The Women’s Center is a campus community center that has helped students for over 30 years. Professionals spoke on the Women’s Center history and resources that have helped shape NC State.
Janine Kossen, director of the Women’s Center, said the Center was founded in 1991 as a result of student advocacy.
“There was a small but mighty group of students who were really pushing for the establishment of a women’s center,” Kossen said. “And they worked in concert with some amazing faculty and staff who, at the time, were very invested, particularly in providing survivor support services, and wanting to create a home for that work.”
During the ‘90s, the Women’s Center mainly provided women’s health services. However, Kossen said the Center has changed throughout the years as they began to understand there were more issues to address.
“Really understanding that this was more than just a health issue, but it was connected to larger social justice issues and gender equity issues in the end,” Kossen said.
Kossen said the Center had a rough start in its initial location in a shared space in a basement before moving to Talley Student Union.
“We had to share space; there wasn’t any institutional support and then in the sense of physical, administrative things, like office supplies, printers, things like that,” Kossen said. “At the time, it was really a scrappy mission of trying to get the resources, then a lot of committed volunteers donated items and space to make it a space, even couches and furniture.”
Penelope Chirolde, a graduate student studying counseling education and graduate assistant at the Women’s Center, said a big part of the resources the Center currently provides is survivor services.
“This could be you know, survivors of sexual assault, domestic or dating violence, stalking, etc, who’ve had an experience, and they kind of need support on how to navigate next steps,” Chirolde said.
Chirolde said in addition to survivor services, the Women’s Center provides volunteer work and community-building events like a feminist book club and Feminist Fridays.
“We try to provide whatever our students are asking for, so we take a lot of consideration like the climate that’s on campus and try to stay up to date with trauma-informed practices and other practices that would be essential and maintain an atmosphere where people feel safe and comfortable coming to the Women’s Center,” Chirolde said.
Kossen said the Women’s Center has changed a lot over the past decade in order to fit the perspective of NC State’s campus.
“Sadly, 30-plus years later, some of those issues still exist,” Kossen said. “So thinking about things like pay equity and safety, misogyny and things like that. I think, over the past decade, the Women’s Center has really leaned into focusing on intersectionality, and the intersectional identities that people experience and hold all at the same time and how those systems of oppression and the power are implicated in the identities that people hold.”
Kossen said the Women’s Center is an important space to provide community, especially for women in STEM.
“So I think even giving folks a space to kind of examine what that looks like within the STEM fields, like how does harassment show up?” Kossen said. “How does misogyny show up? How does racism and xenophobia and all of the other -isms, how do they show up particularly when you’re thinking about women who hold multiple marginalized identities — a woman of color or queer woman of color, trans woman of color — and how all of these spaces on this campus were not built or made for people other than white males.”
Chirolde said the Women’s Center is vital to represent the entire NC State community.
“This is a space where a lot of women can connect and see each other in the same field and outside of just the classroom,” Chirlode said. “I think in academic spaces there’s restrictions and confinement, but here, we’re open to discussing a lot of the intersectionalities that come with being a college student and being a woman of color, maybe a minority student.”
For more information on the Women’s Center, visit its website.
