Welcome to the second quarterly QVA newsletter, where we celebrate achievements and share news from the vibrant LGBTQ+ UVA community being built by students, faculty, staff, and our global network of alumni.
2023 Priorities
As your new Board Chair, I have spent my first few months wrapping my arms around the impressively broad set of ways QVA builds community. In 2022 we reached new heights, hosting our biggest ever fall weekend, awarding a record number of scholarships, and changing our name to QVA.
Building on that success, the Board and I worked to refresh our mission and priorities to account for the ever-growing queer population on and off Grounds. Here are the three most tangible things we’re working on short-term:
- More events: We consistently hear that one of the things people most love about QVA is the lifelong friends they’ve made. We are going to invest in more events in more places to enable our members to get to know each other better!
- Build out our alumni community: UVA has historically not kept data on queer students or alumni. While understandable, that makes it much harder to build community compared with alumni groups oriented around more visible identities like race or ethnicity.
- Our ask of you: If you have friends who are LGBTQ+ UVA alumni or allies who you don’t think have heard of QVA, please forward them this email so that they can sign up for our listserv and receive these newsletters, event invitations, and more!
- Continued breadth of scholarships: For over a decade we have offered financial need grants, as well as given students awards to celebrate community impact. In the past few years, we have experimented with a variety of new grants to further help LGBTQ+ students be their best selves, including for studying abroad, professional development, and queer student group support.
- To the best of our searching, no other University offers the breadth of LGBTQ+ focused scholarships which UVA students have available through our programs, and demand has been incredibly high. We are excited to continue to maintain and sustainably scale all of these offerings!
Events
We are kicking off city-specific QVA events, starting with a happy hour in NYC this August! For folks in the NYC area, keep an eye out for a separate registration email in the coming weeks.
A reminder that Fall Weekend will be in Charlottesville on October 6-8, 2023. We look forward to events from Friday evening through Sunday afternoon, both social and educational, with the Awards Gala Saturday night at Montalto overlooking Monticello. Tickets will become available later this summer, but please feel free to book travel sooner!
In the first half of 2024 we’ll host events in other major cities:
- San Francisco (~January)
- Los Angeles (~March)
- Washington D.C. (~May)
We also recently helped celebrate UVA’s Lavender Graduation, hosted by the LGBTQ+ Center, as well as held informal receptions and LGBTQ+ history wall tours at both Reunions Weekends. We look forward to hosting receptions again next year during Reunions 2024!
Recent QVA Highlights
In our newsletters we will highlight incredible students, faculty, staff, and alumni who have been contributing meaningfully to UVA’s queer community. In the past quarter, QVA:
- Supported 21 students with financial need scholarships
- Recognized 6 students through the Reider-Otis and Herring achievement awards
- Supported 8 students in opportunities to study abroad and attend LGBTQ+ conferences
- Partnered with 5 student organizations, including a Transgender speaker series, an educational drag show at Darden, and a service trip for SOR (UVA’s queer fraternity)
- In addition to Tony-nominated Anant Das joining our Advisory Council, we also welcomed two new Board members:
Megan Moakler (Nursing ’01) was an Army ROTC student and has spent the last 22 years serving on active duty throughout the United States and Iraq. During the first half of her military career, she served under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act. She is currently a Colonel assigned at the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. She has been with her wife Kirsten (College ’06) for 17 years and married for 9. They reside with their two children in Alexandria, Virginia.
Ankit Agrawal (COMM and CS ’22) joins us as the new QVA Treasurer. At UVA, Ankit served on the Managing Board of The Cavalier Daily and as the VP of Finance for the Queer Student Union. He was also a Resident Advisor, a Diversity and Inclusion Committee Co-Chair for Class Council, and an LGBTQ Center Volunteer. Ankit now works as a software engineer at Slack in San Francisco, California.
Donation Request
With all the progress we’ve made, there’s still more work to be done to meet the critical demand we now face for scholarship funding. Word has gotten out about our expanding scholarship and grant opportunities, and more than 10% of UVA’s incoming class identified themselves as LGBTQ+ last fall. We want to fund every qualified LGBTQ+ student who applies.
We are already struggling to meet growing demand and risk falling behind without your help. Please consider making a contribution to the QVA Operating Endowment or the Wavelength Scholarship Endowment using the donate button below. If you would like to discuss how best to support specific types of scholarships or programming, please don’t hesitate to contact me (lance@queervirginia.org).
Thank you all for your support in building a better University of Virginia community. Together we have achieved so much, and I am excited to see where we can build from here. Stay tuned for more news from QVA in the next quarterly newsletter.
Sincerely yours,
Lance C. Guthrie