When Elaine Wang met Winooski residents as part of the interview process that cast a nationwide net for city manager candidates, people noticed how she tried to engage with each person.
“And the community feedback reflected that,” Winooski Mayor Kristine Lott said.
“I feel like Elaine could talk to any member of our community, hear them, hear their voice and show them that they are valued. That’s really important to me,” she said. “We are diverse, not just ethnically and in racial makeup, but also economically, with lifelong residents and newcomers. I felt she could connect with anyone and take their perspective into consideration.”
Wang, 44, started as the new city manager on Monday in Vermont’s most diverse city. She grew up in the Bay Area of California as an Asian American and daughter of immigrants.
“So I’ve been used to having a lot of diversity around me,” she said, “but I’ve also lived in Vermont for the last 17 years, and I like it here. … I want Vermont to work for everybody: the people who have been here forever, the Abenaki, the new immigrants that arrived yesterday, LGBTQ people, everyone. And now I’m in a position where I can help make sure that that happens.”
Wang, who served as assistant town manager in Barre for the past six years, was selected as a finalist out of a pool of 19 applicants this year after an unsuccessful local search last summer found just two finalists, one of whom pulled out. The feedback was that it did not feel right, Lott said.
The search began after Jessie Baker, the former city manager, left for the same role in South Burlington last year.
With help from the equity director, the only person of color on the administrative team, the city hired a consultant and conducted a nationwide search with a focus on diversity and the right mix of leadership and communication skills. The nine-member search committee narrowed the pool to three candidates who were invited to Winooski and introduced to the community.
Wang’s experience in municipal government, her record of success and her ability to engage with people stood out, Lott said.
Barre Town Manager Carl Rogers said Wang was a willing learner, always ready to do what it takes and spent time with every department to learn the operations. She made great contributions in information technology, recreation and human resources, he said.
“How well she does in Winooski eventually depends on Winooski,” Rogers wrote in an email. “As she said here, she offers Winooski a unique fit. That and her desire to genuinely serve the individuals of Winooski with her knowledge and experience she gained with Barre Town should help her be successful.”
Wang previously worked at Sustainable Communities in Montpelier for seven years in climate, environment and international program positions.
She holds a master’s degree in public administration from Norwich University, a master’s in natural resources from the University of Vermont and a bachelor’s degree in conservation and resource studies from the University of California at Berkeley.
She is drawing a salary of $123,000 and said she is trying to move to the city.
Winooski Equity Director Yasamin Gordon said she is thrilled the city hired Wang for the role, noting her “wealth of both professional and lived experience.”
“While there is still work to do, the selection of a person of color for such an important leadership role is a step forward in the progress towards Winooski becoming a more inclusive and equitable community,” Gordon wrote in an email.
The equity lens
After the failed search last year, the committee cast a wider net and intentionally sought more diverse candidates. Winooski may be Vermont’s least homogenous city, but its leadership remains largely white.
That focus and intent attracted Wang to the position, she said, although she was quick to point out that she is no equity expert.
“Of course, people will look at people like us and say, ‘Oh, well, you’re an ethnic minority so you must know everything,’” she said. “But it doesn’t work like that.”
Winooski recently completed an equity audit that indicates the city and school district are “a model for diversity but are challenged with equity and inclusion.” Wang called it a great start with practical recommendations but cautioned there’s a long road ahead.
The next step is to figure out the knowledge gap and to find the resources, she said. The equity work will be part of a strategic plan they are about to embark on as well.
She recalled Rutland Area NAACP President Tabitha Moore, a longtime fighter for racial injustice, once saying: If you don’t feel like you have closure after this event, get used to it.
“She said Black people have been working on this for 200 years, and we haven’t figured it out. So the message to me is: It takes time and persistence. And it’s not something to feel shame about that we’re not there yet. The thing to feel is motivated and to keep working at it,” Wang said.
While she has lived experience as a woman and as an Asian American, Wang said she came to consider equity in her work later in life, particularly after George Floyd was killed by police in 2020.
That’s when “a lot of municipal officials were like, ‘Oh, we have not been doing it well enough,’” she said. “That happened to me, too. It took me some time, but I feel like I’ve developed an equity lens.”
Wang said she likes the term “equity lens” because she puts on her glasses and depends on the them all day because she is nearsighted.
“It should be the same thing with equity,” she said. “Municipal officials, especially a manager, should also have cost effectiveness as a lens on all the time, public service as a lens on all the time. You are looking at everything that your organization is doing and what is happening out there through those three lenses at minimum — equity, cost effectiveness and public service.”
She said she’s personally invested as a Vermonter and as a woman of color. The fact that the city has already made that commitment was a huge draw for her.
Wang said she has also embraced the umbrella term BIPOC — Black, Indigenous and people of color — in Vermont because “for me, it signifies that I have solidarity with other people of color. … If you’re a person of color of any kind, I have some sense of what it’s like for you in such an overwhelmingly white state.”
