Talking Stick - July/August 2011 - 38

Making Gender-Neutral Housing Work

One Student’s Voice
For many colleges and universities considering gender-neutral housing options, students play an essential role in moving the project forward and providing an alternate perspective for the administrators involved. Keegan Tarbell, a senior studying secondary science education at Western Washington University, was involved on the ground level with launching the gender-inclusive housing program on the Bellingham campus, which will ofﬁcially open later in 2011. “I had gotten the question from residents about whether they could live with their opposite gender friends. At the time, the answer was no, but I decided to see what I could do to change that answer. My ﬁrst assumption was that it would be fairly easy for residence life to make an exception and allow people to live with whomever they chose. The more I spoke with residents, the more interest I perceived in the community,” says Tarbell. He wrote a short proposal for administrators to review, requesting speciﬁcally that residents of Buchanan Towers, a suite-style community, be allowed to choose with whom they would live. “When I sat down with several administrators, including the Buchanan Towers resident director and the heads of residence life and housing assignments, to discuss the proposal, they were not opposed to the idea, but they felt that a great deal more work needed to be done. A little more than a year later, the proposal was put before the Residential Advisory Committee, and a Gender-Inclusive Housing Task Force was appointed to further research the proposal,” Tarbell explains. He has served on the task force since then. Among other projects, he was tasked with writing a survey that was distributed to other students at the university. The results of the survey were included in the ﬁnal proposal. “The proposal received a great deal of positive feedback and was met with enthusiasm. In September 2010, the decision was made to move ahead with a pilot program that would start in fall 2011.” Tarbell will be returning to the university for a ﬁfth year as he completes coursework and will have the opportunity to watch the launch of the gender-inclusive housing program. He reﬂected on what he learned through the development of the initiative: “Through this experience, I have learned that although money, power, and connections may make change a little easier, a little initiative and heart go a long way as well.” He encourages other students who want to make a signiﬁcant change on their own campuses to look for connections and commonalities because there is more that unites people than divides them: “There is one thing that stands out above the rest of my accomplishments, and that is knowing I did the right thing. I believe there was a great need to be met and I helped meet it, not because it helped me or because I expected to get anything out of it, but because it was the right thing to do.”

outcomes should be built into the programming, what kind of changes must be made to the room selection process and staff training programs, and how best practices can be shared with other institutions.

Sharing Information and Best Practices
Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and the University of California, Riverside are two schools that have offered gender-neutral housing for more than ﬁve years, and both continue to view the program as a successful one. Wesleyan typically has 4 students, out of an incoming class of 745, who request gender-neutral housing each year; though many other students could beneﬁt from the option, they often opt for single rooms. The numbers are a little higher at UC Riverside, where usually between 18 and 20 students select the new housing option, though the number is typically pared down later by students who decide to opt out. The important thing is that the option is there. As Fran Koerting, director of residential life at Wesleyan, explains, “It ﬁts our student culture well, and we believe that even if a student doesn’t need gender-neutral housing, by offering it we underscore that we acknowledge that gender is not a binary. We feel it is important we meet the needs of each of our students and that they are comfortable in their housing assignment.” One key to the continued expansion of this program is the willingness to share information and best practices with other institutions and with campus stakeholders. Simply learning how peer institutions have made gender-neutral housing programs successful on their campuses can be the impetus needed to garner buy-in from campus stakeholders and to encourage other colleges and universities to expand their housing options. “We get many requests for how our program works,

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Talking Stick - July/August 2011

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