Sean Murray, Prosper Portland Director of Human Resources
Member, Prosper Portland Equity Council
Board Member, Urban League of Portland
Past Chief Human Resources Officer – Portland Public Schools
Past Human Resources Director – Portland Police Bureau
What we learned
In the past year Prosper Portland has implemented new strategies to achieve our equity goals in recruitment, hiring, and staff development, inspired by a cultural assessment by our entire staff and the agency’s new communications strategy and brand.
We’ve expanded our targeted recruitments to include community partners like the Hispanic Chamber, Urban League and Partners in Diversity.
We’ve ensured that our interview panels are diverse and reflective of the communities we serve.
We’ve developed equity questions for use in all interviews to ensure that candidates are able and willing to embrace our equity work.
Our performance evaluation process now includes social equity as a competency to evaluate for all employees.
And we continue to implement trainings to help Prosper Portland staff understand how our work aligns with social equity.
Why it mattered
Internal equity is foundational to our goal of becoming an anti-racist organization.
In the past year we’ve hired 18 new employees – 50 percent of whom are people of color. Our continued improvement in cross-cultural competency and equitable hiring honors the public trust in Prosper Portland and demonstrates our commitment to responsible stewardship of the public dollars that fund our work.
