Golden Valley’s Equity Planners Continue to Seek Community Input
Golden Valley city leaders continue work on updating, improving, and focusing the city’s Equity Plan with a recent series of community information sessions and a postcard campaign this spring to further engage the public.
Equity and Inclusion Manager Seth Kaempfer explained that the equity plan was first adopted in some form in 2017, and has been updated several times since then.
“This plan is much more inward-facing than it is externally-facing,” Kaempfer said. “It really takes a look at how we make sure our services and our resources and accessible to community, that they’re providing additional opportunity, but also taking a look at are we creating any disparities or inequities with what we’re doing, and addressing those from the front end to make sure that we have more and stronger and more dynamic impact from the back end.”
He said late in 2024, the city hosted community information sessions and gathered input from residents and business owners.
“This plan is to create a better local government that will have better local impact to our community, so they need to be aware of what has been the progress,” he said. “We had some really wonderful community members show up to provide their input about what should come next and just their insight about what they’re feeling about what this plan currently looks like and its current implementation.”
The city will send out three postcards later this spring, one each with the words “Diversity is You,” “Equity is You,” and “Inclusion is You” written on them, with QR codes on the back that Kaempfer says will take users to a site to help give input on a equity vision statement.
“Instead of me creating one that may not actually resonate or be appropriate, (a plan) that our community is crafting and I can present it to council,” is the goal, according to Kaempfer.
He also pointed out efforts by the police department’s community engagement specialists to better inform the department about its policies.
