QSC Director

Hola Lillian!

Congrats on being the new QSC Director. You’re gonna do amazing work in the upcoming year – no words can describe how excited I am to watch you step into the role and make this commission your own! Always remember you got the community to support you. Feel free to reach out to me if you have a question about anything QSC-related, I will be on campus and willing to support you if you ever need it!

Every ASUW employee passes on these transition documents to their successor to help smooth out the process of taking on the role. Beyond containing some fundamental logistical things like password info and dates for major events, this page also serves as a recount of my experience as the previous QSC Director.

What makes the position really cool is that however you lead the commission is ultimately up to your discretion. You’re gonna be incredible! I’m always open if you have questions.

All the best,
Juan Torres

UW NetID

Username: asuwqsc
Password: believeinQTPOC18!

Website

qsc.asuw.org/wp-admin
log in with your UW NetID

Instagram

Username: asuwqsc
Password: frankoceans1819!

Twitter

Username: asuwqsc
Password: frankoceans1819!

Slack

Email: asuwqsc@uw.edu
Password: Queers are the best

Mailman (listserv access)

http://mailman11.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/qsc_asuw
log in with your UW NetID

HUB Reservations

Go to  hubres.uw.edu/hubres/
Username: asuwqsc@uw.edu
Password: qsc20

RSO Center (printing password)

asuwqsc-16

Desktop Computer

Password: Queers are the best

Office Voice Mail 

123456
To access, press ‘Mailbox’

(it will light up red when new messages are in)

Mailchimp 

Username: ASUWQSC
Password: believeinQTPOC18!
Security Question (mascot of your last high school): Viking

Safeway

Email: asuwqsc@uw.edu
Password: QTpoc18!
Security Question (city of birth): Seattle

Sticker Mule

name: Queer Student Commission
email:asuwqsc@uw.edu
password: Queerstickers!

Your weekly tasks fluctuate depending on the schedule you set for yourself. Generally, there’s always emails to respond to and messages on Slack to check. There’s the weekly meetings, which are detailed below. Among the ones you sit on, there’s also the ones you manage internally between your team.

Your office hours are asked by the Personnel Director to be set by the start of every week. The QSC Director works 19 hours, and 75% of that has to be in the HUB, rounded down. On average weeks, you can spend 5 hours outside of the HUB – I usually used this opportunity to set 1.5 of my hours at QPOCA, and a couple set as remote, so I could work at places like Suzzallo or Allegro. Remember you can do office hours at the Q Center!

The real bulk of the work is furthering your progress on the QSC’s events and advocacy. This relies on communicating with your team as well, who you can delegate a lot of tasks to. Make sure not to overwork yourself;  that was something I had to learn on the job pretty hard. There’s always another day to continue working on something – just keep in mind upcoming deadlines and you’ll be fine!

This was how I experienced the work of the QSC per quarter.

Fall
The first few weeks of the job are the busiest. There’s the ASUW Autumn Orientation, which is a multi-day training where you’ll be meeting the other employees for the year, many of whom for the first time. After that, work will start in the ASUW offices in the HUB, and there’s a lot of administrative things to take care of – officially getting on the payroll, getting acquainted with the QSC office in HUB 131P, etc.

There’ll be a flurry of welcome events where it’ll be a good opportunity to advertise the QSC’s internship positions. The Q Center’s open house sessions are a great time to plug the commission, along with their welcome luncheon during the first week (Make sure to reach out to the Q-Center and ask if the QSC can help in any way.)  ASUW also has its own open house session during Dawg Daze, although I found the Q Center’s open houses more effective for getting outreach done. This brings me to the next point:

The first few weeks of fall quarter are all about recruiting the team. My predecessor told me there were some QSC Directors who didn’t recruit interns or volunteers at all, and I myself ended up with a team of 4. To recruit interns, the Office of Outreach and Involvement will be assisting you.  The gists of intern recruitment are:

• You can host the application on Google Forms (and you can make the form yourself with OOI approval, or they can make it for you)
• The application must be open for a minimum of two weeks, due to an ASUW policy known as the Open Selection Process.
• I’d recommend setting up short interviews with the applicants – 10 to 15 mins worked for me with all of them. I’d include the Doodle (or whatever online scheduling website of your choice) in the form itself, so they know to follow up with you in-person.

