March is Women’s History Month, and one new way that the Women and Gender Resource Center has celebrated it is by offering $100 mini-grants to faculty, staff and students who came up with innovative project ideas. In addition to the money, each grant came with the support of WGRC staff.
“We have been offering Women’s History Month programming for years, but we wanted to see what our campus community members would suggest to ensure that we offer relevant programming that folks are interested in,” said Jackie Northrup, assistant director of the WGRC.
“We hoped that this would highlight existing work happening in other areas on campus. The WGRC is not the only office offering programming related to women, so our hope was that we could compile a good list of varied opportunities.”
The national theme of this year’s Women’s History Month is “Visionary Women: Champions of Peace and Nonviolence.” It was requested, but not required, that grant applicants come up with ideas that fit the theme.
Northrup said the grant application process was a simple online series of questions. “We wanted to make it easy so that students and busy professionals wouldn’t be discouraged in the process,” she said. “Because these are small dollar grants, there isn’t any burdensome reporting they need to do.”
A total of seven grants were available. Only two grants were applied for and awarded.
The first recipient was the Ferguson Student Center information desk manager, who applied to have Women’s History Month materials available at each of the three information desks. The grant will provide balloons, bookmarks, banners and photos of UA women who have made history.
The second grant was awarded to Project Health, American Association of University Women and the Student Leadership Council who are jointly using the money to host a March 25 film screening and discussion on “Period. End of Sentence.” The grant will provide refreshments for the event.
The grant application window, which was open in February, is now closed, but Northrup hopes to raise awareness about the grants so that next year more people will apply.
“We did have a campus partner approach us to offer money for the initiative, so it could be that in the future we could collaborate even on the awarding of the grants.”