards its goals, its efforts need to be tailored to the community.
For example, Concord’s non-white population includes many refugees who were relocated here, while Nashua’s population includes immigrants who moved there for job opportunities, particularly in the technology sector.
Nashua, which has twice the population of Concord, has an Asian population that makes up 8% of the city’s residents compared to 3.9% in Concord, according to statistics from the U.S. Census. Similarly, Concord’s population is 3.8% Hispanic, compared to 13% in Nashua. The difference for refugees is often the ability to navigate through a new society, compared to other diverse populations that grew up or were born here.
“What has worked in Nashua probably won’t work as well or maybe at all in Concord because of that difference,” McKim said. “They have come to Nashua voluntarily and already know how society and the government works.”
Still, McKim sees Concord’s diversity committee as a genuine attempt to grow, but there’s always room for improvement.
“A DEIJB committee needs to have representation from all of the stakeholders involved, which means that people of color need to be there, but this is a white person’s problem, created by white people, perpetuated by white people, and people of color can’t solve it,” McKim said. “We don’t want people of color spearheading the ship; they can be there and say what they are experiencing feels wrong but for one of us to come up with a solution. … White people need to exhibit equitable inclusion for people of color in what they are doing to set an example for the rest of the city.”
Future efforts could include continuing to hold listening sessions, executing an assessment on where the city is and where the city would like to go, hiring and promoting more employees of color and retaining the services of a professional consultant for guidance.
“Many cities miss the broad definition of diversity and truly bringing all of the stakeholders together,” said McKim, who also acts as a consultant for companies and government organizations. “Concord has a fairly progressive mayor, and he’s committed and he has been at the listening sessions that have happened.”