See below under ‘Interns’ about getting a good team together. I had my team by the end of October, and after their orientation we jumped straight to planning the Queer Prom, which took up most of November for me.  The most important point for fall, though, is to take it slow and pace yourself. There’s so much going on regarding just acclimating to the job itself, and team recruitment will be the bulk of the work, followed pretty immediately by planning for the Queer Prom.

Winter
The Queer Prom typically happens in early winter, and most of the work in late fall is planning for this event in January. One cool thing about winter is that the team, after their own orientation into the QSC, have had the time to really grow into their roles and can take up a lot more tasks by this time.

As with the Queer Prom in the fall, the back-end of winter is dedicated to planning the Drag Show. It’ll be a lot of the same work – organizing performers, queer student art vendors, reviewing the room with HUB Event Services, buying things, marketing, etc.

Spring
The Drag Show comes this quarter, and after that the commission is free to do whatever. Spring, however, is when ASUW hirings occur, as well as the filling out of transition documents and getting in touch with your successor. The QSC should help support and fund the Lavender Graduation in June, which the QSC also supports (but the Q Center does the heavy planning for the event). Nail the Drag Show, support the other cool queer events happening on campus, plan a few more of your own, and cherish the last few meetings with your team.

There’s a couple of meetings to keep in mind, as the QSC is expected to sit on them.

Joint Commissions Committee: This is the weekly gathering of entity directors from the following ASUW entities, along with SAB, to discuss the work you’re all doing and your plans to collaborate together. Along with each entity, I put the name of each director in parenthesis (or Vice Chair in the case of SAB).

• Asian Student Commission
• American Indian Student Commission
• Black Student Commission
• LatinX Student Commission
• Middle Eastern Student Commission
• Pacific Islander Student Commission
• Student Disability Commission
• Queer Student Commission
• Womxn’s Action Commission
• Sexual Assault and Relationship Violence Activists
• Student Health Consortium
• Student Advisory Board for the VP of Minority Affairs and Diversity n)

The Director of Diversity Efforts chairs JCC as a whole and acts as everyone’s liaison to the Board of Directors.

Student Senate: The Student Senate acts as a space for students to voice their support for the issues they care about. Senators can pass resolutions here about anything ranging from supporting more microwaves in the HUB to supporting the IMA’s intention to build an all-gender locker room. Whatever passes becomes the ‘official’ opinion of the student body, motioning ASUW to advocate for the topic that just passed. Senate meets every week for two hours (sometimes going past that time), so you’re free to send a proxy in your place.

Student Advisory Board: This advisory board connects students with Rickey Hall (the Vice President of Minority Affairs and Diversity) to discuss topics and concerns related to diversity. It connects a lot of RSOs affiliated with the ECC, along with JCC, with administrators. There’s a lot of presentations from organizations around campus (often asking how they can incorporate equity into their policies, so come with input), along with free dinner. You can also send a proxy to these meetings. It’s on Monday afternoons.

Student Safety Advisory Board: SSAB is a roundtable chaired by the Director of Campus Partnerships. Its purpose is to connect the UWPD with student groups around campus to discuss issues of student safety. It doesn’t meet every week, but still a fair number of times per quarter – so you should mark its dates down somewhere when they send out the meeting times at the beginning of each quarter. You can send a proxy to these meetings.

Director’s Caucus: This meeting is only supposed to happen once a quarter, and is chaired by the Vice President. Their role is to manage internal operations of the ASUW, so every quarter they’ll be hosting this roundtable to check in with the heads of every entity to see how everyone is progressing.

Advisor Check In: Patrick, your advisor from SAO, will be checking in with you briefly every week to consult with you about the QSC. He’s a good source of institutional knowledge if you want to learn how previous QSC Directors did things in the past. He also makes the purchases with the budget given to the QSC, so talk to him in person or Slack him if you want to buy anything.

That’s all of them, barring the meetings you’ll be organizing regularly with your team.

There’s a lot of different people and entities to keep in mind while navigating the job. Here’s a list of the ones who I interacted with pretty frequently.

ASUW Board of Directors: ASUW’s leadership, consisting of the President, Vice President, Director of Diversity Efforts, Director of University Affairs, Director of Community Relations, Director of Campus Partnerships, Director of Internal Policy, Director of Programming, Personnel Director, Finance & Budget Director, Communications Director, and the Senate Vice Speaker. Their weekly meetings are open to the public and they can always be found in HUB 121 if you ever need to meet with them.

