Charlottesville Mayor Dave Norris unveiled a plan for building and maintaining a more diverse Charlottesville workforce Thursday. As part of the plan, the City could partner with the University to increase outreach efforts to potential minority employees.
Many local employers have said increasing diversity is a top priority, Norris said, noting that the City as a whole should work to improve its efforts to attract professionals of different races and ethnic backgrounds.
Norris said he hopes the University will partner with the City to promote the initiative, which he called a “targeted outreach program.”
“U.Va. is already a little bit ahead of us in terms of trying to recruit a more diverse faculty and staff, but they have acknowledged that it would really help if we did it jointly,” Norris said. “We are ... encouraging professionals of color to think of [Charlottesville] as what we call a ‘Community of Choice.’ We hope they will relocate and put down roots here.”
Despite the University’s high black graduation rate, most black students leave the Charlottesville area after graduating, Norris said.
“What I want to see us do as a city and a community is try to reach out to third- and fourth-years at the University to whom it may never have occurred to stay in Charlottesville,” he said. “We could create internships and opportunities so that they will consider staying and adding to the local workforce.”
Norris said the City’s diversity efforts, however, will not only focus on minority graduates.
“We are also looking at people who are mid-career — asking how we present Charlottesville as a more attractive place for professionals of color to put down roots,” Norris said.
In addition to recruiting diverse professionals from outside the area, Norris said he hopes to grow a more diverse workforce from within the community. He cited the City’s growing summer youth employment program — which he said has seen a high level of participation from black students — as an example of these efforts. Another initiative meant to expand the City’s workforce diversity is the African-American Teaching Fellows program, which Norris said aims to recruit local black citizens as teachers, as well as provide mentoring and support services.
Other fields in which the City wishes to generate minority job interest include nursing and law enforcement, Norris said.
The Charlottesville initiative, through which the City could partner with the University, is still in its conceptual stages right now, though, said Bill Harvey, the University’s chief officer for diversity and equity. Harvey was invited by the City to work on the initiative.
“It’s a little bit too early to tell until we begin to go through the process and see what the program will look like,” Harvey said. “We will layout the framework of the University’s involvement and what the program will look like overall. I suspect once we have a couple of meetings in the summer, in the fall we will probably have a blueprint of action.”
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