As the new chief of equity for the city of Boston, Karilyn Crockett will work across City Hall departments to assess whether decisions being made create equal opportunities across communities.
Mayor Marty Walsh announced Crockett would head the Equity Cabinet in late June. She told Boston Public Radio on Thursday the role is about addressing equity at every level of city government.
"The mayor has been really clear about wanting to put some extra muscle in the city's work to be intentional about creating an intersectional equity lens to shine on all the work," she said, "and to figure out how City Hall can really be better about doing the work we need to do in terms of racial equity, in terms of economic equity and inclusion, in terms of thinking about health inequities."
A new report has labelled Boston the third most gentrified city in the country. Crockett said when visitors can spend days in Boston without seeing a person of color, despite Boston's status as a majority non-white city, that's a policy failure.
"There's something we're not doing right to really showcase not only the city's richness and prosperity and wealth, and also just letting all of our people truly be in the city, integrated in the city, and just be around," she said.
Crockett has served as the city's director of economic policy and research, and director of small business development, and is a public policy professor at MIT.
