Two of CSU’s resource offices collaborated to create an event to help students who both are part of the LGBTQIA+ community and live off campus. Off-Campus Life and the Pride Resource Center collaborated to hold a roommate matching event Nov. 7 to give students an opportunity to meet potential roommates and learn what resources are available when living off campus.
PRC Program Coordinator Soleil Gonzalez discussed this event and similar ones last spring with Off-Campus Life. They recognized the need for queer and transgender students to find safe roommates and wanted to create resources to aid in that process.
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“There is a need for our LGBTQ students within housing (to find), like, friendly, queer-adjacent and/or queer roommates,” Gonzalez said. “And so the hopes for this program is to kind of aid that process a little bit more in terms of finding a roommate.”
“Obviously, it’s not going to be, like, an end-all be-all, ‘You’ll find your perfect roommate here,’ but it’s just more, like, connecting them to the resources that Off-Campus Life has and the Pride Center, along with providing them other resources that they can access,” Gonzalez said.
First-year CSU student Darens Bretous attended this event among others.
“I went to these meetings in particular because I want to room with others in the communities that I am a part of,” Bretous said. “I would definitely suggest going to one of these roommate matchup meets. The information provided at the meetings was very helpful, especially for a first-year student like myself who has never had to try and figure out how the roommate finding process even works.”
“The staff were super welcoming, and the only way I think it could improve is by having more people looking for roommates actually show up,” Bretous said.
Fifth-year student Sammy Trout is the Off-Campus Life program assistant, RamRide community outreach coordinator and one of the facilitators of the roommate matching event.
“I’m really excited that this is a service that Off-Campus Life provides,” Trout said. “As a queer student, I was really lucky to find somebody else within the queer community that I was able to room with, but I know not everybody coming to CSU has that same opportunity.”
“I was really privileged to grow up in a community that was very welcoming for me,” Trout said. “Joining in fellow queer communities was really easy for me to get into, but for a lot of people, they’ve grown up in a way that was really hostile toward that.”
One of the main issues this event tries to solve is community support.
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“How can we help you find a sense of family and community when you didn’t have that necessarily where you originally came from?” Trout said.
The Pride Resource Center and Off-Campus Life offer more resources and information on their websites.
Reach Aubree Miller at life@collegian.com or on Twitter @CSUCollegian.
