Mount Prospect places Community Engagement Committee on pause
Mount Prospect's Community Engagement Committee, created in 2019 to help celebrate the community's diversity, is on a "permanent pause" while the village's newly hired diversity, equity and inclusion consultant conducts its work, Mayor Paul Hoefert said.
The future of the committee, which in 2020 hosted a "Community Conversation" on issues of racial justice and equality, was brought up during a more than three-hour village board conversation Tuesday about volunteer panels and commissions.
When former committee member Liz Fischer asked Hoefert about the panel's status, the mayor replied that it is on a pause and, if reinstated, "will definitely have a much more stated mission, a much more concise mission."
"As I see it, we'll take our direction from the DEI consultant," he added.
Fischer said at least some of the committee's members were unaware of the pause.
"We put a lot of time and energy in that, and to not even be told that we were being decommissioned feels very disrespectful," she said. "We were giving to our community, and I feel like that was taken advantage of."
Among the committee members who say they did not know the panel was on pause is Ronak McFadden.
"We have heard time and time again from the community that they really enjoyed (the) community conversation," she said, adding that the committee hoped to meet with the mayor, Village Manager Michael Cassady and the police chief.
But Hoefert said the village had received a communication from the committee expressing the desire to take a break.
"Now that we're going down the DEI journey, it may reconstitute in a different format," he said.
The village board last week hired Chicago-based inQUEST Consulting LLC, at a cost of up to $84,000, to lead efforts to examine diversity issues in the community. The firm expects to issue a report in about three months.