UW’s Lincoln Johnson receives student union association’s highest honor

Lincoln Johnson, associate vice president for student life at the UW, has been recognized with ACUI’s highest honor, the , for his significant contributions to the college union and student activities movement.

Founded in 1914, is a nonprofit educational organization that brings together college union and student activities professionals from hundreds of schools in seven countries.

Johnson has more than 30 years of senior leadership experience in higher education, working at small, large, public, private and faith-based institutions. He’s been an active volunteer with ACUI since 1995 and has been at the since 1996, where he first served as director of the Husky Union.

“For decades, Lincoln Johnson has continued to serve as a role model for our association and our campus communities,” said ACUI Chief Executive Officer John Taylor. “His willingness to participate, the energy he directs toward others to become involved, and his commitment to maintaining a culture of care on campuses are but a few of the attributes that have made his contributions so significant.”

Johnson received the award during a live ceremony at the Association’s 2022 Annual Conference in Chicago. In making the announcement before a live audience, Dave Barnes, James Madison University director of University Unions and ACUI past president (2012–13), reflected on nominator statements in support of Johnson receiving the honor.

“He constantly reminded me of that difference that I and so many of my colleagues were making, making it clear that we were supported whole-heartedly,” one student nominator wrote. “He emphasized that our work, and more importantly, that we as individuals, mattered. It made all the difference.”

You can view Johnson’s acceptance speech .

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91Ě˝»¨receives INSIGHT Into Diversity Magazine’s Jesse L. Moore 2022 Supplier Diversity Award

The 91Ě˝»¨received the from magazine, the oldest and only print diversity and inclusion publication in higher education.

The award is a national recognition honoring colleges and universities that take proactive steps to support and engage with minority-owned businesses through supplier diversity offices, unique programs and leading initiatives.

The 91Ě˝»¨was recognized for its , which supports the University’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion by encouraging the 91Ě˝»¨community to consider small, local and diverse businesses when sourcing and purchasing goods and services. It is comprised of a multi-disciplinary team, which includes Procurement Services, 91Ě˝»¨Facilities and the Foster School of Business Consulting and Business Development Center.

“The 91Ě˝»¨Business Diversity and Equity team is proud of its collective efforts to identify, utilize and grow small and diverse businesses,” said Monica Acevedo-Soto, interim director for Facilities and Business Diversity at the UW. “Supplier diversity programs help communities and businesses thrive. Creating equity in business opportunities and diversity in our supplier base is integral to the UW’s values and exemplifies our commitment to making a positive social and economic impact in the community.”

The Business Diversity and Equity Program worked to raise awareness campuswide to the value of engaging with new and existing diverse businesses and providing opportunities for them to grow and thrive. Examples of collaborative efforts recognized by this award include student internships focusing on supplier diversity, a consulting and business development program offered to minority-owned small businesses, and inclusion goals for capital projects focused on minority-owned small businesses.

Winners will be announced in the April 2022 issue of INSIGHT Into Diversity magazine.

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Ben Brunjes begins fellowship with the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Policy Planning and Liaison

, an assistant professor of public policy at the 91Ě˝»¨Evans School of Public Policy & Governance, this month will begin a fellowship with the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Policy Planning and Liaison.

The fellowship is designed to meet the Biden administration’s mandate for studies and recommendations to increase equity in federal procurement. The administration last December in order to better serve small businesses owned by women and people of color.

An expert in federal contracts and government procurement, Brunjes will advise SBA officials; help create and update federal procurement rules and regulations; identify and share new data on federal contracting; and study trends in and the performance of federal procurement equity programs. More specifically, the work includes studying disparities by location and type of industry among small businesses owned by women and people of color, and how to provide tools and incentives to improve contracting and potential community revitalization.

“The SBA’s equity programs help support growing businesses around the U.S. This fellowship will give me the chance to help improve access for small businesses,” Brunjes said. “Procurement equity programs are among the most successful social improvement policies in our country and making them work better will improve the lives of hard-working Americans in communities that need investment the most.

The fellowship runs through Sept. 15, alongside Brunjes’ current responsibilities in the Evans School.

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Yong Wei honored by NOAA as ‘Ambassador of Tsunami Risk Assessment’

, a senior research scientist at the UW-based , was recently honored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory as an “Ambassador of Tsunami Risk Assessment.”

Wei is an expert in tsunami modeling, coastal flooding, and tsunami effects on structures in the U.S. and overseas. He is currently working on a multiyear NOAA project to assess tsunami hazards and develop “Tsunami Design Zones” for select overseas State Department facilities.

