Category: Uncategorized

Video now available for the 2021 PSO Spring Celebration

with UW President Ana Mari Cauce

in Partnership with the Whole U

https://youtu.be/2dCpLvWjVGI

Original message here

This message is being sent to faculty and other academic personnel, staff, trainees, and student employees across the University of Washington. Dear Colleagues, With more than half of Washington residents age 16 and over now fully vaccinated, we continue to see declines in COVID-19 cases and anticipate the planned statewide re-opening on June 30. Thank you to everyone who has already gotten vaccinated to protect yourself and to protect the members of our community who aren’t able — or aren’t yet able — to be vaccinated. To protect the health of our community, the University of Washington will require faculty and other academic personnel, staff, student employees, and trainees to be vaccinated against COVID-19 by autumn quarter in order to work on our campuses or within our facilities. This is consistent with our requirement that students be vaccinated and follows the release of new workplace requirements from the Washington Department of Labor and Industries. Similar to the student requirement, employees will be allowed to seek exemptions for medical, religious or philosophical reasons. This decision follows the recommendation of the University Advisory Committee on Communicable Diseases and comes after consultation with faculty and staff leadership, as well as the state. Work is underway on how this requirement will be implemented, and more details will be shared in early summer on how you can confirm that you have been vaccinated or apply for an exemption. Guidance this summer will include more detail on how this requirement will interact with the existing UW Medicine employee vaccine survey, as well its application to faculty affiliates or staff who do not come to UW campuses or facilities and those employees who work out of state. The Department of Labor and Industries has issued new guidance regarding vaccine verification and health and safety requirements for fully vaccinated and unvaccinated employees. We expect that additional regulatory guidance will be released as we approach the state’s planned lifting of most health restrictions on June 30. We are in the process of reviewing the new requirements, such as around masking and distancing, and anticipate updating University requirements after that date. Until then, existing University and UW Medicine requirements remain in effect. The FDA-authorized vaccines — which are based on technology that’s been under development for more than two decades — are safe and effective. Widespread vaccination is our ticket to a return to in-person learning and working as we create the “new normal” for our University, and we encourage you to get vaccinated as soon as you’re able. Sincerely, Ana Mari Cauce President Professor of Psychology Mark A. Richards Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Professor of Earth and Space Sciences

Join the PSO Board to celebrate and connect as a community!

Hear from UW President Ana Mari Cauce, meet the newly elected PSO Board members, and celebrate our year together. Look for more information coming soon.

When: May 26, 3-4pm
Where: Zoom

Register today!

The Washington State Legislature adjourned on Sunday, April 25th and the 2021 Regular Legislative Session is now over. The Office of State Relations has posted a blog entry reviewing the Session.

The Whole U invites you, your family, and friends to join for an evening panel with Be The Match – an education, research and advocacy organization managing the world’s largest marrow registry.

This registry is essential to connecting people living with life-threatening blood diseases and cancers, to life-saving donors—like YOU! A cure to cancer exists, but matches are needed on the registry from all of us. Growing and diversifying the registry is essential to saving lives, and The University of Washington is committed to diversifying the donor list so that all people have an equal opportunity to find a cure.

This event is on Monday, April 26 at 5:00 p.m. Don’t miss this Zoom.

Register Here

Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities (NWCCU), the accrediting body for the UW, will conduct the university’s evaluation on April 14-16, 2021. This occurs every seven years and will assess the UW’s initiatives and efforts related to student success, institutional effectiveness and mission, as well as governance, resources and capacity. As part of that process, the NWCCU will hold an open forum for staff on Thursday April 15th from 9-9:50 a.m.

Staff members interested in meeting with the evaluators should register via this link. Zoom links and passcodes will be sent to registrants the morning of the forum and posted on the provost’s website.

More information on this process and to access links to the student and faculty forums can be found on UW News.

Seeking Professional staff from the Medical, Research, Administration and Academic sectors of the University system

Submit your application to the PSO Board here

Why Join the PSO Board?

• Learn more about UW and the professional staff role, share ideas, resources and connections, and make impactful contacts all across campus! 

• Support and advocate for professional staff by working with UW leadership at the President’s office, Human Resources, WholeU, faculty committees, and the membership.

• Develop leadership skills by chairing a committee, organizing outreach, and supporting our various events with a supportive group of colleagues.

• Make an impact on the more than 10,000 professional staff! Board members work together to advocate for and enrich our roles at the UW.

• Meet and network with other professional staff from across the Seattle, Bothell, and Tacoma campuses, Harborview Medical Center, and UW Medical Center  

Commitment: Elected board members, on average, spend a few hours per week on board activities (monthly meetings, committee meetings, faculty councils. See Job description for more details)

We are now accepting applications for 2021-2023 board members.  The application deadline is:  April 30, 2021.

Term starts July 1st, 2021

Submit your application to the PSO Board here

The Professional Staff Organization condemns the abhorrent violence against Asian, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community members. The horrific shootings in Atlanta, Georgia, on Tuesday March 16, that claimed the lives of eight people, six of whom were of Asian descent and seven of whom were women, exemplify the intersectional oppression that so many minoritized people face: racism, misogyny, classism and beyond. We recognize that these murders punctuate the context of a sickening increase in anti-Asian violence, harassment and bigotry around the country as well as locally, as President Cauce and others have noted. Over the past year, Asian diasporic people have been targets of nearly 4,000 reported hate incidents in the United States, and in King County these reports have risen from 39 in 2019 to 59 in 2020. Even before the pandemic started, Asian Americans were the third most targeted race/ethnicity group, following Black Americans and Jewish Americans. Such violence is a particularly despicable aspect of the deep, tangled roots of bigotry and xenophobia in our society. The myth that the AAPI community has not been impacted by white supremacy and systemic racism dismisses and ignores people’s experiences and stories and has sometimes left AAPI community members out of the anti-racism conversation.

The PSO stands in solidarity with the communities under attack right now, and holds space for the grief in this moment. We are with you. We see you. 

We encourage all those who can to take action. This may include the following (thank you to The Revolutionary Love Project and Common Power for posting these ideas):

1. Learn the names and stories of those we lost. Six names have been released so far. Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33; Paul Andre Michels, 54; Xiaojie Tan, 49; Daoyou Feng, 44; Julie Park, 70’s; Hyun-jeong Park Grant, 50’s.
2. Check in with family and friends in the AAPI community, listen to their stories, for as long they want to talk about it.
3. Contact your representatives and advocate for policies that thwart hate crimes and violence, and that support progress toward institutional anti-racism and justice for all.
4. If you see racism, say something. Strong allyship behavior needs to be modeled over and over again.
5. Donate to stopaapihate.org. Historically, less than 1% of philanthropic resources go to AAPI communities.
6. Donate to napawf.org, the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, specifically their Atlanta chapter.
7. Get involved with groups like the Revolutionary Love Project who are helping to direct resources to victims’ families and organizers on the ground.

Other resources: 

• Reporting anti-Asian hate activity, provided by the Seattle Chapter Japanese Americans Citizens League (JACL)
• President Cauce’s statement against anti-Asian violence
• Bias Reporting Tool
• Washington State Human Rights Commission Complaint Form
• Let’s Talk (Seattle campus)
• Hall Health and the UW Counseling Center (Seattle campus)
• UWB Counseling Center (UW Bothell)
• Counseling & Psychological Services (UW Tacoma)
• UW CareLink (UW employees)
• Resources to talk to children about racism