Washington Live Steve.

Our invocation will be given this evening by Councilwoman Dinera Barber, followed by the Pledge of Religion.

Those of you who would um like to join me in prayer, bow your heads at this time.

Gracious God, we thank you for this beautiful day.

We thank you for the opportunity to assemble in this place.

We ask you, God, to be in our midst, give us wisdom, give the council members, give each of us wisdom and knowledge to make the best decisions on behalf of our citizens and those who reside here in our city.

We ask you, God, to uh protect all of us in this space, protect our uh city workers, protect our public uh safety officers, our firemen, even our Lyman God and all those who put themselves in danger each and every day so that we may live the best life that we possibly can here in our community.

God, we ask you just to bless each and everyone under the sound of my voice, and God continue to bless our city, continue to give us the wisdom and knowledge needed to grow our community and to meet the needs of those who live here in our community and help us to be good partners, partners not only within the boundaries of our community, but those who are outside of our community.

And God, we just ask you to bless each and everyone that um represents Gastonia.

In Jesus' name we pray, amen.

Amen.

Let us stay.

Our nation, under God, the individual with liberty and justice for all.

You may be city.

First item on the item C, the adoption of the agenda.

I will like to add that we have a considered agenda item.

Um G a resolution to approve the updates to the gas social district bank visit and operations plans as before you that must be included as part of the uh adoption of the agenda.

So what it wishes council motion to approve with the addition of item G.

Second.

Oh, motion second, all in favor, please indicate.

Thank you very much.

Other item D, the approval of the minutes for the regular city council meeting on July the 18th.

Um, I was going to look.

Yeah, sure.

Okay.

Yes, I move to approve.

Second.

Well, motion, second, all in favor, please indicate.

Thank you very much.

And item E of the presentation update on the City of Gas Study Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Program.

Uh present to see if Ms.

Shri and our coordinator, which you who is our coordinator of the uh good evening, Suri.

Good evening, Mayor, members of council, uh, community members and partners.

Um bring my presentation up.

All right.

So I am um thank you for providing me the opportunity to come before you today to give you an update of our city's diversity, equity, and inclusion strategy.

This presentation will include an overview of our accomplishments, our current activities, and the direction uh that we are headed in with our strategy.

I stress the word hour and uh my initial statements and we because while I am happy to serve as the coordinator of our DEI initiative and have the awesome responsibility to lead this work.

Um, and over the last two and a half years, let me just say it has been an enormous uh task upon me and very challenging and tremendously honorable for me to do this.

This is not a one-person effort, right?

It is our commitment as an organization.

This is not a single one person, and if I can be candidate, I just feel like I'm representing um not only you, Mayor and Council, but all of the employees within the city of Gastonia.

Um our diversity, equity, and inclusion uh principles that we adopted when we first started our program was born out of our organization's core values.

I underline on this slide the word inclusiveness, because that's embedded in our our core values.

We adopted these strategies and a commitment statement, and our commitment statement reads that the city of Gastonia is committed to creating and maintaining a work environment that is inclusive, equitable, and welcome welcoming.

We value diversity and promise to honor your experiences, perspectives, and unique identities.

And this is speaking directly to staff who are working now and anyone who was seeking opportunity to work with in our organization.

Our guiding principles guide our work.

But this is not, this is a journey and it's not a one-and-done initiative.

Our work for advancing equity and inclusion in the city of Gastonia is an adopted change model approach.

This approach is both crafted after our needs as an organization, but it's built on best practices throughout the nation.

In fact, our organization is a member of the government alliance for race and equity, which is a collective of local governments, both county, city, towns, all over the United States who are organizing to have equity and inclusion as a part of their work.

So our model starts with normalizing conversations about diversity and equity and inclusion.

That you will see with our training program that we develop.

Our model also includes organizing people internally and externally to advance the work.

And then finally operationalizing by using data, best practices to develop our strategies.

What diversity equity inclusion is and how we define it as an organization.

So diversity includes just the representation of various identities.

It includes the diversity that we know we have within our employee base, both those things you can see, which are gender, race, sometimes you can see age, and those things that you may not be able to see, which are parental status, even disability, tenure within the organization, religion.

It includes a whole host of things, perspectives, ways of thinking.