Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs Sara Klein hosted a meeting of LGBTQ+ student leaders on Thursday, February 21. The meeting, formally titled “LGBTQ+ Initiatives Meeting,” was assembled by Klein to discuss various issues facing the LGBTQ+ community at Stevens and sponsor a greater spirit of collaboration between various groups represented by these leaders.
The attendees at the meeting came from a wide variety of LGBTQ-related organizations. They included Isabelle Joyce, Julia Martin, Jonathan Pavlik, Matthew Doto, and Caitlin Mahoney of Torch Alliance; Nasir Montalvo, Amir Mustafa, and Adrian Castellanos of the Student Government Association (SGA) Diversity & Inclusion Committee; Chase Kahn and Tyler Wright of TranSIT; Eli Trakhtenberg, Peer Health Educator and co-founder of Sexual Wellness Education Advocacy and Training (SWEAT); Ang Contreras of Out in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (oSTEM); Dakota Van Deursen, former SGA Vice President of Student Interests; Veronika Paprocka, Graduate Coordinator for Diversity Initiatives; and Klein herself.
Much attention was given during the meeting to the plethora of new and rising organizations related to the LGBTQ+ community on campus. oSTEM, a professional society dedicated to LGBTQ+ students, and SWEAT, a new organization dedicated to serving the needs of Stevens’ kink community, are continuing in the New Organization Process. Also, TranSIT, a group dedicated to providing a safe space for Stevens’ transgender students, is seeking to enter the New Organization Process in the future.
Trakhtenberg particularly spoke about SWEAT, stating her interest in re-starting the group’s momentum. “I know how it could look to say like ‘Hey, here is how you tie someone up!’ but there should be resources for students so they know how to do things safely.”
A common topic of discussion was the general lack of resources for LGBTQ+ students at Stevens, and furthermore a lack of awareness of how to seek out resources from off-campus sources.
Contreras said that they would like to see students more easily linked to external resources and support structures. They noted that many students do not have safe support networks of their own and should be able to find one at Stevens. Contreras mentioned that there are a lot of panels in the New York metropolitan area on subjects relevant to LGBTQ+ students, and being able to send information about such panels to students at Stevens would be a great help to the community.
Klein raised the possibility of hiring a Federal Work Study employee in her office whose specific duty would be curating off-campus resources for LGBTQ+ Stevens students and delivering information about them to those students.
Several students brought up issues regarding how they were treated when they went to CAPS, Stevens’ Counseling and Psychological Services office. Montalvo stated that when he went into CAPS one day, he was handed a pamphlet without any specific information in it. Martin agreed with Montalvo, mentioning that a lot of the information on the pamphlet was also out-of-date. The general consensus in the meeting was that CAPS should provide up-to-date information about counselors in the Hoboken area that are LGBT-specialized and specifically transgender-friendly. This information is not readily available to the public, said Klein.
Coordination was a major focus of the meeting. The various organizations are spread across multiple subcommittees — for example, Torch is a part of the Special Interests subcommittee whereas oSTEM is part of the Professional Societies subcommittee and the Diversity & Inclusion committee is a part of the SGA, not a separate student organization. Montalvo mentioned that many of the Stevens cultural organizations enjoy a broad degree of close collaboration due to the structure of the Cultural Subcommittee and Ethnic Student Council, and that the LGBTQ+ organizations do not have this intrinsic collaborative body among them.
Pavlik raised the idea of all the LGBTQ-interest organizations hosting a Stevens Pride Day celebration, as Torch has done in the past. Several people noted that Hoboken used to have an official Pride celebration but no longer does, and even when they did, it cost a significant amount of money to attend. A Stevens-oriented Pride celebration would, in Pavlik’s view, not only promote collaboration and community within the Stevens LGBTQ+ organizations, but the LGBTQ+ community on campus as a whole. Montalvo also later mentioned the idea of organizing a Queer Prom.
Klein spoke at length about the issue of STD/STI testing on the Stevens campus. Many students, whether or not they identify as LGBTQ+, have requested that STD testing be made available through the Health & Wellness Center which currently provides various other health services for students. Klein said that she spent nine months researching the topic and came to the conclusion that it’s impossible at the present time and infeasible for the future. On-campus STD testing would require the Wellness Center to operate its own laboratory and testing facility, which requires a host of licenses that cost extraordinary amounts of money to acquire. The maintenance costs of such a laboratory would also be significant. Also, implementing STD testing would require the Wellness Center be capable of billing students, which the school currently has no method of doing. Klein specifically called out the Student Information System (SIS) operated by the Stevens Division of Information Technology for lacking any billing features that would allow the school to move forward with STD testing.
By the end of the meeting, the decision was made to create a Slack workspace that will act as a centralized method of communication between LGBTQ-interest organizations. It will also provide a place for news about resources for LGBTQ+ students to be posted in a common platform. Stevens students can join the new Slack workspace at StevensLGBT.slack.com.
When asked about the meeting, Van Deursen said, “I am very happy that all the people in positions of power of [LGBT] identity-based organizations have been able to create a single community Slack […] When I was Vice President of Student Interests, it was mainly Torch, but oSTEM and SWEAT were becoming a thing. I am interested to see if this Slack is able to bring these groups together and breathe a little more life into LGBT on campus.”
Joyce also spoke about the meeting afterward. “I thought it went well,” said Joyce. “It was a good start of what I hope will be a continual dialog on campus between faculty, and all the growing LGBT organizations on campus. I look forward to meeting and working with everyone more.” Pavlik also commented that there was helpful discussion towards the development of the community, and that he looks forward to working with the new organizations.
At the conclusion of the meeting, Klein and several attendees expressed their desire to hold these meetings more regularly, and began making preparations to organize additional meetings on a monthly basis.
Be First to Comment