Offer to Meet

 

To: Alicia Hurtado and Organizing Members of Care Not Cops

From: Ka Yee C. Lee

Subject: Offer to Meet

Date: September 4, 2020

 

Dear Alicia,

 

On August 31, I offered to meet with you and a representative group from your organization. This follows a similar invitation that was made in June.

 

While you rejected those offers, I would like to refer back to the message that President Zimmer and I sent to the campus community on August 12, where we committed to renewing engagement with our university and broader community through listening sessions with a broad range of stakeholders to gain input on public safety issues and identify potential areas of action. I continue to believe it is important to include your group’s perspective in these sessions.

 

I reiterate our willingness to hear from you. I write to offer a Zoom meeting with your organization where members may express their concerns and provide input.

 

I will make myself available for this session next week at a mutually agreed upon time. This discussion is taking place at the beginning of our community engagement process and therefore will be in the form of a listening session similar to other stakeholder engagement sessions we will be conducting during the first phase of engagement. We would like to hear from you and understand your experiences. Yours is one of a number of perspectives we intend to engage, and we look forward to moving forward with you and other community members in this important dialogue.

 

Following the completion of our series of listening sessions, the University will use the input we receive to identify areas for improvement in our public safety function. We will then hold a public town hall forum where we will share the input we received and solicit additional feedback from the community on our ideas for responding to this input.

 

Please share your proposed time options with me at provost@uchicago.edu.

 

I look forward to hearing back from you.