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Town of Lexington Ad-Hoc Human Rights Organizing Committee Minutes of November 6, 2007 Meeting Draft 11/11/07 Submitted by Deborah Strod Attending: Al Zabin(Chair),Nora Aroyan, Chris Casey,Margaret Coppe(arrived near end),David Horton, Hank Manz, Deborah Strod, Linda Vine Mr. Zabin called the meeting to order at 5:40. 1. The first topic discussed was"What do the Selectman hope we produce?" Mr. Manz stated that the initial hope had been that the Lexington No Place For Hate Steering Committee (LNPFHSC)members would have played a large part in a revised structure. He is not sure how many members will wish to continue and anticipates needing to recruit new participants. The Selectmen hope that the Committee will put forth a structure which supports the work, addresses both the privacy needs of human rights incidents and the need for public proceedings of town committees under Open Meeting Law; and not"reinvent the wheel" in the process,but rather examine what other towns/cities have done, and what Human Rights work is extant in Lexington. 2. Mr. Horton distributed and discussed a brief history of the No Place For Hate program in Lexington(see handout). To be certified, a town needed to do 2-3 activities per year, and the original focus was activity-based; the Steering Committee came later. Sometimes the LNPFHSC would look for things which others could do, rather than managing activities themselves; sometimes they would manage or partner with others. Mr. Horton pointed out that it was never clarified how much the Steering Committee was"steering" versus"operational;"he also said that the sense was that the focus was "more ADL than ACLU" as the LNPFHSC would not have supported a Nazi group marching in town; and the issue of confidentiality, though generally handled without complaint, did not have an official mechanism. The focus included but also went beyond addressing racial bias, and included work on bringing small groups of citizens together to focus on a book, or on dialogue. The LNPFHSC also partnered with other groups to support broader efforts such as the Martin Luther King Day celebration. The Ad-Hoc committee agreed that,while very productive, the LNPFHSC had suffered somewhat from an unclear relationship with the town and that more structured support from the town would have been helpful in some situations, particularly in the most recent one which resulted in the town asking the ADL to take Lexington off its list of NPFH communities. 3. The committee discussed existing Human Rights work in Lexington. The committee discussed the town's Incident Response Team, set up under the Town Manager's office with technical assistance from LNPFHSC and three community volunteers who initiated the idea. The IRT responds to human rights and relations