Walsh announces creation of Office of Diversity

Boston Mayor Martin Walsh announced Wednesday  the formation of the Mayor’s Office of Diversity, which will be dedicated to increasing diversity across city leadership.

The office aims to more accurately reflect all ethnicities of the Boston community, according to a Wednesday press release.

“Increasing our diversity across the workforce, we want to make sure that city government and the business that the city conducts reflects the people that we represent,” said Kate Norton, press secretary for Walsh.

Walsh appointed Shaun Blugh as chief diversity officer and Freda Brasfield as deputy chief diversity officer of the newly created office. Blugh currently serves as the director of due diligence for IMB Development Corporation. Brasfield has served as the administration and finance manager for the mayor’s office since 2011.

“Their role is in providing the strategic leadership role, to set some hard, quantifiable goals for, as we described, this diversity agenda,” Norton said. “They’re well-qualified, and they’ll be a fantastic addition to the administration.”

The newly appointed officers will be responsible for setting benchmarks and ensuring the achievement of those benchmarks, the release stated.

“The Mayor’s Office of Diversity will also be tasked with analyzing and improving the city’s procurement strategies, to support and increase opportunities for minority and woman-owned businesses to engage directly with the city of Boston,” the release stated.

Diversity has been one of Walsh’s long-term priorities, according to the release.

“Even before being sworn in as Mayor, I made some very ambitious and serious promises about increasing diversity across our workforce and ensuring that City government reflects the people we represent,” Walsh said in the release. “I’m proud of the steps we’ve taken and the progress we’ve made, and I know that the addition of Shaun in this Chief Diversity Officer role will serve to strengthen and grow the foundation we’ve built.”

Fred Bayles, associate professor of journalism at Boston University’s College of Communication, said the problems of racial inequality Walsh is trying to tackle are evident throughout the city’s leadership.

“People in power don’t necessarily reflect the demographics of the city,” he said. “What we are seeing here is a delayed advancement of ethnic minorities that are slow to take over bureaucracies.”

It takes a gradual process to bring people into the bureaucracy that have the right experience and are also racially diverse, Bayles said.

“The government has to tread very carefully if they are going to do this in a quota system because quite frankly, you get fairly angry people who are not offered certain jobs because they are not of the right ethnicity,” he said. “Certainly a case can be made that you want to have the city administration reflect the people that it serves, but on the other side of the coin, you have a bureaucracy already in place that has some experience and to take that over eliminates some of that expertise.”

Several residents said increased racial diversity will be beneficial to the community.

Rosa Juan, 66, of Jamaica Plain, said she supports Walsh’s efforts to create a more diverse leadership system.

“We need representatives of diverse backgrounds,” she said. “Right now, if we look at the ethnicities of people who ride on different T lines, it’s blatantly obvious that some are filled with white people while others are filled with Latinos. To create a cultured government, and thus cultured Boston, we need to expose other ethnicities to public official positions.”

Jimmy Morgan, 28, of Brighton, said diversity is beneficial when choosing those in leadership roles but only if also backed by merit.

“Anything diversity is good as long as it’s not done in an overly obvious way,” Morgan said. “As long as it’s all still based upon merit, then it can only be a benefit for Boston.”