A Letter to Members Post Creating Change 2018

Dear Members:
We hope this email finds you all well and settled into the routine of the semester! The beginning of a new year and new semester can bring with it an opportunity for change and growth. It is in this spirit that we want to share with you where we are as an organization, provide a recap of the Consortium’s time at Creating Change 2018, and inform our members of the work the Executive Board will be taking on as we move through 2018.

Creating Change 2018
Executive Board retreat & work with our consultants
In our early January email, we shared that the board has decided to hire consultants, Dr. Kai Green and Micah Hobbes-Frazier  to help align the organization’s leadership structure to best fit our mission. One phase of this work was an all-board retreat with Kai and Micah at Creating Change 2018. The retreat took place on Tuesday January 23rd and was really transformative. One of the immediate changes that took place from that retreat was the restructuring of our annual Creating Change Business Meeting. It became clear to us that framing the only time that our members and the executive board come together throughout the year around Business felt counter to our mission and values. We quickly changed the name to Community Gathering and worked on creating a space that centered the feedback and experiences of membership, rather than leadership. In that Community Gathering we asked for the following feedback:

• how do you educate & push yourself in your practice? how can we help?
• strategies for healing in this work/how do you keep yourself from burning out
• how do you enact pipeline in your hiring, mentorship, and advocacy?
• how could you operationalize racial justice in your work if there were no barriers

For those that could not make the Community Gathering and would like to provide us their feedback to these questions, please do so through this form. All of this feedback will be sent to our consultants as we continue the work of becoming a mission-driven organization.

Consortium Elections
As an update to members who were not at Creating Change, we wanted to give more information regarding elections. As a part of the work we are doing with the consultants, they are working with us to restructure the board and help us rethink positions to better align with our mission and vision. To that end we shared with membership at are community gathering that we will be postponing elections until the process with the consultants is completed. We have received initial guidance from the consultants that holding off on the board elections is the right next step as we work together to reimagine board structure. We expect to have a fuller update and report from the consultants toward the end of the semester.

Day-long institute: Recap from Education Committee Chairs, Juliann Hass and Cam Breither
When developing this year’s daylong institute, the Education Committee, to whom we are grateful for their work, actively worked to build an agenda that would provide space for education, connection, and transformation among and between colleagues engaging in LGBTQ work within higher education through intentional conversation. Our goal for the institute was to provide much needed space to discuss current tensions in the field and how they are impacted and shaped by identity and region. Throughout the day we saw both opportunities for further conversation and a need for healing, specifically at the intersections of race and queerness within the field.  The hurt in response to the panel reinforced the urgent need for more depth and intentionality within this community/coalition building work. When we stop seeing each other, even for a moment, the forces that seek to marginalize community members become painfully present.  As we look toward next year we welcome all interested voices to be involved directly, constructively, and tangibly in crafting the vision, mission, and content for the Consortium Daylong Institute at Creating Change 2019 in Detroit, Michigan.

During the Institute comments were made that included remarks that did not align with our mission to center racial justice in our work. As a board and panel members we came together to offer multiple ways for members to reflect as a community, to come together in QTPOC spaces, and to engage with the board regarding the panel. As we move forward in the actualization of our mission, we will continue to address situations like these while offering spaces for education and accountability in addressing how racism and white supremacy show up in our work. Though we might not do it perfectly, we are grateful for our members who can come together in community as we move through this messy but needed process.
 
If you had the opportunity to attend the Institute at Creating Change, please take a moment to fill out the Creating Change 2018 Daylong Institute Evaluation.
 
Summer Institute
As we mentioned in an earlier email, we will not be hosting a Summer Institute. We are hoping to use this intentional pause as an opportunity to invest our time and energy as a board to the work with the consultants toward aligning our organizational structure with our mission. This spring and summer the board will take a deep look into our work, both philosophically and operationally. We will regularly update members as we continue this process.