ASUW Office of Communications: Overseen by the Communications Director, OComm helps market and advertise the work of ASUW. Their visual designers take requests from entities, so if you ever a need poster or any kind of graphic design, you can submit a request to them at http://comm.asuw.org/design/

Requests for design services must be submitted at least two weeks prior to the date it’s needed by. Also keep in mind the time you need to advertise events (a week to a couple of weeks in itself) so turn in your requests to them well in advance.

RSO Center: This resource center at the end of the HUB 1st floor gives the QSC a $50 voucher for free printing. I printed all my posters here, and the printing code is above in Login & Password Info. You can also make buttons here, use their helium tank to fill up balloons, use their cutting board, and rely on them for stuff like scissors, glue sticks, and free colored paper.

SAO Office: The staff here advises not only RSOs on campus but ASUW as a whole. Patrick’s office is here, and all package deliveries arrive here, so you’ll be coming here pretty frequently. Make sure to check the QSC mailbox near the back periodically.

Q Center: It’s always good to set part of your office hours in the Q Center from time to time.

September: Work kicks off with orientation on the third week, but this month is good to prep your vision of how you’ll be running the commission – what events you want to do, how you want to structure your team, etc. After orientation, you’ll be doing a flurry of administrative work like getting on the payroll and getting the keys to the office. Attend the Q Center’s events and the ASUW Open House during Dawg Daze. This is the best place to recruit interns! Be sure to order QSC or rainbow stickers if you want to hand them out to people at these events. You can use sticker mule for QSC branded ones, or just buy non-branded rainbow/queer themed stickers on amazon with your budget.

October: Spend the bulk of this month getting a good team together. You’re free to plan events around this time, but it’ll be pretty busy with both intern recruitment happening and getting acquainted with meetings like JCC, Senate, and the Student Advisory Board. National Coming Out Day is in the middle of the month. A good way to still do something is post on social media!

Also, start the preliminary planning for the Queer Prom, like reaching out to queer student art vendors through posting a general sign-up form, as well as messaging anyone you know.

November: Keep up with training the interns – they’ll be ready by now to help with doing things for the Queer Prom in full. Start delegating tasks, like making lists for decorations, food, and a playlist for music. Trans Day of Remembrance also happens in November, and historically the QSC and the Q Center collaborate to do a week of programming in its honor.

December: More Queer Prom planning + not working due to the break. Post a couple of reminders about the Queer Prom on the QSC’s social media during break, though, so it’ll be on people’s minds. A lot of people bring their prom dresses/suits from home!

January: Final push for planning the Queer Prom, and then the event itself. You can use the rest of January to give yourself and your team a break, and do prepping for February. Also, early winter is when you’re given the opportunity to both modify your job description and request a budget for next year’s QSC. The Personnel Director and Finance & Budget Director will be assigning liaisons to you to help you with this process – note that the liaison from the Personnel Director’s Personnel Committee will be overseeing your hiring. I would recommend using this time to advocate for creating an Assistant Director position for QSC. This is something I wanted to do, but didn’t have the capacity to take on. Some commissions that have ADs are the Asian Student Commission, the Student Disability Commission, and the Womxn’s Action Commission. These are good places to go for more information. You should also talk with Personnel.

February: This is a good month to host a few events, because your team is much more acclimated to their roles than in fall. Start prepping for the Drag Show in this month, though, because it happens in April, and March is partly  gone due to the break. Prepping for the Drag Show tends to be less daunting than the Queer Prom – even though it gets a bigger turnout, everyone on the team at this point has had experience pulling off a wide-scale event back in January. Do the usual: reach out to performers, communicate with the HUB, and start your marketing. Keep in touch with Aleksa Manila.

March: Drag Show planning + not working again due to the break.

April: The Drag Show! I’d advise taking a short break after this, because you’ll have spent a lot of time, energy, and labor on two big events at this point. Just like January, your team can do some prepping for the upcoming month.

May: Last few events and projects, along with hirings for the next QSC Director. Your liaison from the Personnel Committee will be in charge coordinating your committee, and will do all the logistical work of getting a date and time ready that works for everyone.  By late May your successor will be hired, so train them well!

June: Lavender Graduation is the QSC’s last event, done in collaboration with the Q Center. The Q Center will be doing most of the logistics, like getting the room and graduates together. The QSC’s role is very much a supporting one, and most of it is doing outreach (both in advertising the event itself and reaching out to graduates to remind them to sign up).

