----community----
Worth The Wait
O R EG O N ’S LGBTO N EW S M A G A ZIN E
The Rock Creek campus of Portland Com
munity College is about 12 miles west of down
town Portland, abutting the predominantly rural
areas of North Bethany and Helvetia.
There, the students and staff have been work
ing since last year to create an LGBTQcom m u-
nity center that would serve not only the students
at the college, but the community at large.
The new Queer Resource Center, or QRC,
had its grand opening on October 11, National
Coming O ut Day. The Q R C ’s mission is much
like that of the Q_Center, the nonprofit LG-
BTQ_hub in Portland. It’s a designated space
where people can come and connect with oth
ers in the LGBTQ_population, participate in
activities, get help if they need it and learn
about the community’s issues and history.
These resources are available at the Q^Center
in North Portland— near PC C ’s Cascade cam
pus, in fact—but they are sparse in the suburbs.
“At a campus like Rock Creek, it makes sense
that you would create these types of services
and programs because these sorts of outlying
areas don’t have as much available,” says David
Martinez, the outreach and orientation coordi
nator with the Rock Creek campus and a mem
ber of the task force that started the QRC.
Students and staff invited the community to
attend the grand opening, which was celebrated
with a ribbon cutting, music and food. Tables
were set up to educate people about the new
QRC, and representatives from Cascade AIDS
Project and the Portland Area Business Associ
PCC Rock Creek opens Queer Resource Center
BY AARON SPENCER
ation (PABA), as well as Q_ Center executive
director Barbara McCullough-Jones, came to
show support.
But the QRC didn’t happen overnight. In
fact, the very idea of a school-based QRC is
something of a novelty, especially on a commu
nity college campus. Larger universities like
Oregon State University and Portland State
University have QRCs, though they go by vari
ous other names. But as far as staff at PCC
Rock Creek can tell, their QRC is the first at
any community college in Oregon.
“W e’re really at the forefront of a new and
innovative program,” says Joshua Peters-
McBridc, who as the clubs and programs spe
cialist with PCC Rock Creek, helped drive the
QRC forward. “Even though the concept of a
QRC isn’t new and innovative, at an academic
level, it really is.”
PCC Rock Creek’s QRC sprang from the
school’s Gay-Straight Alliance, a club found at
many schools and universities that’s meant to
provide support for L G B T Q jouth (though the
PCC club is in talks to rename itself the Queer-
Straight Alliance, or QS A).
GSAs are not uncommon. Students often
C a rlo s S a nche z, Ja zm in S a n d o va l, and
P a tric k G u illen w ere re co g n iz e d fo r th e ir
e ffo rts by Q C e n te r e x e c u tiv e d ire c to r
B a rb a ra M c C u llo u g h -J o n e s .
OCTOBER 21, 2011
17 .ft
at her high school in Scappoose, but parents
eventually forced the club to shut down, she
says. W hen she went to PCC Rock Creek, she
got involved with its GSA.
“I joined the GSA, but it took me a while to
get the courage to go to a meeting," she says,
“and then when I went there I was like, ‘This is
where I belong.’”
The QRC idea came from students in the
GSA and was brought before the school’s stu
dent government. Around that time, in Janu
ary, the school hired Peters-McBride, who had
experience organizing queer groups at the
University of Montana. He “really ran with the
idea,” Martinez says.
Student government worked with the dean of
students to create a task force, which drafted a
proposal for the QRC. That proposal was even
tually okayed by the president of the campus
with an annual budget of $16,500 a year.
The QRC is operational now and sees about
30 to 50 people walk through its doors each
day, says Peters-McBride, who has an office
near the space.
Plans for future programming aren’t concrete,
but students envision events that can help the
entire community.
“It’s been a long time coming, but it’s defi
nitely been worth the wait,” Peters-McBride
says, i t ]
come to college from high schools that have
GSAs, so they’re looking for something similar
in college, Martinez says. But the QRC is dif
ferent from the GSA in that it provides a desig
nated space for LGBTQ_ resources. It has a
front lobby, or lounge, a collection of books,
computers and a part-time staff.
One of those staff members is Jazmin San
doval, a sophomore and student advocate for For more inform ation on the P C C Rock Creek Q R C ,
the QRC. She had been a member of her GSA v is it pcc. edu/resources/aspcc/rock-creek/qcenter.
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