Wausau’s Liberation and Freedom Committee approves report with focus on community engagement

Damakant Jayshi

Wausau’s Liberation and Freedom Committee on Wednesday approved a report that lists the group’s priorities for 2022, which will next be presented to the City Council.

Chair of the Liberation and Freedom Committee, Tom Kilian, prepared the report, which also focuses on potential strategies for implementing priorities identified. Kilian, who is also a City Council member representing Dist. 3, said he finalized the report based on members’ input and past notes and video recordings of the advisory body’s meetings.

The idea was to apprise the Common Council about the committee’s work and “take their (council’s) temperature on it, Kilian said.

The committee spent several months exploring various ways to engage with the community and seek public feedback on advancing the body’s goals and objectives.

The LFC, an advisory body to the City Council on matters of inclusion, tolerance and acceptance, among others, was established in April 2019. The group was previously known as the Mayor’s Welcoming and Inclusivity Committee.

Some of the priorities include “engaging the public on future committee goals and potential local barriers to inequality, to garner additional public input on these matters” and “facilitating more meaningful interaction opportunities between the committee and the public, through which the committee can better identify and understand relevant community needs and concerns, and so the public learns more about the committee’s role and function.”

The committee aims to accomplish this by disseminating their mission, events, and materials to the public in a more effective manner. They will plan a community engagement meeting for citizen input on committee’s goals and objectives. Another plan is to provide multilingual materials including those translated into Hmong city hall“for certain committee elements and communications, such as potential translations of committee meeting agendas and brief summaries of key committee issues.”

When Kilian sought suggestions from his colleagues for future agenda, member La’Tanya Campbell suggested reaching to the Wausau Policing Task Force to share their report on policing reforms. The Task Force is close to finalizing its report.

The vote was unanimous.

(To read the Liberation and Freedom Committee report, click here, and go to page 5.)