Safe Zones Trainings
The Safe Zones Trainings are professional development opportunities for UNH faculty, staff, and graduate students to advance awareness, knowledge, and skills around the services and support that we provide to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) students and colleagues. Participants of Safe Zones Trainings are a campus-wide network of allies who are supportive of LGBTQ faculty, students, and staff and are committed to contributing to a campus climate of inclusion at UNH.
Trainings are 1.5 hours in length. We offer department-specific trainings, and some trainings that are open to mixed groups of faculty and staff from various departments.
Topic areas explored during trainings:
- Increasing awareness of the issues and experiences of LGBTQ individuals,
- Using inclusive language,
- Accessing and referring LGBTQ individuals to important campus resources,
- Discovering specific ways to provide support and be an ally in the work that you do with students,
- Exploring specific issues related to providing services to LGBTQ students and assessing ways to be inclusive of and welcoming to LGBTQ individuals in the general services that you provide,
- Developing skills to take active steps toward reducing and preventing harassment, discrimination, and violence based on sexual orientation and gender identity or expression,
- As an office / department, how can you best "communicate" that you [your department] is supportive [an ally] to LGBTQ students?
Following the training, participants may decide to request a Safe Zones sticker.
To inquire about attending an upcoming training or scheduling a Safe Zones Training for the faculty and staff in your department, please contact:
Ellen Semran, Safe Zones Coordinator,
at 862-5053 or ellen.semran@unh.edu or www.unh.edu/safezones .
Safe Zones is sponsored by the President's Commission on the Status of GLBT Issues
and the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs.