The Emporia Gazette

May 27, 2012

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With less than a majority of its members present, the Emporia Human Relations Commission couldn’t call a meeting to order Monday night. So director Patty Gilligan presided over an informal brainstorming session instead.

Gilligan was asked by the city commission to have the HRC come up with ideas for projects that would work toward making Emporia a more inclusive community, and the lack of a quorum Monday night provided the group the opportunity to start work on that request.

Gilligan asked the four members present — Prue Schmidt, William Cogswell, Steve Ihde and Patty Lipson — to start thinking of ways to make Emporia more inclusive. Wielding a marker, Gilligan then jotted down their ideas on a large flip pad sitting on an easel. City Manager Matt Zimmerman, also in attendance, offered some of his thoughts, too.

At first, Gilligan wanted to know what the concept of an “inclusive community” meant to the HRC members. Members threw out various criteria, such as having lots of different kinds of people and having different programs to meet the needs of a diverse group of residents.

Schmidt said she believed that to be inclusive, Emporia had to address the “availability of services in the community for all groups. And we cannot leave out those who are not Hispanic and those who are not refugees. If it’s inclusive, it needs to include everyone in Emporia.”

Gilligan said she didn’t want the focus of being an inclusive community to be entirely on racial diversity. She said some people in the disability community had requested that the city form a disability advisory committee.

Schmidt said she would like to form a task force-type body, perhaps overseen by the city, that included representatives of all different kinds of people. The prospect of forming such a task force or coalition quickly became the center of the discussion.

“Maybe our project is setting up this inclusive coalition,” Lipsom said. “Not micromanaging it, not actually running it, but getting it established.”

Ihde said he would like to see such a coalition have both retiree and student representatives. The idea was raised that a student could be formally appointed to a one-year term on the coalition, and Ihde noted how good that might look on a student’s resume.

“That’d be kind of a win-win,” he said. “Get that viewpoint and give them something to promote themselves.”

The informal session lasted about an hour and 20 minutes before coming to an end.

Resignation

Minutes before the session began Monday, Gilligan informed Zimmerman that Jeannelle Tebbetts had submitted her resignation from the HRC.

Gilligan said after the meeting that in Tebbetts’ resignation letter, “She just said that she was going to be very pressed for time and didn’t think she’d be able to serve on the commission.”

Tebbetts’ term would have expired in May 2008.