Meeting_Body
EXECUTIVE MANAGEMENT COMMITTEE
FEBRUARY 18, 2021
Subject
SUBJECT: FEBRUARY 2021 EQUITY AND RACE PROGRAM UPDATE
Action
ACTION: RECEIVE AND FILE
Heading
RECOMMENDATION
Title
RECEIVE AND FILE February 2021 status report on the Equity and Race Program.
Issue
ISSUE
This report provides an update on Metro's Equity and Race Program.
Background
BACKGROUND
Metro defines Equity as both an outcome and a process to address racial, socioeconomic, and gender disparities, to ensure fair and just access - with respect to where you begin and your capacity to improve from that starting point - to opportunities, including jobs, housing, education, mobility options, and healthier communities. It is achieved when one's outcomes in life are not predetermined, in a statistical or experiential sense, on their racial, economic, or social identities. It requires community informed and needs-based provision, implementation, and impact of services, programs, and policies that reduce and ultimately prevent disparities.
Metro's Equity Platform ("Platform"), which provides a framework for advancing equity, was approved by the Metro Board of Directors ("Board") in March 2018 (Attachment A). The core objective is to increase access to opportunities including housing, jobs, healthcare, education, and other key determinants of health and thriving communities. The Platform is explicit in its focus on the vast disparities that exist in access to opportunity and is intended to help identify and implement projects or programs that reduce and ultimately eliminate those disparities. It is driven by access needs, not geographic equality, though some disparities have a geographic element. The Platform has been incorporated into Metro's Vision 2028 Strategic Plan and must be a critical factor in our decision making. In August 2020, Metro published an Equity and Race Program Update (Attachment A) outlining the activities taken under the leadership of Metro's new Executive ...
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