Strengthening Our Campus Infrastructure Initiative
June 18, 2020 | Update
We have decided to allocate $300,000 for student services and $200,000 for academic services development. We have also added an additional $50,000 to help invest in staff wellness. The team leads in these areas were empowered to work directly with their own stakeholders to make final decisions on how to implement their plans.
May 14, 2020 | Strengthening Our Campus Infrastructure Initiative from Chancellor Wolf Yeigh
Dear UW Bothell Campus Community,
First, thank you all for your dedicated service ensuring that students are set up for success during these uncertain times. I was on our campus this week. It was eerily quiet, with a few transit buses passing through. Although the high energy of activities our campus enjoys each spring wasn’t visible on the Promenade, I know it is present in chatrooms, Zoom calls, social media spaces and the like.
I recognize we are all exhausted coping with the dramatic changes the pandemic has brought us for several months now. Yet I also hear about everyone helping each other navigate the new virtual space: students helping faculty overcome technical glitches like how to share your desktop without feedback noise, faculty helping each other with Canvas and so much more. These examples attest to the fact that the UW Bothell community is resilient, creative, supportive and just outright impressive.
We do not yet know what autumn 2020 will bring, and there are several groups at UW that are working on and preparing for multiple scenarios. It has become clear, however, that we need to deploy resources immediately to strengthen our campus’ instructional and student services infrastructure as well as the work environment for our staff and faculty. We need to create plans before we break for the summer, if we are to have these supports in place before the beginning of the next academic year.
To this end, I am allocating an initial $500,000 to help fund this work. I want to reassure you that this funding will not impact allocations set aside for UW Bothell’s Investment Fund and Strategic Plan implementation. Also, I want to make clear that these resources shall be used exclusively for campus infrastructure improvement; they will not be used for existing operations or to backfill budget constraints.
To develop these strategies quickly, I have tasked members of the Chancellor Executive Team to set-up small working groups to outline plans in three main areas of support we have identified:
These working groups will submit recommendations to the Expanded Chancellor’s Leadership Council (eCLC) for final approval the first week of June. Each recommendation should include the campus issue being addressed, the expected outcomes both long term and short term, and the funding needs. The eCLC includes CET members; leaders from the Council of Academic Deans, General Faculty Organization, General Staff Organization and Associated Students of the University of Washington Bothell; and the chairs of the three campus councils: Diversity, Community Engagement and Sustainability.
I will make a final announcement on funding to the campus community by June 15, 2020, so the various teams can use the summer months to implement these support programs in time for autumn quarter.
Together, as a UW Bothell community, we will prevail!