Dear Infrastructure and Sustainability team,
I hope this letter finds you and your loved ones well. I’m thrilled that so many of you were able to attend our sessions on racism and diversity with Professor Donna Mejia and found them valuable. Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, and I’m so grateful to Donna for leading the sessions.
If you were unable to attend, we have posted all three sessions on our Infrastructure and Sustainability Sharepoint site. Our custodial staff will also be getting together as teams to watch these sessions in late November and early December. Providing access to these types of opportunities for training and growth—for all of our staff—is vitally important to me.
As I’ve mentioned before, fostering a welcoming and inclusive environment has been a key objective for me since I joined the university four-and-a-half years ago. One aspect of that is ensuring all of our staff have opportunities to grow in their skills and roles at the university.
Our apprenticeship program has been a good example of an initiative that gives frontline employees the opportunity to learn new skills on the job and advance within our organization. We’ve also been able to bring on staff as trainees in certain frontline roles who might not have been qualified when we initially hired them. Through an onboarding trial period, they’re able to learn the skills they need to be promoted into the full-time roles for which they applied. Our computer literacy courses for frontline staff have provided many of our team members with skills most of us don’t give a second thought to but that are crucial to being an informed and engaged employee on our campus.
Our I&S leadership team continues to look for ways we can keep all of you engaged and growing in your careers. And we know we must keep these discussions around diversity, race and inclusion going to continue developing our organization as one where all of us feel respected, valued and like part of the team. We’re already exploring what types of additional educational opportunities around race and diversity that we can provide for you in the spring, including the possibility of additional sessions with Professor Mejia. Our Infrastructure and Sustainability Inclusive Excellence Committee (ISIEC) is helping drive many of these discussions as well, and I encourage you to reach out to that group if you’re interested in learning how you can get involved.
I value each of you, and am proud of everything you do to serve our university mission. We will continue to work to support you so that I&S is an organization you can be proud to be part of.
With gratitude,
David Kang, vice chancellor for infrastructure and sustainability