As Director, how you choose to structure your team is completely up to your discretion. I personally had a team of two interns, which had its own pros and cons. The good thing about a small team is that it’s easy to schedule meetings where everyone can meet, and everyone feels engaged because there’s always things for them to do. The problem of a small team is that you don’t have as many people to delegate tasks to, which runs the risks of someone feeling overwhelmed. A big team, on the other hand, doesn’t run into those problems, but it’s harder to schedule meetings, and you have to be careful of making sure everyone has something to work on. Here’s how you can break down members of your team per the ASUW Volunteer Policy, which are the guidelines for how to oversee any non-paid affiliates of ASUW.

Interns
The closest members of your team who commit the most time to the commission. As said above, my whole team this year were my two interns plus myself, and we functioned pretty efficiently. The roles I had for them were:

• Programming: Helped plan, facilitate, and manage events. I chose to have two Programming Interns since the QSC’s work is so programming heavy. Put up posters around campus for events.
• Legislative: Worked to solve issues facing the queer and trans community on campus by talking to administrators, representing the Student Senate, working with the Office of Government Relations, etc.
• Social Media & Outreach: Sent out the brilliant weekly newsletter. Managed the QSC Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Handled marketing for events, put up posters around campus.

Specialized Leads
The Volunteer Policy defines specialized leads as people who are apart of your entity, but don’t necessarily put in the same amount of time commitment as interns. You can technically only have four interns and any other people invested in the entity must be specialized leads.

Volunteers
Volunteers are people who help out the commission, but don’t have the same time commitment as the other kinds of team members above. I didn’t make use of the volunteers too much this year. Looking at how other commissions did volunteers,  they can primarily help with outreach and being present to help with big events!

Structuring Meetings and Contact
Beyond the weekly team meeting that lasted one hour, I’d meet with each intern individually for an additional hour, where I would check up on their progress for any tasks they’d taken on. If there was anything that came up that an intern and I couldn’t resolve, it would be something we’d make sure to bring up to the whole group. Before team meetings, I would also set the agenda and send it to everyone on the day of (which would also function as a reminder to meet). We’d use my office to meet for the most part, but the meeting place is also up to your discretion.

Planning Events: A General Timeline
First, have a clear, concise idea of what an event is. Who is it for and what does it accomplish? If you are using QSC funds for the event, who in the community is being paid? Former QSC directors have tried to be intentional about centering marginalized members of the Queer community – ex. Black, Indigenous, disabled, undocumented, transgender and non-binary people of color that would otherwise be overlooked despite remaining at the forefronts of queer liberation movements and foundational to queer artistry. Forming a clear and short statement about what an event is about helped me conceptualize things going forward. Having a statement on hand is also helpful when someone asks you what a program is about.

If you know what problem you want to combat and who in the community you want to center, the details of the event can be visualized in collaboration with these community members (you definitely do not have to come up with everything on your own, and your event will likely be more engaging and intentional through these collaborations). During my time as director, I took a step back and allowed community organizers and artists to envision ideas around what they would find most beneficial and effective in terms of event details.

During this time, in addition to the stress of the pandemic, Black folks in our community have been and continue to be experiencing trauma and exhaustion due to the violence of anti-black systemic racism and police.

Throughout all your events, make sure to get community input about the ideas you have and really reflect on the initial feedback you get. Always keep in contact with the community about what they want to see for QSC events!

Then, you can get down to the event logistics. Plan out the date, time, and location. When considering the date and time, be aware of any other events or programs on campus that are taking place around it – Gender Discussion Group meets Tuesday afternoons, QPOCA on Friday afternoons, etc. Also, when considering the location, know where to make the reservation (see below).

Move on to event details. This is when you’ll be planning out all the really specific plans about what’s going to happen. Things to consider:

• How will the event look like? Schedule everything precisely.
• What resources does the QSC need to buy? Work with Patrick on utilizing the budget.
• Is the QSC collaborating with other organizations? Keep in close contact (usually through email or Slack).
• What are accessibility needs, how will you meet these needs (do this very early)
• What’s the to-do list from now until the day of the event?

After that is marketing and outreach (see below). And on the day of the event, attend and facilitate. Being the facilitator entails being present in the space to answer questions and smooth over issues (technical, interpersonal, or otherwise).

