About the Center for Gender Equity
DISTINGUISHED and DISTINCTIVE:
Women's centers are common on college campuses, but few are as innovative, inclusive, and diversified as Pacific's CGE. The CGE's diversity of initiatives and its efforts to reach out to a wide variety of people make it an innovative and model program. This is especially true because we are able to operate with minimal funding, using a wide range of volunteers from many other university and community affiliates. Our effort to build partnerships with other groups allows us to maximize our impact even when funds are tight.
- Work with Larger Community: CGE services are available to people on and off campus. There are two reasons for this. First, there are no services for women available in Forest Grove, and public service is central to our mission and that of the University. Second, we are interested in breaking barriers between “town and gown” and connecting people across professions with various life experiences. Women particularly are connected by their experiences as women in a society that continues to discriminate against them. By working closely with groups on and off campus we stress women’s common challenges, struggles, and advantages. This is distinctive as most college women’s centers only serve the campus.
- Multi-Cultural Programs: CGE is particularly sensitive to multicultural feminism and is interested in expanding the emphasis on women’s equity beyond the needs of white, middleclass, western women. For this reason we have established a sister-center at a women’s college in India and plan to establish similar affiliations with women’s centers in various countries. We are also focusing on the Latinas in our own communities for the same reasons. We have plans to provide brown bag lunch presentations in the Forest Grove housing projects, and the center has begun to address some of the issues of the Latina custodial workers. This is distinctive; most campuses concentrate on middle-class women students, and when class issues are addressed, they are among students. Few if any centers deal with women workers on campus and in the community.
- Inclusive: CGE is open to everyone on its campuses and in the community, regardless of gender. We seek opportunities to cooperate with any group that wishes as long as the collaboration furthers the mission of CGE. Our services and programming reach out to all genders.
- Research: CGE is both a service organization and a center for research. The students participating in the India program do field research produce papers which we publish on-line. As the Center grows it will become a focus of research on gender issues: local and worldwide.