The student association and leadership team of the School of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape (SAPL) condemn systemic racism, bigotry, discrimination, hate, and abuse of power. To those who have been, and are being harmed by these actions, we are here to listen, support, and effect change.

We express our deepest condolences to the families and communities impacted by the deaths, disappearances, and traumas of loved ones resulting from institutionalized abuse of power, and racially motivated violence. We acknowledge and send our sincere regrets to Black, Indigenous, people of colour, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community who have suffered abuse; and whose lives and opportunities have been impacted by a historical and ongoing continuum of systematic racism, bigotry, homophobia, and gender violence. We acknowledge privilege and power, and the role it has played in sanctioning, perpetuating, and normalizing systemic racism.

We acknowledge the designer's historic and ongoing complicity in upholding social and institutionalized systems of discrimination. Design education that is not inclusive of all people or concerned with the spaces in which they live and work ignores these problems, which are perpetuated in built environments that stay with us for decades, and even centuries.

We must re-focus on how to create change in a meaningful way; to help eradicate racism, poverty, elitism, and social inequity. We must raise our level of critical awareness.

As an educational institution, we acknowledge that we have a responsibility to impart a deep awareness of how unconscious bias, lack of understanding, and fear of repercussion translate into systemic social and environmental injustice. As a school that trains future architects, planners, and landscape architects, we are responsible for the education of those who design our future cities. Institutionalized and systemic racism has operated in schools of professional education, and subsequently the professions themselves. This must change.

We must, and we do, take shared responsibility for being silent. We must hold ourselves accountable; we must listen, we must re-think our behavior, we must commit to change; we must take meaningful action. Words are not and will never be enough.