Ordering Food
You have two methods for getting food for events:

First, you can briefly borrow the Q Center’s credit card to buy food and then return the card with receipts and reimburse them for whatever you spent from the QSC fund. Reach out to the Q-Center early and communicate with them about how to navigate this. Forward the email receipt immediately after to her, and then work with her and Patrick to transfer the same amount of money from the QSC’s budget to the Q Center’s budget.  Also, for any event that the Q Center paid food for, make sure to track attendance at the entrance with a sign-in sheet. Send that attendance list to the Q Center after so they have a record showing that X amount of people were present at X event to eat the food.

Second, you can use Justin Camputaro’s fund to get food for free. Justin is the Director of the HUB, and keeps a pretty large fund that he likes giving to ASUW entities for food. In your emails to him, introduce yourself, the QSC, the event being thrown, how many people are predicted to come to the event, what kinds of foods you want to purchase, and the exact amount of money needed (including tax and shipping.) He’s a really friendly guy and a great resource! You’ll probably see him at least once around the HUB this year.

Funding & Sponsorships
The current QSC budget allocates over $7000 for programming. Much of that goes to the big flagship events though (~5000 for the Drag Show). Past successor have said the Queer Prom takes up about ~2000. I spent a little more on the drag show because we had extra money.

Try using up as much of the QSC budget as you can; if there’s enough years where the QSC is consistently not using most of the budget, the ASUW Finance & Budget Committee will see that and re-proportion less money for a future QSC Director.

If doing a collaboration with other commissions, you can use the JCC Fund. Keep it in mind if you ever do co-host a program with another commission(s), because ASUW allocates thousands of dollars to sustain it! The general rule of using the JCC Fund is that at least two commissions must be working on an event together. They then bring a funding proposal to the JCC, and it’s voted on. If it passes and the request is more than $1000, then the Director of Diversity Efforts writes a bill to bring to the Board of Directors, where it is discussed among them. They will then vote on it, after it passes the money can officially be used for an event. If it’s less than $1000, it’s not taken to the Board of Directors. We had a great deal of money left over this year and we barely spent it the first two quarters, you should collaborate with the other commissions early to create intersectional programming that can support community and students.

You can also rely on Justin Camputaro’s fund for food (see above).

CART Captioning / ASL Interpreting
When you request CART or ASL for QSC events, email dhhreq@uw.edu and include all of this info:

•  Short intro including your name, organization,  contact info and today’s date
•  The name of person/persons needing services (you can say general audience attending event)
• Date for service
• Start time for service
• End time for service
• Location (building and room)
• Details of assignment including the title of the event if any and the type of the event (such as lecture, presentation, meeting, concert, staff retreat, training)
• Type of service requested (such as interpreting, captioning, amplification services, TTYs)

For the drag show, CART costed $125 per hour, so keep that number in mind when having the service at an event. For the Drag Show this year, the D Center was able to pay for both CART & ASL services with their own funds. This is a resource that many people don’t know about, so make use of it!

Remote Accessibility via Streaming
I didn’t secure remote accessibility for events as much as I should have, although a lot of the smaller events I had were more of a closed space because I wanted to respect the privacy of the audience.

You can work with OComm to secure streaming for an event. They have a Multimedia Coordinator who can provide both the tech and the hands to manage the recording.

ADA Accommodations on Event Notices
Make sure to include this statement on any poster for a QSC event, as well as in the description for any Facebook event page for said event:

“To request disability accommodation, contact the Disability Services Office at 206-543-6450 (voice), 206-543-6452 (TTY), 206-685-7264 (fax), or dso@uw.edu. The University of Washington makes every effort to honor disability accommodation requests. Requests can be responded to most effectively if received as far in advance of the event as possible, preferably at least 10 days.”

Reserving Rooms in the HUB
Use the HUB Res website to reserve HUB rooms.

http://hubres.uw.edu/hubres/

Login with the info above, pick the room you want according to the availability on the date and time the event is, and choose things like what you need (microphones, podiums, a table for food) and the room setup you want (lecture style with rows of seats, banquet style with banquet tables around the room, etc).

For the small small rooms it’s a pretty simple process: after you submit your request they’ll be contacting you through email until it can get confirmed.

