Safety Matters

Our downtown campus is a gathering place for students, staff, faculty and the general public. People come to SFU Vancouver to learn, do research, study, work and connect, all the activities that make the campus so vibrant and important to life in the heart of the city. It’s crucial therefore to make sure our campus is welcoming, safe and inclusive, and this is a priority that we can all contribute to.

Last year (2022) we launched a new initiative to support this priority. Every semester, including a summer session held recently on June 1, we have held Safety Forums that welcomed students, staff and faculty to discuss ways we can keep our campus welcoming, safe and inclusive. Our community partners – transit police, Harbour Centre staff, the university’s safety and risk management team, VPD, etc – also took part, answering questions and providing information. At the last forum, we had a spokesperson from the Kettle Society, Damian Murphy, help us understand the lives of community members dealing with addiction, mental health and homelessness.

The Safety Forums themselves won’t make our campuses safer, but what they will do is help us come together as a community and collaborate on strategies that can keep our campus welcoming, safe and inclusive.