Wei helped developed probabilistic tsunami risk maps to update the American Society of Civil Engineers’ design standards, and applied these new design criteria in a UW–NOAA project funded by the U.S. Navy and the National Institute of Building Science to . In the Pacific Northwest, Wei performed tsunami inundation modeling and debris tracking for the Oregon State University’s Gladys Valley Marine Studies Building in Newport, Oregon, which last year won an for its focus on coastal resilience.

The lack of accountability, poor communication and insufficient planning that has plagued the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic — especially in its early months — have roots in how the nation responded to 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the H1N1 swine flu, a new study involving the 91Ě˝»¨ found.

Focusing on the way government agencies assemble and allocate resources – the procurement system – researchers said the successes and shortcomings of responses to other large-scale crises show that a more centralized approach can achieve goals faster and more effectively.

“In the moment of disasters, we prioritize saving lives, but if we also want to achieve other goals, like equity, we need to establish processes and relationships in advance,” said , an assistant professor of public policy at the 91Ě˝»¨and co-author of the , published April 14 in the Journal of Emergency Management.

In theory, government procurement aims to acquire goods and provide services efficiently, equitably and at the lowest possible cost to the taxpayer. When seeking bids and proposals, agencies are supposed to prioritize spending with businesses owned by women and people of color. During an emergency, however, governments suspend many timelines and rules in the interest of speed.

The government’s approach to the pandemic, especially in the early months when personal protective equipment and medical supplies equipment were the priority, has been criticized as fragmented and politicized. States were generally left to compete on the open market for N95 masks and ventilators; a lack of information and, ultimately, supplies, plagued the Strategic National Stockpile; and even today, the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines has been inconsistent across states.

The highly infectious nature of the coronavirus, and the impact not only on the health care sector but also on most other areas of society, made the pandemic an almost unprecedented emergency for which few countries were prepared, the researchers point out. The United States, with a mostly privatized health care system and three levels of government (local, state and federal) involved in emergency response functions, faced a massive task in protecting the population.

But the Trump administration’s hands-off approach, researchers said, essentially pitted states against each other. Some states had too little and others too much or simply poor-quality supplies, and that opened the door to fraud in the contracting process.

These problems could have been avoided, Brunjes said, if the federal government had recognized and mitigated some of the issues that arose during past crises:

• During 9/11, . Emergency responders from different agencies were unable to communicate with each other throughout the 2001 disaster, which led to an effort among law enforcement and other aid agencies nationwide to improve radio systems over the next several years. In the years that followed, new emergency management policies and innovative technologies helped avoid similar problems in subsequent disasters.
• The evacuation of millions of people during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 prompted the need for emergency shelters and other services, fast. Several federal agencies purchased temporary beds, trailers and portable school buildings that went unused or were overpriced. In the aftermath, new laws were passed to make emergency procurement more accountable.
• The case most similar to the current pandemic — the H1N1 swine flu in 2009-2010 — showed how the response to COVID-19 might have been different if government had taken the issue seriously and acted quickly. As the H1N1 crisis continued, and coordination across states was stymied. In response, the federal government developed a dashboard to track and share information about critical supplies, aiding in the rapid distribution of vaccines.

In addition to the lessons of better communication and contracting accountability from Hurricane Katrina and 9/11, the government’s experience with H1N1, a smaller-scale pandemic than COVID-19, shows the importance of interagency planning and procurement throughout. That includes the use of existing, issue-specific resources, such as the pandemic guidebook and organizational structure that the federal government developed during H1N1.

“If the previous administration had retained human capital and not gotten rid of the pandemic team, this would have been a lot smoother. There was a lot of knowledge about how to go through this process,” said Brunjes, a former emergency policy analyst for the Department of Homeland Security’s research institute.

The new study was written early in the COVID-19 pandemic, he added, but nothing in the course of events would have changed the researchers’ recommendations. The Biden team has seen the need to take a more central role in communication and management of the response, Brunjes said, and though the administration acted quickly in rolling out a vaccine program, there remain significant equity concerns over who has received the shots. With vaccines alone — all the first and second doses still to be administered, not to mention any booster doses in the future — there should be an even more transparent supply chain and system for determining what agencies need, how much and when.

Co-authors on the study were Sawsan Abutabenjeh of Mississippi State University; Lachezar Anguelov of The Evergreen State College; Ana-Maria Dimand of Boise State University; and Evelyn Rodriguez-Plesa, who worked on the study while completing her doctorate at Florida International University and is the assistant to the city manager of the City of Sunny Isles Beach, Florida.

For more information, contact Brunjes at Brunjes@uw.edu.