Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti on Jan. 21 announced the creation of the Anti-Bias Learning for Employees initiative, or ABLE, a mandatory implicit bias training program for all city employees. This step upholds a key commitment in the mayor’s order to advance racial equity across city government.

“Racial equity starts with us – with the public servants entrusted by Angelenos to advance justice and fairness in our city’s policies and programs,” Garcetti said. “ABLE will equip members of our city family with the tools, knowledge and resources to honestly confront systemic racism and more effectively address the deep inequalities laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic and the reckoning with racial injustice.”

ABLE is the product of close collaboration between the Mayor’s Office and the Personnel Department’s Office of Workplace Equity to identify and secure a proven training framework that could be tailored to serve the unique needs of the city workforce. An agreement was made with Ohio State University’s Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity to adopt its highly-regarded implicit bias training and adapt it for city staff.

“Addressing implicit bias at the level of the individual is important and necessary to a meaningful and productive conversation about race,” said Deputy Mayor Brenda Shockley, who is also the city’s first-ever chief equity officer. “We’re working hard to create a more equitable future, and I’m confident that this training will help keep our city workforce on the leading edge of that movement.”

The Kirwan training centers on three broad concepts: first, understanding implicit bias; second, recognizing our own biases; and third, mitigating the impact of negative bias, with a focus on identifying, understanding and counteracting implicit bias on the individual level.

The program uses a combination of video, reading content and interactive quizzes to help participants explore the historical, psychological and institutional causes of implicit biases, along with how these long-standing structures directly affect the way people think and interact. Built into the training is the opportunity for each trainee to take the Harvard University Implicit Associations tests to learn of their own implicit biases.

“We are grateful to the Kirwan Institute for developing the key content of this training program and making it available to us. This allowed the city to efficiently provide a very large workforce with an implicit bias training grounded in research and expertise from one of the nation’s leaders on race, equity and inclusion,” said Malaika Billups, chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer in the Personnel Department’s Office of Workplace Equity.

The city of Los Angeles-specific training is expected to roll out in late February. Employees will be required to complete it by the end of 2021 and undergo the training on an annual basis.