About

The City of Richmond’s Office of Equity and Inclusion was established in 2021 and aims to work alongside city leadership and staff, community members and partners to build a strong foundation for the collective work of advancing equity, inclusion and justice within the City’s internal and external facing policies, practices, operations and overall culture. As a member of the Government Alliance on Race and Equity, a national network of government localities working to achieve racial equity, our goal is to create a more equitable and inclusive culture that benefits all Richmonders, particularly the City’s most historically marginalized communities, as well as city staff.

Mission and Purpose

The City of Richmond’s Office of Equity and Inclusion seeks to provide guidance, facilitation, tools and resources to city staff that will increase awareness around critical concepts such as racial equity, inclusion, belonging, cultural competency, why these concepts matter and the role that local government plays in advancing equity and inclusion on a daily basis in Richmond.

The Office of Equity and Inclusion aims to increase the collective understanding of the City’s role and responsibility in advancing equity within and across all city offices and departments in order to dismantle institutional racism and other oppressive elements that have been historically engrained within city policies, practices and culture and that have led to generations-long disparities along racial and socioeconomic lines within the City of Richmond.

The goal: to purposefully and intentionally institutionalize equity, inclusion and justice in ways that will lead to meaningful, long-term, population-level outcomes across all issue areas for the City’s most historically marginalized, overlooked and underserved communities.

The work of the Office of Equity and Inclusion is collaborative in nature.

Objectives include:

• To help develop a collective, cohesive understanding of racial equity, inclusion, cultural competency and belonging amongst city leadership and staff
• To help city leadership and staff better comprehend and embrace the role of government in advancing racial equity and justice
• To help create the groundwork for normalizing and operationalizing equity and inclusion throughout all city departments/offices so that all leadership and staff operate with an equity lens and that equity and inclusion become embedded within all city policies, daily operations and overall culture
• To work with community members and other stakeholders to collaboratively advance equity work within the City