The 203 Centre for Gender and Sexual Diversity

The University of New Brunswick in Fredericton has created a new space for Queer students. Professors, students and members of the community celebrated the grand opening of The 203 Centre for Gender and Sexual Diversity. The centre is an effort between students and the UNB counselling department. Nadine Violette is the student spearheading the centre. She is the president of Qmmunity (the UNB society for Queer students) and explains the motivation for the centre:

“As was kinda the theme in a lot of the speeches today, having space and occupying space and having social space, essentially, where students can like hangout and have these conversations and get peer mentoring and get counselling specific to them and get student advising and read a queer book and admire some queer art. You know, like all of these things kinda play into the whole overall theme of taking up space and like, doing what we want with it.”

The 203 Centre is named for it’s room number in the U-N-B student union building. The Centre is central on campus and is open to both U-N-B and St. Thomas University students. The counselling department believes that it is essential to have accessible and safe space for the queer community. The director of counselling services at U-N-B, Rice Fuller, was also central in bringing the centre to fruition. He says there was little to no resistance from the administration or others on campus:

“It’s just so obvious that this is something that is necessary and needed. And that everyone we speak with is like ‘oh yeah, let’s do that!” And so it’s been simple that way.”

The centre was open to suggestions from attendees and collected people’s thoughts in boxes. People were enthused about the opening of the centre itself, as well as the poster campaign which was launched. Going forward, the 203 centre hopes to provide counselling, programing, and a space for queer students to make their own. 

With an excellent crowd at the grand opening the support of the community was clear. Students, professors and administration alike are confident the centre will be put to good use.