For the big rooms, you also have to have a meeting with Mei-Chun, the HUB Event Planning Supervisor, where you can square away any questions you have about the room reservation.  There’s deadlines and small fees associated with changing the request the closer to the time of the event, but the fees aren’t too much to worry about.

Always, always keep track of the deadlines. Keep a record somewhere of all deadlines and make sure to provide that info to the HUB before it passes. Passed deadlines actually aren’t too much of a big deal, as it happened to me a few times and I provided what they wanted pretty quickly after being notified. They’re understanding – it’s just stressful when a deadline has passed and you need to prioritize it for the day.

HUB Gender Inclusive Restroom Policy
Email Paul Zuchowski, Associate Director of the HUB, at badgers@uw.edu to request that an event the QSC is hosting at the HUB needs gender inclusive restrooms. He’ll always oblige, just make sure to give a brief description of what the event is and what floor it’ll be on.

Reserving Rooms in the ECC/ECT
There’s an online form for reserving rooms in the ECC/ECT, which can be found here: http://depts.washington.edu/ecc/reservations/make-a-reservation/

They’ll review the request and if the space is open for the date and time you requested, they’ll send you a follow up confirmation email. Forward these emails to Patrick to work out the paying of these rooms.

There’s a lot of avenues to approaching how the QSC does advocacy. If I could have gone back I would have 1) paid more Black, Indigenous, POC queer and trans folks through honorariums 2) used JCC funds to engage in collaborations with other JCC commissions 3) hire more Legislative Interns or specialized leads to create a mini-team.

ASUW Student Senate
The QSC can pass legislation in the Student Senate, which is the premiere space to get student concerns communicated to the ASUW. A resolution that passes in the Student Senate doesn’t make things official per se, but it is considered the official student body opinion and pushes various actors (the Senate Speaker, the Senate’s Committee on Resolution Follow Up, the ASUW Board of Directors) to work on advocating for whatever  the resolution dictates. Here’s a rough draft of the path of a resolution:

1. Submit a resolution to the senate website at senate.asuw.org
   1. Go to “Introduce Legislation”
   2. Resolution gets put on the agenda for the next meeting
2. First Readings
   1. Resolution gets read aloud by you, the sponsor
   2. Senators ask questions, but they don’t debate
   3. They can’t suggest changes to  the resolution just yet
   4. Legislation is then sent to one of the Senate committees for further readings and edits
3. Committees
   1. Legislation is discussed and analyzed by committee members
   2. It’s rewritten and improved upon
4. Second Readings
   1. Resolution gets read aloud again
   2. Senators ask questions, and can make motions to strike things out, add things, change them, and generally voice their opinion
   3. The resolution gets voted on – pass or fail
5. Pass or fail?
   1. Pass: gets sent to the ASUW Board of Directors to be voted on
   2. Fail: does not get sent to the ASUW Board of Directors
6. Pass or fail?
   1. Pass: becomes the official student opinion
   2. Fail: does not become the official student opinion

Also, a resolution is made up of two parts:

1. WHEREAS clauses
   1. These give background, context, and reasoning to a particular issue
   2. Ex: “WHEREAS, spaces for nonbinary students are severely lacking, and”
2. THEREFORE clauses
   1. These are declarative statements of what the student body wants to see happen
   2. Ex: “THAT, students support the IMA’s intention to update and renovate the IMA pool and locker rooms; and”
   3. This part of a resolution is always preceded by:
      1. BE IT RESOLVED BY THE ASSOCIATED STUDENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON:
   4. This part of a resolution always ends with a list of people to forward the resolution to:
      1. Ex: “THAT, this resolution be forwarded to Ritika Jain, ASUW President, Ananya Garg, Queer Student Commission Director, Ana Mari Cauce, UW President, Jeremy Moon, Student Activities Fee Committee Chair, Lincoln Johnson, Associate Vice President for Student Life, and Matt Newman, IMA Director.”

ASUW Office of Government Relations
OGR is ASUW’s lobbying arm, and they facilitate a lot of interaction between the association and outside political entities. They have an employee who goes down to Olympia all winter to advocate for student needs during the legislative session, a programming coordinator who plans OGR events on campus, and a liaison who advocates for local issues concerning students. They should reach out to JCC early in fall to set up a time to discuss how they can foster a relationship with you, so definitely keep them in mind.

