The Great Lakes Colleges Association Students of Color Leadership Conference was held last weekend
Mariah Joyce
Editor in Chief
The Great Lakes Colleges Association’s (GLCA) Students of Color Leadership Conference was held at Wooster last weekend, Nov. 4-6. Featured events included a documentary showing followed by a panel discussion and an open mic night hosted in Freedlander Theatre.
The annual conference was attended by around 200 students from schools in the GLCA, which includes Albion College, Allegheny College, Antioch College, Denison University, DePauw University, Earlham College, Hope College, Kalamazoo College, Kenyon College, Oberlin College, Ohio Wesleyan University, Wabash College and The College of Wooster.
Different schools in the GLCA take turns hosting the conference. The theme of this year’s conference, hosted at Wooster, was Loving Y(our)selves. Staff from Wooster’s Office of Multicultural Student Affairs helped to organize the weekend. The stated mission of the conference, taken from the GCLA’s website, is to “engage with other students of color at other institutions within the Great Lakes Colleges Association” and to “unite students with the idea of self-love, awareness and pride, while actively caring for their community.”
Conference organizers cited the fact that the identities of students of color at historically white institutions, such as The College of Wooster and other GLCA institutions, are complex. A conference such as this one offers those students the opportunity to connect and build relationships with other students of color at primarily white institutions, who are having similar academic and social experiences.
Khorkie Tyus ’19 attended the event last year and said she thought that the conference offered a valuable opportunity to talk with students at other institutions about their shared experience. “This conference gives me a chance to