We thank you for your continued patience and trust in the executive board as we attempt to make changes to an organization so many of us care deeply about and believe in. Our goal is to better the organization to best serve the needs of our members, to better serve you all as you do the work to liberate LGBTQ people, in all our intersecting identities, in higher education. There is no better way to capture the sentiments of this work than the video, our Research and Assessment Award recipient, DL Stewart shared with participants at the Creating Change conference. Please watch DL’s video here.

Onward,
Dr. Adriana di Bartolo, Dr. Van Bailey, and LB Hannahs

Updated Statement on Scout Schultz

Please note: this statement has been updated to include biphobia. The Consortium Board apologies for not explicitly naming this form of violence in our first message, especially in light of the fact that Scout identified as bisexual and because, as Robyn Ochs reminded us, data shows clearly that bi+ youth exhibit very high levels of minority stress.

Dear Membership,

The Consortium of Higher Education LGBT Resource Professionals is deeply saddened and troubled by the death of Scout Schultz (they/them/theirs), a fourth-year engineering student at the Georgia Institute of Technology who proudly and publicly identified as bisexual, intersex, and non-binary. Scout was the president of the Pride Alliance at Georgia Tech and an important presence in the LGBTQIA+ community.

We want to offer our support and love to our colleagues at Georgia Tech, and we stand in  solidarity and offer affirmation to all of our members and communities. We recognize the absolute reality that this could happen on any of our campuses at any time, and we know this situation is likely to impact students across the country as we all process the loss of Scout. There is no textbook or course that prepares us to respond to such instances that spark feelings of pain, anger, grief, fear, and a myriad of other emotions, both in ourselves and in the students and communities to whom we dedicate ourselves in service.

As a board, we are particularly concerned about the response and actions of campus police officers in this tragedy. The use of deadly violence against a student experiencing a mental health crisis, coupled with the lack of de-escalation tactics utilized in the situation, is alarming. We frequently see students in crisis when homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, and racism are wreaking havoc on their mental health. This could have been prevented by a deeper awareness, understanding, and competency when working with our communities on campus and beyond. From the streets of St. Louis to our campuses, we know police brutality and violence against our communities is systemic and justice is rarely served.  Any authorities whose use of power interrupts what should be a common mission to foster student resilience and persistence need to be held accountable.

We acknowledge and appreciate the hard work that you’re doing and we want to offer community space and resources to support you. Please join us for a conference call for our membership on Monday, October 2nd from 1pm-2:30pm EST /10am-11:30am PST/12pm-1:30pm CST for connection and discussion about our collective promising practices for crisis response.

The call-in information is listed below.

1. Dial into the conference:

  Dial-in Number: (712) 451-0701 - United States

  Access Code: 920022

  International Dial-in Numbers:https://www.freeconferencecall.com/wall/treasurer601/#international

2. Join the online meeting:

  Online Meeting Link:https://join.freeconferencecall.com/treasurer601

  Online Meeting ID: treasurer601

Instructions:

At the scheduled date and time of the meeting, dial into the conference line. When prompted, enter the Access Code followed by the pound key.

To join the online meeting, click on the meeting link listed above and follow the prompts to join the meeting.

For 24/7 customer service please call 844-844-1322

We believe that we can make change as a community of connected practitioners. In addition, see the document Promising practices in crisis response and add your own statements, programs, and other insights to learn and support your colleagues. We are here for you; please let us know what else you need.

In solidarity,

The Consortium Executive Board

You are cordially invited to attend the Tyler Clementi Center Academic Colloquium on October 26, 2017!

Please see the details below for registration information and share widely with colleagues across the region!

