Update: Advisory Board for the Office of Equity and Diversity

Meeting on Feb. 12, 2010

Advisory Board for the Office of Equity and Diversity

NEWS:

- SEED program has received the Outstanding Social Justice Collaboration Award! CONGRATULATIONS!
- SEED is the Seeking Education Excellence and Diversity program in campus.
- Categories of race, and ethnicity have slightly changed with more focus on Hispanic vs. non Hispanic groups (I am not sure what this meant and need to follow up for the exact details). All UW employees will be asked to identify themselves regarding to the new category.

Advisory Board Activities:

- The Advisory Board for the Office of Equity and Diversity has prepared a report of the activities of different diversity groups around the campus. The report has been ready for more than a year, but for different reasons it has not reached the senate yet. This is the first item in the group's agenda to be completed.

- The board is trying to define a new agenda for the coming years:
- This advisory board will not solicit information from different diversity groups on campus directly anymore. This will be done on an annual basis by the OED office.
- We will invite different leaders to tell us about what they are doing regarding diversity on campus (possibly including the chancellor). This will inform us of what is going on, and also facilitate the conversation between different campus sections working on the diversity issue (if we can have meetings that different groups attend at the same time).
- We have to create an annual report for the Advisory Board which is due in June.

Other updates:

OED and the Advisory Board have attended a meeting hosted by Damon Williams, Vice Provost for Diversity & Climate on December 2th. Some of the issues that his office is focusing on are as follows:

- To have a centralized entity (such as a Web site) that gathers information from different diversity groups so that we know their issues and can help solve them.
- Faculty are not required to attend the harassment training which is an issue.

Fatemah Panahi, Advisory Board for the Office of Equity and Diversity