More than 250 students attend Girls of Color Summit at GVSU

Over 250 middle and high schoolers gathered the morning of March 3 for the fifth annual Girls of Color Summit in Kirkhof Center.

Some of them traveled from as far as Detroit, including Taniya Perkins, who woke up at 5 a.m. to make it to her school bus on time. She and La’Shae Horne are high school students at University Preparatory Academy in Detroit and were attending the summit for the first time. 

The program, hosted by the Center for Women and Gender Equity (CWGE) was broken up into multiple breakout sessions throughout the day, with one track of three sessions for middle school, and one for high school. After the first session, the entire group gathered together for lunch, where students were asked about what they had learned so far.

Horne, along with many others, touched on intersectionality, saying that it was nice meeting “a lot of black people and brown people to talk about the experiences that we share.”

Nya Neal, an 8th grader from City High Middle School in Grand Rapids, had just come from a session focusing on self-love. She said that she liked getting to hear from all the different types of people, and to learn about their versions of self-love. 

The central theme of this year’s summit was Standing in Your Truth. Keynote speaker, Tashuna Hunt, adjunct professor at GVSU and a licensed social worker, focused on this as she spoke, sharing her own story.

“For so long I’d never seen professors or teachers that looked like me,” Hunt said. “I attended Grand Valley for my graduate degree, and for the first time, I had several professors that actually looked like me.”

That, Hunt said, was what inspired her to teach. “She did that!” she called for the room to repeat in a rousing chorus. “And I can do that too.” 

Many of the facilitators for this event were community activists, graduate school organizations, and members of the BIPOC community, according to Lariesha Lee, assistant director of the CWGE.

One of the goals for this summit was to provide opportunities to learn about activism, allyship, and leadership. There was also a focus on solidarity, said Lee, amongst BIPOC and their allies, returning to that theme of intersectionality. Coming together, “not only in times of despair, but times like this of celebration as well. It’s very important.”