Women’s center series promotes empowerment

The Women’s Resource Center is attempting to revamp the women’s empowerment movement on campus through the Rosie the Riveter: We Can Do It Series.

According to the center, the program is centered on empowering women to be strong, independent, and resourceful, and the skills obtained through attending the series of events cannot be found in any other college classrooms.

Women’s Resource Center and Diversity Coordinator Jennifer Graham, the creator of the series, discussed the idea behind the series.

“The reason is to provide a safe environment for people, mainly females, to learn real life skills, maybe things they wouldn’t have otherwise learned. Things that are helpful to real life situations,” Graham said.

The series has experimented with a new topic each month. The September topic allowed participants to assist in basic car maintenance skills such as changing tires, checking oil, and changing windshield wipers.

Those attending October’s series had the unique opportunity to build a bench using solely manual tools, teaching them the “how-to’s” of basic carpentry tools.

This month’s topic focused on basic computer and cyber safety skills. Lessons ranging from learning how to defragment your computer to running virus protection software provided participants with an enhanced sense of self-confidence and knowledge when dealing with the common mysteries of technology.

Technical Support Specialist on campus, Sonny McKenzie, led the hands-on discussion and directed participants through numerous examples of improving computer maintenance, strongly recommending backing up and saving documents onto multiple hard drives.

“Always plan for your computer to crash, plan for it to crash tomorrow,” McKenzie said.

According to the center, taking advantage of this series of opportunities during college years is vital, especially as students are stripped away from the guidance of fathers, brothers and even boyfriends.

The Women’s Resource Center eagerly awaits suggestions of topics students want to become established in and could be uniquely incorporated into the Rosie series.

“Having the awareness and know how to do it yourself, it’s empowering to know you don’t have to necessarily rely on somebody else to do the little things, you just need the opportunity to learn,” Graham said.

Suggestions should be sent to Jennifer.graham@gcsu.edu.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Nov 13 2009. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry