Striking Committee Experience
Article written by Skylar Franke
In 2019 I sat on the Striking Committee to determine who would be selected to sit on each advisory committee. Every four years a Striking Committee is formed with members from various community groups to advise and recommend to the City who should be on each committee. I was selected as the Acting President of the Urban League of London to help make those selections, and was sent a package with the applications, a terms of reference for the Steering Committee and a date and time to show up. No other guidance was provided in advance of that meeting, nor a suggestion for a process on how to actually make the selections for the advisory committees. I went in with an open mind and hoped maybe there would be a recommended process when I arrived at the meeting.
As I read through the application package, I noticed the breadth and degree of experience for applications for the various advisory committees was astounding. Professors, those with lived experience, students, consultants, parents, citizens from across London applied to these advisory committees with a desire to help improve the city we live on. I was impressed with the selection and knew it would be difficult to narrow the choices. Some committees had too many applicants, such as EEPAC, Cycling and Diversity and Inclusion. Others had not enough, like TFAC, AAC and ACE. Deciding who to cut and who to keep was agonizing, especially when so many of these volunteers were so qualified that the city could have hired them as consultants, but instead would have the luxury of free advice.
The selection process was not perfect. In fact, there was no actual process to follow and the City staff told us not to “bring past experiences of individual applicants” into the decision making process because it “was unfair” (although the entire point of the process was to select the best candidates and for example, if someone was repeatedly verbally abusive to other committee members and staff in the past I’m unsure as to why we wouldn’t want them on a committee again).
City staff suggested a process at the beginning of the meeting to simply go down the list of each committee applications and select that way - but then the Striking Committee shifted to my suggestion which was to start with committees that were under their application limits and approve those, then look for duplicate applications and figure out the best spot if they were already put on another committee. We did our best try to get some gender diversity and those of different abilities on the committees but that work was just because Steering Committee members wanted to aim for that, but no other effort was made to ensure an equity lens was approached when determining who was on the committees.
Council agreed with most of our recommendations, but in a few cases ignored the time and effort it took to determine who was placed on which committee. They added and subtracted committee members, who while all were worthy, took away the gender balance we were trying to strike on some of the committees. Since they were not in the room for the discussions they didn’t know that was the intention for the selection of a few committees, and therefore just ignored the recommendation from yet another committee of citizens.
Kudos to Maureen Cassidy for acknowledging that the Councillors knew nothing about the process of the selection of committee members and therefore should have just listened to the Striking Committee or actually just have picked all the committee members themselves. In my opinion, it was clear that City Hall didn’t really care too much about the very important process for selecting who went onto the advisory committees.
Skylar is passionate about building community, environmental advocacy, local food systems, great wine and ethical coffee. She has over 7 years of experience in advancing action in the environmental sector by running a variety of environmental programs in London while working at ReForest London and the London Environmental Network.
Editors note:
Recently we released a statement about our concerns with the current review of the City of London Advisory Committees (ACs.). Advisory Committees are an important component of citizen engagement that provide valuable ways for residents to engage with the City of London and bolster transparency and accountability to City and Council decisions.
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