Important My Voice survey starting soon

January 16, 2018

Dear Campus Community,

We write today to encourage all of you – faculty, staff and students – to set aside time to take an extremely important new survey, the My Voice survey, that we hope will provide the campus with the insights and information needed to more effectively prevent and respond to issues of sexual harassment and violence.

We need to hear from everyone in our community to capture individual experiences and perspectives with a particular focus on matters involving sexual harassment and assault, dating and domestic violence, and stalking. This is an issue that we, as an entire campus community, face and must address.

Everyone will soon receive an email regarding the My Voice survey and a link from NORC at the University of Chicago that will direct them to the survey access point. Staff will be invited to take the survey starting today, January 16, and students and faculty invitations will start on January 22.

The survey, which is confidential, will yield insights that will enable us to tailor programs, services, and policies to the unique characteristics and challenges of our campus culture. The main focus of the survey is to inform and strengthen our current and future prevention and response efforts. Once we have the survey results, we will develop an action plan to continue to improve the campus prevention and response efforts to sexual violence and harassment. The survey will also gather information about rates of occurrence in order to establish a baseline for the future.

The My Voice survey is anonymous. NO ONE at UC Berkeley will ever be able to link your identity to your survey responses. In order to protect the anonymity of survey respondents, we have contracted with NORC, an independent research organization at the University of Chicago, to collect all data from the survey. NORC will analyze the responses and author a report on the findings. NORC has more than 75 years of experience in data collection and has conducted similar surveys for other universities. 

This survey is the latest of many efforts underway to make ours a supportive and safe community for everyone. Learn more about the survey at myvoice.berkeley.edu and about campus efforts regarding sexual harassment and sexual violence at sexualassault.berkeley.edu. Survivors who have experienced sexual violence or harassment and are seeking information about options and resources are encouraged to contact the campus’s PATH to Care Center at (501) 642-1988.

Sincerely,

Carol Christ
Chancellor 

Sharon Inkelas
Special Faculty Advisor to the Chancellor on Sexual Violence/Sexual Harassment

If you are a manager who supervises UC Berkeley employees without email access, please circulate this information to all.

via Calmessages