The city of St. Louis Park hired a Racial Equity Coordinator, Alicia Sojourner, who joined the team on January 17th of this year, according to city manager Tom Harmening.

Sojourner said her primary task will be to create a focus on racial equity throughout the city.  

“Overall it’s really to help the city move their racial equity work forward within all of our departments, and also coordinating some of the external work.” Sojourner said. “Being that this is a new position, it will probably change overtime, but right now what that looks like is that all of the different departments that the city has are able to do the work through a racial equity lens.”

According to Harmening, the city council became aware of the importance of racial equity over two years ago, and have worked to include all members of a diversifying community.

“Given the fact that our country, our state, our community will be becoming more diverse as time goes on, we wanted to make sure that the way that we were providing our services meet the needs of everybody in our community, no matter the color of their skin or the culture they might have, their religion,” Harmening said.

Harmening said that while the diversity of the city staff can still be improved, the city has made strides in their hiring process, recently beginning to take names off their job applications to avoid implicit bias.  

“The employees who work for St. Louis Park are predominantly white, the employees that work here do not reflect the community that we work for,” Harmening said. “One of the things we started to look at, and something I think we have made some progress in, is how we recruit and hire people.”

According to Sojourner, St. Louis Park is among the first to hire a Racial Equity Coordinator.

“Within the Minnesota suburbs we are the first city to have an actual person dedicated,” Sojourner said. “Minneapolis and Saint Paul have been on a racial equity journey for awhile with folks dedicated to doing the job, but for a suburban city we are a leader in that.”

Sojourner said she feels her previous experience from her positions as Racial Equity Consultant at YWCA, and as the Director of Organizing Civic Engagement at the ChildCare WORKS company will help her accomplish the equity goals of St. Louis Park.

“With that combination of positions, I think I’m able to bring those experiences into the city of St. Louis Park and utilize it to great the place of growth and change with some of the racial equity that has already been happening,” Sojourner said. “I was able to fill by toolbox with some best practices and how we can cross pollinate that into here, St. Louis Park.”

Harminger said the city hopes to collaborate with the schools in the district to work towards it’s equity goals.

“We want to partner with the school district as much as we can, they have done a lot of work in this area,” Harminger said. “The extent we can learn from them, that will be a bonus for us and to the extent that we can work together and make an even more powerful change I think is a good thing for the community.”

According to Sojourner, action is just now being taken, after many years of discussion and raising awareness.  

“This conversation has been around historically for a long time,” Sojourner said. “The difference is that now it’s not just a conversation, now we are moving it into a place of cultural change, disrupting the status quo in order to actually create that place of change.”

Sojourner said community members can make a difference by making small changes in the way they consume goods.

“I tell folks sometimes it’s about those thousand little things that you do and change,” Sojourner said. “Ordering a meal from a local immigrant-owned restaurant, versus let’s say chipotle, it’s those thousand little things that we do that say ‘I care about you, I want you as part of this community, I see you and I hear you.’”