President's Report Masthead
December 31, 2013

LGBT family service group moves to campus

A new $600,000 state grant will provide five years of funding for a community agency that supports same-sex parents and their families. The Lesbian and Gay Family Building Project, founded in 2000, relocated to Binghamton University this month.

The organization provides support, advocacy, information and access to healthcare and services across upstate New York. The project director and faculty members say their collaboration will help families, lead to better pre-professional training and provide new avenues for research.

“Now the program will have a scholarly advisory team who can advise us on our programs and help us evaluate them and improve them,” says Claudia Stallman, project director. “The New York State Department of Health is requiring increased rigor in our approach to program planning and evaluation. Our collaboration with social scientists will ensure that we keep up.”

Her group has teamed up with Binghamton University faculty members in the past on conferences and training for healthcare providers. The move to campus will intensify their collaboration and provide new opportunities to work with Binghamton students.

“Many of our students and affiliated faculty want to connect our intellectual work with community engagement,” says Dara Silberstein, executive director of the transdisciplinary Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies program, which shares office space with the group. “Having this relationship is a natural flow from that. There’s a real connection between scholarship and civic engagement.”

Read more in Inside