The University of Connecticut Rainbow Center hosted its second ever symposium on Friday, Oct. 13, 2023, according to reporting from The Daily Campus.
This event featured free food, discussion panels and workshops on topics such as coming out, finding LGBTQIA+ friendly employment opportunities and HIV prevention and protection. The symposium was open to all UConn students, faculty, staff and community members.
The Daily Campus Editorial Board recognizes the importance of highlighting cultural centers and programs as well as other spaces on campus for marginalized community members and further emphasizes to students the significance of their participation in their programming and events.
Beyond the Rainbow Center, UConn has other cultural programs including the African American Cultural Center, the Asian American Cultural Center, the Puerto Rican and Latin American Cultural Center, the Women’s Center, and Native American and Middle Eastern Cultural Programs.
The Rainbow Center’s symposium is one of the many events offered by UConn’s cultural centers that students should make every effort to attend. The programming offered at all of UConn’s cultural centers is a powerful opportunity to get involved on campus. At these centers, students have the opportunity to be in a community with students of diverse backgrounds, bridging divides between a university population that is perforated by many social and economic differences.
Furthermore, utilizing the programming and events from UConn’s cultural centers additionally provides students the opportunity to educate themselves surrounding issues that impact marginalized communities and how to advocate for them.
Students should care about having a diverse student body at UConn. Therefore, the existence of cultural centers ensures that marginalized populations have rightful representation on campus. To do so, UConn students must show up in order to highlight these important campus fixtures to the university’s administration. If students support these programs, that is just another means of showing the UConn administration where funding and resources should go, the importance of which was highlighted last fall when students raised their concerns for this very issue.
As The Daily Campus Editorial Board has highlighted before, it matters both where UConn’s funding is going and where it is not going. If, within the university’s mission statement, there is a promise to “…embrace diversity and cultivate leadership, integrity, and engaged citizenship in our students, faculty, staff, and alumni,” cultural centers are a massive part of that. Students have the opportunity to show support with their participation.
It matters that we have multiple cultural centers at UConn, but it is even more important that students reinforce the importance of these organizations and programs by participating in them.