Impact

The LGBTQ Center at UNC-Chapel Hill provides vital educational and direct support programs to the Carolina community. Your support enables us to continue to create a stronger ally network through education and community-building, and offering direct support to students, faculty, and staff on campus.

What We Do

Connecting to Support and Resources

The LGBTQ Center is housed in an office suite with a common area where campus and community members can relax, study, and chat with friends. We keep easily accessible snacks and personal items on-hand for your convenience, as well as to support housing and food insecure members of our community. We maintain a curated collection of resources from around campus and the Triangle, including LGBTQIA+ affirming health care resources, information on local LGBTQIA+ clubs, groups, and organizations, and information on recovery programs in the area.

Building Community and Resilience

Undergraduate students gather at the Center or online via Zoom for monthly socials and community events, where they build friendships that become part of their care networks and connect them to opportunities around campus. Students also use the Center to hold club and organization meetings, and to host visibility events.

Queer Graduate and Professional Students (QGAPS) meet twice a month to connect, visit with friends outside of their programs, and share strategies for managing their workload, as well as for navigating academia as LGBTQIA+ individuals. This time to decompress and relate to people with similar lived experiences is vital to success in post-graduate education and often helps inform participants' research and knowledge of the resources available to them. 

Twice per semester, we invite LGBTQIA+ faculty and staff to connect with one another across departments, disciplines, and affiliations. We provide a space to talk about the interpersonal impact of policies, get to know one another, and form relationships that sustain the work they do to improve the lives of North Carolinians both on and off-campus.

Fostering Affirming Self-Discovery

The Center is home to a lending library of over 1,000 holdings. Most of our holdings are donated books including LGBTQIA+ focused research, history, novels, poetry, advice, and more. Our library offers a place where students who aren't yet comfortable exploring these topics can browse in relative privacy and know that anyone around to notice what they check out is not passing judgement. Some students come to us because a book was assigned by their instructor, and the main library has run out of copies. Once here, they meet professional staff and student workers who are eager to help them find what they need and often end up perusing the rest of our collection for leisure reading. Faculty and staff check out books to inform their affirming classroom practices, assist with supporting students, and for personal enjoyment.

Educating a More Inclusive Campus

Safe Zone Allyship training is our most popular program with nearly 1200 trainees in the most recent academic year. This program allows anyone on campus and in nearby communities to learn fundamental terminology, concepts, and strategies to affirm people of all sexual orientations, gender identities, and gender expressions. We offer a foundational training, suitable for anyone on campus, and a healthcare training geared towards Health Care providers, but open to all. The curriculum for Safe Zone is continually growing and changing as terminology and conceptualization of certain identities have evolved. We have also added continuing education sessions on specific identities and communities to deepen trainees' understanding of them and more effectively advocate for equitable campus policies and practices within their spheres of influence.

How We Do It

Passionate Volunteers

Our professional staff members are tasked with serving the campus community at a ratio of 11,299 to 1, excluding requests from local community members and organizations. Student volunteers who serve as B.O.N.E.S. program ambassadors or QGAPS Advisory Board members help to plan and deliver community-building and educational programs of all shapes and sizes. Staff members who volunteer their time to go through Safe Zone Facilitator training help us provide training to larger groups and on a more flexible schedule. Faculty, staff, and researchers answer our calls to provide engaging content at LGBTQIA+ Speaker Series and sit on Advocacy Award committees.

Allied Campus Partners

Our largest events: Queer FallFest, National Coming Out Day, Pride Week, and Lavender Graduation are collaborations with student organizations and other campus departments whose missions align with ours. We partner to ensure that students, faculty, and staff members of all orientations, genders, and expressions know that there are programs and resources to support their identity development and paths towards allyship.

Generous Donors

Our programming budget comes from private donations. The work of the LGBTQ Center to create a safe and inclusive campus environment would not be possible without your generosity and support. Contributions of time, knowledge, money, and resources allow us to continue our efforts to ensure that all people at UNC-Chapel Hill are treated equitably.

• Give to help us continue connecting our community to needed resources.
• Give so that LGBTQIA+ students, faculty, and staff have opportunities to gather and build strong, sustaining connections that support their own continued work.
• Give to help us cultivate an up-to-date library where LGBTQIA+ campus members of all races, ethnicities, abilities, and interests can find themselves reflected across history.
• Give to help us continue developing a network of informed campus and community members of all identities with the tools to disrupt heteronormativity and cissexism.