On October 26, 2017, the Tyler Clementi Center of Rutgers University will host a daylong Academic Colloquium to highlight critical research on queer-spectrum and trans-spectrum student experiences in higher education. The program will feature a presentation of findings from the largest and first-ever meta-analysis of queer-spectrum and trans-spectrum student experiences in the history of American higher education, comparing national datasets from the Center for Postsecondary Research at Indiana University Bloomington, the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, the SERU-AAU Consortium led by UC-Berkeley and U-MN, the American College Health Association and Rankin & Associates.  Collectively, these findings represent the responses of 78,798 queer-spectrum students and 8,361 trans-spectrum students from nearly 1,000 institutions across the U.S.. Additional Colloquium presentations will address the complexities in conducting survey research with queer-spectrum and trans-spectrum students, the challenges of translating research to effective policy and practice and the climate for queer-spectrum and trans-spectrum students within different institutional settings (HBCUs, faith-based institutions, 2yr institutions.) 

Please visit the Tyler Clementi Center’s website for more information on the presenters, schedule or to register: http://clementicenter.rutgers.edu/events/tcc-colloquium/. Registration is open to the public.  The rate for in-person attendance is $25 and includes breakfast, lunch and reception.  The event is free to Rutgers University students.  For those who cannot attend in-person, Livestream access will be provided free-of-charge at the time of registration.

The event is sponsored by the Tyler Clementi Center, the Consortium of Higher Education LGBT Resource Professionals, the Tyler Clementi Foundation, Rutgers University Undergraduate Academic Affairs, the Rutgers University Center for Social Justice Education and LGBT Communities, the Rutgers University  Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology, and the Rutgers University Committee to Advance our Common Purposes.

A Letter to Our Membership regarding Charlottesville

August 23, 2017

Dear membership, friends, and partners:

We see you and have been holding you during these past weeks in light of the White Supremacist terrorism and tragedy that occurred in Charlottesville, and as we continue to recognize the racist, anti-Black, anti-Semitic, xenophobic terrorism and tragedies that preceded these events and continue across the country. We write to communicate our solidarity with you in these times and to hold all of us accountable to getting and staying engaged, as we are able, in protecting our communities from immediate and systemic violence.

The presence of American Nazis, the Klan, and white supremacists is not new, and this is not a resurgence. To state otherwise is to negate the real violence that has been perpetuated over the centuries since this landmass was colonized. Actors, enablers, and silent majorities of white supremacy have always been here; these latest events, in which white supremacists have made their presence known and enacted violence with emboldened force, while perhaps surprising to some, are not a deviation from the course of our country’s long history of violence against people of color.

In the landscape of higher education, the events in Charlottesville have also reignited tensions around the use of free speech to marginalize communities of color, Muslim, queer and trans communities, Jewish communities, and others.  As professionals working within institutions of higher education, we are often faced with the challenging balance between supporting some of our most marginalized campus communities and upholding an institutional commitment to the free speech of all people, including those voices that further marginalize historically oppressed communities.  We must employ strategies to protect and empower our most marginalized communities and educate our constituencies, to find better solutions to these tensions. We recognize that many of our members are trying to balance the complexity of this work and hope to engage each other in future webinars and Consortium-sponsored events on this topic.

As an organization committed to queer and trans justice, we are intrinsically connected to racial justice. We are not doing our work as LGBTQIA+ resource professionals if we are not doing racial justice work. This work starts with each of us, and we, as the executive board, take responsibility and ownership of our privileges and actions of compliance with white violence and supremacy.  We all must recognize our power and influence through our work and in our positionalities, as we push our institutions to do better and empower our communities. As colleagues and partners in this work we are here for any guidance you need to push forward in this effort- at all of our institutions, with all of our students, colleagues, friends, and family.

In Community,

The Consortium Executive Board

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The Consortium of Higher Education LGBT Resource Professionals envisions higher education environments where LGBTQ people, inclusive of all of our intersecting identities, are fully liberated. We are a member-based organization working towards the liberation of LGBTQ people in higher education. We support individuals who work on campuses to educate and support people of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities, as well as advocate for more inclusive policies and practices through an intersectional and racial justice framework. Learn more about the Consortium at lgbtcampus.org.