Lakehead University Student Health and Wellness Is Celebrating Pride Month!

Lakehead University Student Health and Wellness Is Celebrating Pride Month!

Student Health and Wellness has been making efforts to ensure that all of our 2SLGBTQIA+ students feel welcome accessing our services and spaces. It started with the student union bringing us a question in 2008 about pronouns at our centre and we have continued to work to educate ourselves since then. In 2019, our staff completed Rainbow Collective’s Gender and Sexual Diversity and Inclusion training so we could demonstrate our continued commitment to making positive change in our own centre and on our campus.

[Student Health and Wellness Staff in Their Lobby]

We have worked to make sure that we have the knowledge to support the health and well-being of our 2SLGBTQIA+ students. We provide our services in a warm and welcoming environment where gender-neutral language is used and where gender identity, name in use, and pronouns are respected by our trained employees.  Members of our medical and counselling team have engaged in continuing education programs to provide gender affirming care to trans and non-binary students.

We have partnered with Pride Central on campus to offer programming for 2SLGBTQIA+ students. In 2021, we launched Rainbow Connections, a speaker series led by a sexual health educator to address topics specific to queer students. In 2022, we offered a Pride Social during orientation to connect students to one another and invited Rainbow Collective, Thunder Pride, the Umbrella Clinic and the Indigenous Friendship centre so students could connect with the Thunder Bay Pride groups and service providers. We also work to make our resources and events inclusive, ensuring that the language and images we use reflect our diverse student body, that we include topics and supports for 2SLGBQTIA+ students and developing resources specifically for them, like the Pride section of our website.

Student Health and Wellness has also been highly involved in making our campus more accessible to trans and gender non-conforming students, through the creation and expansion of all-gender washrooms on campus as part of Lakehead’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan.

The work to make our campus welcoming and safe for all our students is still in progress but we are proud to be a part of the process.

To learn more about Lakehead University Student Health and Wellness, please visit: https://www.lakeheadu.ca/students/wellness-recreation/student-health-and-wellness

Lakehead University Student Health and Wellness Is Celebrating Pride Month!