Keira Stearns signs the guestbook and picks out a button while Andee Coco looks on during the Women's Resource Center's 15th birthday celebration Wednesday.The center strives to empower women through diversity and acceptance. Stearns is a CU-Alumna who worked for the center and said it was like a home to her while she was in college. (CU Independent/Lauren Walter)
The Women’s Resource Center at CU Boulder is celebrating its 15th year of supporting gender diversity and empowerment on campus.
About 50 people made their way into the Koenig Alumni Center Wednesday evening to celebrate the anniversary of The Women’s Resource Center. The festivities included everything from free food and drinks to music and a photo album slideshow of volunteers.
Since its beginning in 1994, the center and the groups it provides have expanded every year with the input of new students, according to Women’s Resource Center Director Barbara Kulton. Kulton has been with the center for eight and a half years.
“The students are wonderful,” Kulton said. “There are so many activities on campus where students are more like assistants, but not here. Our students are not assistants. They are leaders.”
The mission of the Women’s Resource Center is to enable empowerment through diversity and provide students with a safe place to nurture those things, Kulton said.
Addressing the celebration in her welcoming speech, she said the responsibility of the center is to continue promoting diversity and acceptance.
“It is our job to be a thorn in the sides of the campus administration, to remind them about diversity; it’s our job to implement social change,” Kulton said.
Daniel Ellen, a 20-year-old sophomore political science and international affairs major, said he has been volunteering with the Women’s Center for two weeks. Ellen said women’s issues and class issues have always fascinated him, and that’s one of the reasons why he decided to be an active volunteer.
“Last year I was in the Ethnic Living and Learning Community in a residence hall and we would discuss things like race, gender, ableism, etc. We were trying to evoke a sense of multiculturalism,” Ellen said. “Plus [joining the Women’s Resource Center] helped me understand my own male privileges, so I thought, ‘There is a way I can help women and hold myself to some kind of accountability.’ So I applied and the rest is history.”
Ellen said he is volunteering to help with body image issues, and that he is disturbed by societal preoccupations and dictations on the female form.
“I came to the epiphany that from a young age, women are taught to hate themselves and their own image,” Ellen said. “My mother once told me that women don’t dress up and paint their faces for men, which is bad enough, but often do it to upstage other women.”
Evy Valencia, a 20-year-old junior ethnic studies and sociology major with a minor in women and gender studies, is also a member of Sigma Lambda Gamma, a multicultural sorority. Valencia has been working with the Women’s Resource Center for a few months.
Valencia said although she was nervous initially about the responsibilities of her new job, she was quickly reassured about her role.
“I was nervous, just coming into a new job…[but] it was just being with women,” Valencia said. “I really got to understand the role we play on campus. I think at that moment I figured out this was where I was supposed to be. These women empower me.”
Valencia said she first started being active in the Women’s Resource Center during her freshman year, when she attended one of the center’s longest-standing groups, Kitchen Table.
“I started going to WRC as a freshman for the Kitchen Table group, and I always felt really welcome there,” Valencia said.
Kulton said she agrees that the community fostered by the Women’s Resource Center is one of its best strengths.
“There’s an empowerment that’s generated from their engagement around each other that is just exciting,” Kulton said.
Also present at the festivities was CU Boulder alumna Keira Stearns, a 22-year-old who said she remembers finding the Women’s Resource Center her sophomore year of college.
Stearns said she would not have missed the evening’s celebration for anything.
“It was such an empowering place for me,” Stearns said. “It was unconditional support…I came back because the Women’s Resource Center was home for me in college. This was something I just couldn’t miss out on.”
Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Andrea Rael at Andrea.rael@colorado.edu.