Unlike California, where she was part of a huge community of Chinese Americans born to immigrants and living among various other Asian communities, “the silver lining of being in a majority white state is that I have this newfound sense of fellowship with a whole range of people of different colors that I never had before because I didn’t need to,” Wang said.
A city of 7,997, Winooski is about 83% white, while Vermont is 94%, according to 2020 U.S. census data. While 14.8 % of the city’s residents are foreign born, only 3.4% are Black, 2% identify as Hispanic or Latino and 0.2% are Native American. Asian residents make up the largest ethnic minority at 11.4%.
Wang serves as co-chair of the equity committee at Vermont League of Cities and Towns where executive director Ted Brady said she led efforts to help municipalities across the state address diversity, equity and inclusion issues.
“She is a thoughtful, deliberate and smart leader,” Brady said.
For Wang, the equity work is an opportunity to understand and connect with people from different backgrounds rarely found in Vermont. It has also made her aware of the value of intersectionality — the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class and gender — and expanded her understanding of how difficult it is for a person of color to access government if that person faces other marginalization, such as because of disability.
All those different layers have “really opened my eyes to all these other things that I just didn’t see, I didn’t have to worry about. And now it’s not a matter of worrying, it’s like, oh, how can we make this place work for everybody?”
Her immigrant experience
Born in Washington state, Wang grew up in the Bay Area where, she said, “people will have very specific stereotypes about Chinese Americans. It’s not even just Asian American — we know we all have those stereotypes — but it’s very specific.”
In overwhelmingly white Vermont, she has found that some people “have literally never talked to an Asian American.”
While running a workshop on vernal pools in Barre, for instance, Wang said she met with a nice resident with whom she had a “very respectful conversation about diversity.” He asked her why she was leaving town.
“And I said, well, I gotta tell you, it’s really white — and I like it here — but that can get kind of old sometimes,” she said.
He made a noise indicating that it doesn’t matter and Wang said, “Well, I appreciate that you treat me like another human being, but not everyone does that. And if you don’t see that I’m different, you don’t see how other people treat me differently.”
Wang’s life reflects that of many immigrant families. For one, she’s named after a relative whose name sounded similar to her Chinese name 王義藍 (pinyin is Yilan, meaning justice and blue). Wang means king.
Her mother’s cousin loaned her mother the money to go to college after her parents immigrated to the United States in the ’60s. They came from China via Taiwan, searching, like many others, for better opportunities, she said. Her father was an engineer who changed careers late in life and became a math teacher.
“My mom’s plan was to get a factory job to earn enough money to go to grad school so that she can get a decent paying job here,” Wang said. But her mother’s cousin in Pittsburgh said, “Don’t do that. You’re going to get stuck there because I’ve seen it happen.”
As new immigrants themselves, they didn’t have a lot — but they loaned her the money for tuition and told her to take her time. “It’s the common immigrant story, right?” Wang said.
It allowed her mother to get a library degree from the University of Pittsburgh — coincidentally the same school from which the Winooski librarian received his degree, Wang noted.
Thanks to her mother’s last job at the East Asia Library in Stanford, her parents have health care for the rest of their lives, something they could not have afforded otherwise, Wang said with a catch in her voice.
Although American by birth, Wang remembers the racial slights along the road, from the child in grade school who asked her if she ate Chinese food at home to microaggressions at work.
So she understands why, despite Vermonters appearing so friendly, how “new Americans still don’t feel like they belong because there isn’t that sense of actual connection.”
One time, a man she had worked with told her that he wasn’t sure what to think of her when she first started and was hesitant about talking with her because he was scared of saying the wrong thing. Wang said she was stunned to hear there was a barrier to their professional relationship from the start.
“I didn’t even know it, and so I’m struggling against this invisible barrier that I probably should have expected was there, but from the outside didn’t seem like it was there. Because how do you tell the difference between someone who is just reserved and someone who’s only reserved around you,” she said.
It’s nuanced and it can be uncomfortable, but that’s how equity work is. The lesson is to always treat them like a human. It may sound stupid, she said, but “we all need that sort of familiarization if we haven’t grown up around it.”
“I have compassion for people in that situation who want to do the right thing and don’t know what that is. I’ve been in that situation plenty of times.” That’s when she turns to social media to understand and “learn about what stupid stuff not to say,” she said.
Wang’s hope is that she can engage the residents who feel left out and build bridges between the city’s different communities.
As a successful Asian American woman of color in a position of power, Wang is also keenly aware that her privilege creates a barrier. She understands that a blue-collar Asian worker, for example, might hesitate to reach out to her, and she wants to change that.
“She said in her community presentation how much she loves Winooski, and I really believe that,” Mayor Lott said. “That matters.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified someone and also used the wrong pronoun for Winooski’s librarian.
