To: Waterloo employees and students
From: External Review Team - Human Rights, Equity, and Inclusion (HREI) Review
Date: May 1, 2021
Subject: HREI Review status update - Next Phase
Note: This email is for information
After several months of community engagement with the members of the University of Waterloo, the Human Rights, Equity, and Inclusion (HREI) external review panel is providing this update on our progress and the next steps.
Starting in December 2020 and continuing into the winter term, the panel has met with members of the HREI offices and engaged the University community through a series of meetings, roundtable discussions with faculty, staff, and students, and with various individuals, groups, organizations, and stakeholders of the University of Waterloo. These consultations were a key part of the department review and are now complete.
Thank you to all at Waterloo who have reached out to us to share your thoughts, perspectives, and feelings thus far. We appreciate the information you have provided and your candour. These conversations have been extraordinarily helpful to our work on the review panel. Indeed, there has been both a marked diversity of opinion and a distinct coalescing around certain important concepts or issues that will help guide us as we draft our report. The review panel is grateful for and inspired by the community’s generosity and engagement.
For our next steps in the review, we will be collecting and reflecting upon the viewpoints you have provided, and we will then be focusing our efforts on preparing our report to provide to the University by the end of May. As the panel’s work will be critical to informing the direction and leadership of the HREI office, we ask for patience as we move into these final stages of the review process.
Again, we thank you to those who have shared your experiences and insights to this review.
The HREI Review Panel
Denise O’Neil Green
Christina Sass-Kortsak
Barrington Walker
Lisa Castle
