This Saturday, June 19, 2021 marks Juneteenth, a commemoration of the moment the last enslaved people in the United States learned of their freedom on June 19, 1865. We remember and honor this moment by continuing to educate ourselves and fighting for racial justice.

Over the past year, our student affairs teams have undergone efforts to better support our Black students both in the United States and abroad. Last year, the Master of Engineering (MEng) program launched “You Belong Here,” a new admit web resource highlighting Experience Diversity 2021, a series of diversity initiatives and events at Berkeley hosted by the Dean of the Graduate Division, the Assistant Dean for Diversity, and members of the Office for Graduate Diversity. This fall, the MEng program has two Mastercard Foundation Scholars (MCFS) from Sub-Saharan Africa joining the program, planned recruitment efforts at HBCUs, and a DEIB question and response essay planned for Fall 2022 applications. In the Fung Fellowship program, the DEIB student lead held a bias training workshop for all students and staff involved in the admissions process for incoming fellows. While fellows learn about implicit bias in their human design centered design curriculum through the fellowship, this process challenges students to check their biases among their peers and build strong recruitment best practices. A subset of Fung Fellowship projects addressed the structural systems and practices that enforce the inequality, neglect, and exploitation of Black communities:

• In the Honors program, one of our student teams launched Shotline, a community-powered organization bridging the digital divide in public health by leveraging the tech skills of a widespread, virtual volunteer network to make the COVID-19 vaccine more accessible to communities facing technological barriers, focusing on Black and other underserved communities.
• In the Health + Tech track, a student team partnered with Fresh Approach to work towards addressing systemic injustices that result in inequities and health disparities within communities of color in the Bay Area. The team worked to develop a program to improve access to local food sources for populations that lacked food security and had diet-related health conditions.
• In the Conservation + Tech track, a team of students partnered with Civic Design Studio to reimagine deteriorating city parks in Oakland, California to increase awareness and appreciation of the many cultural connections to urban-based biodiversity while also uplifting, improving, and renovating these spaces via new landscaping and other installations co-designed with community organizations and other local stakeholders.

In addition, 14 full-time staff have started or completed a UC Berkeley College of Engineering EMPOWER series module over the past year. This includes using EMPOWER curricula and lessons learned to examine our own internal and recruitment biases and how they propagate via personal and institutional practices. The Fung Institute is also under the leadership of Black-identifying executive and faculty directors — Stephany Prince and Anthony Joseph, with Stephany also recently appointed to UC Berkeley’s Independent Advisory Board on Police Accountability and Community Safety. As we continue the fight for racial justice, we encourage you to join us in honoring this day with these recommended resources:

• Berkeley’s Principles of Community
• The Fung Institute’s Commitment to DEIB
• Antiracist Allyship Starter Pack
• FI DEIB Knowledge Base*

*adapted from Berkeley Haas’s Center for Equity, Gender, and Leadership Continue the conversation with us! We seek input from our student, alumni, and partner community. Please reach out to us at deibatfung@berkeley.edu if you’d like to share your experience & thoughts about how we can make an impact in the fight for racial justice.

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Juneteenth 2021 was originally published in Berkeley Master of Engineering on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.