The town of Elon may be about to bid farewell to a citizen advisory board that tries to promote the values of equity, diversity, and inclusivity in municipal government.
Yet, it isn’t some sort of conservative backlash that has imperiled Elon’s committee on diversity, equity, and belonging. Instead, this six-member group, which sprung into being about three years ago, appears to be the victim of its own, unmitigated success.
Since its creation in the fall 2022, the town’s committee on diversity, equity, and belonging has been officially tasked with the mission of combing through the town’s ordinances to weed out any “bias or differential effects” from the text of these rules.
For all intents and purposes, the committee fulfilled this charge in October of 2023. That month, the group’s members appeared before Elon’s town council to present the results of a month’s long review of the town’s ordinances.
Based on their reading of the text, the committee’s representatives declared the ordinances to be free of any glaring examples of discrimination. They went on to recommend a few tweaks to the code to address gender-specific references that appear in the text. In response, the council updated an existing disclaimer to clarify that both gender-specific and gender-neutral language applies to “all gender identities, as well as firms, partnerships, and corporations.”
Following this presentation, Wendy Scott, the committee’s co-chair, informed the town’s leaders that she and her colleagues saw ways to expand their role beyond their original imperative from the council.
“This is about building harmony in the community and people feeling that their concerns are being heard,” she went on to explain before the council gave the committee its leave to explore these possibilities.
The council has heard very little from the committee since Scott’s declaration two and a half years ago.
This relative silence prompted Elon’s mayor Emily Sharpe to revisit the group’s ongoing mission during a town council meeting earlier this year. Sharpe added that her own conversations with the group’s members have convinced her that the committee has largely been rudderless since it completed its review of the ordinances.
“I don’t want people to be meeting just for the sake of meeting,” she went on to assert when she broached the matter on January 13.
Sharpe assured the rest of the council that the committee’s members still have a lot of gusto to do something useful on behalf of the town. To this end, she suggested that the council could rejigger the group’s mission and, perhaps, even bestow it with a new moniker to enshrine this revision.
As a potential candidate for a new name, Sharpe proposed “Respect, Include, Support, and Engage,” or RISE, which she said seemed to sum up the inclinations of the committee’s own members. The mayor went on to say that the rechristened group could serve as a liaison between the town’s leaders and their constituents in order to encourage public participation and volunteerism within the community.
“It’d be about coming together,” she added, “building each other up, and building community.”
Sharpe said that she hopes to hear back from the group’s members about this prospective change – which she said may eventually come back before the council in the form of a formal proposal.
