In the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breanna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, and countless others who have lost their lives as a result of systems of systemic racism that have remained unchecked, the Viterbi Student Ambassador team expresses solidarity with those speaking out against these systems, and is committed to ensuring that our actions as a body stand behind this solidarity.

As student ambassadors in a field of study that has for too long remained deliberately inaccessible to youth from Black and marginalized communities, we have a moral duty to use our platform to amplify underrepresented and marginalized voices, particularly those that exist here at Viterbi. Being cognizant of the experiences of microaggressions, underrepresentation, and racism that students at Viterbi have expressed on social media, we will be taking active steps to better amplify voices that have remained unheard, both within our team and within the larger undergraduate engineering community.

Internally, we will be making changes in our recruitment and work environments to ensure we are fostering a safe space within which our ambassadors can speak candidly about their diverse experiences, while also remaining accessible as representatives to our peers in engineering.

Externally, as a small sample of the Viterbi undergraduate community, we understand that we cannot fully represent the diverse experiences of engineering students. Thus, we are committed to building on our initiatives to expand the presence of non-VSA student voices on our content platforms. Last year, the VSA team initiated the Share Your Voice campaign as part of our Viterbi Voices web platform in the hopes of highlighting new voices across Viterbi; we are recommitting our efforts to expanding this campaign, while also collaborating with Viterbi student organizations to bring to light new and often unheard voices in our social media, video, and podcast content.

As a team, we believe strongly in the values of inclusivity, representation, and authenticity when telling our stories of the Viterbi experience, and will be working hard to ensure we continually hold ourselves accountable to these values on our public platforms.