The Q Center
Student Speakers Bureau Pilot
Each semester the Q Center receives requests from faculty, staff and Residence Life student staff for support in learning more about LGBTQ identities. In the past, we have had to deny some of the requests because we have not had a pool of volunteers to draw from. In January, we began a pilot project with eight volunteers who agreed to be trained to talk about their personal lives in a way that is educational for others. The volunteers received three hours of training, learning how to pick a story from their lives, craft it, practice telling it in five minutes or less and received feedback. Students were then given a week to refine their story and returned to tell it again and receive additional feedback.
On Feb. 28, four volunteers participated in our first panel discussion for Marguerite Wilson’s Gender Development and Education class. Our brave volunteers sat before a class of 45 students and talked about everything from coming out and internalized oppression to sex and facing discrimination from other LGBTQ people. They then spent 30 minutes answering questions from their peers. The questions were smart and caring. They were sympathetic and appreciative. The ensuing dialogue was rich and the whole experience was educational for all. Panel evaluations were positive with a significant number of students indicating that their awareness of and sensitivity to LGBTQ issues and identities had shifted because of the panel.
We hope to expand the number of trained volunteers by the fall semester so that we can advertise the Student Speaker Bureau as a service of the Q Center. Our target audience will be all pre-professional majors: human development, social work, student affairs administration, public administration, education, psychology, nursing, pharmacy and even School of Management marketing classes. We believe that pre-professional students can gain by having exposure to a diversity of LGBTQ identities and issues that they will likely come into contact with during their careers. We believe that faculty in those programs will be excited by this new resource as similar programs on other campuses garner up to 60 requests per semester for Speakers Bureau panels.