Dear colleagues and friends,

I’d like to personally thank each of you for taking the time to meet and express your thoughts
during our initial Black Voices discussion prior to the Thanksgiving holiday. I hope that you were
able to safely enjoy some time with loved ones.

Following up on our discussion, I would like to solicit additional feedback from each of you as
we begin to leverage Black Voices convenings as a(n) Black & African American employee
engagement platform throughout the organization. Your willingness to candidly contribute your
thoughts and experiences at SFPUC led to several themes that I’ve listed below.

• Transparent access to resources for upward mobility.

• Microaggression training.
• Protection against retaliation.
• Dedicated community and space for Black employees.
• Assurances that work will not be performative.
• BIPOC staff should not be unfairly burdened with solving racial issues in organization.

You tasked us with following up on the issues listed above. As we begin to actualize racial
equity work at SFPUC, I would like to gather your responses to the following questions:

• What are potential non-performative resolutions to the issues listed above?

• Where would you rank the issues in order of priority?
• Is there something missing from this list that you believe should be added?

If you would kindly provide responses to the questions above prior to December 15th, we will
use your responses to focus our conversation around these priorities and convene the next
discussion with this group in early January. Going forward, our intent is to reference this set of
issues as initial discussion topics during future engagement with all SFPUC Black & African
American staff via this Black Voices platform. The responses each of you have provided thus far
have already had an impact on informing how racial equity engagement is enacted within the
SFPUC and your participation is immensely appreciated.

We look forward to meeting with you all once again in the coming year to continue our
collaboration on this transformative work.

Be Safe, Happy Holidays

-B