Talking to Administrators
You can also generally reach out to administrators  to voice any concerns. Initial email introductions are good for setting up meetings, from which you can follow up from there. Administrators also show up at spaces like SAB and SSAB, so make the most of those spaces whenever they meet.

IMA Gender Inclusive Locker Room

In 2018, Josh’s team worked on this project. Feel free to take it on next year:

The IMA have plans to renovate the facility, among which would include an expansive all gender locker room in addition to their current gendered locker rooms. Em wrote a bill in Senate that passed (R-24-12: A Resolution In Support of an All Gender Locker Room and Pool). Since then, the IMA has continued to advocate for this project. Although getting this renovation approved will take a long time, they have met with the QSC to help get advocates for this project on the student side. Keep this project in mind if the IMA staff reaches out to you, they’ve been using our passed Senate bill as evidence of official student support in their various meetings. You can read the Senate bill on the Senate website at senate.asuw.org.

Email
The QSC’s main mode of one-to-one communication. Check on it pretty frequently, although a lot of the inbox will consist of things you can delete or pass over pretty quickly. One thing that helped me this year is that if there was something that I needed to directly respond to, but I didn’t have the time to answer it, I’d mark it as unread so I would remember it for later. Since the UW is a public university, all of the work you do for ASUW technically needs to be a part of public record, which is why we use email and Slack. Do not use your personal Facebook or other social media to communicate for your job related things, because technically, someone can request to see your communications and then you would be required to hand over your entire Facebook/other social media account.

With the newsletter, I used Mailchimp to make the template, and included major QSC events, other queer and trans events around campus, and meeting times for some of the RSOs and weekly programs like QPOCA, oSTEM, and the Q Center’s Gender Discussion Group. If you use Mailchimp to compose the newsletter, I would send the email back to asuwqsc@uw.edu for a quick review of what it would look like in an actual inbox, and then forward that to the listservs (always remember to edit the subject to remove things like the ‘Fwd:’ in the title and the Fwd message in the body.) I’d send out the newsletter every Monday, although oftentimes I would slack on it because curating it takes a surprising amount of time. Look into tasking an intern with it!

The listserves are:

• qsc_asuw@uw.edu (QSC, easy to mix up with asuwqsc@uw.edu)
• campusq@uw.edu (Q Center)
• pantran@uw.edu (old QSC/Q Center project, queer and trans specific newsletter)

Facebook
The Facebook page has a little over 900 likes as of this writing, and it serves as the QSC’s primary social media platform. Use it for publishing event pages. Also share other events happening in the community and any other things going on with the QSC.

Instagram
The Instagram has nearly 600 followers. The Instagram is also a cool platform to publish QSC things on – I really liked utilizing the story for things that we wanted to announce on the fly. Follow anyone you think would follow back! It has been our primary source of sharing event information. The story feature was something that we used EXTENSIVELY this year. You can take a look at the type of things we’ve shared by looking at the story archives. We used stories to share the work of queer and trans artists of color, boost the posts or information shared by other campus entities or community organizations, and to engage with our followers with questions/polls/event countdowns/live videos/event pictures that were not made into actual posts.

Twitter
Any updates that are posted on FB/IG, you can shorten it and tweet about it as well.  Maybe assign one of your interns to take charge of it, and have them tweet/retweet often so people can see it’s actually active.

Posters
Beyond word of mouth and Facebook event pages, putting up posters around campus was the other major way to do outreach for QSC events. You can put up posters in the following buildings:

• HUB: 10 posters. They need to be approved with a stamp by the HUB front desk, and they also can only be put up for two weeks at a time (but they can be restamped and reposted).
• Dorms: 30 posters. Turn them in to the HFS front desk in Terry Hall, and they’ll distribute them to the various dorms to put up in the following days. I think posters in the dorms are pretty imperative to good outreach, because it’ll reach a lot of freshmen and sophomores who aren’t too involved in the community yet and don’t have the network to see their friends interacting with the Facebook event pages.
• ECC: 1-3 posters. Also turn these in to the ECC front desk and they’ll put some up around the facility.
• Quad buildings (Smith, Gowen, Savery, Raitt, Miller, Art, Music): Each building can take up a few. Although it was hard to find places for Raitt, Savery has like 10 boards for posters. In the Art building, you can put some in the basement level around Parnassus. You don’t need permission to put up posters in these buildings.

Those are just the main ones, you can put up posters anywhere as long as you talk to the managers of the buildings about their specific protocol. And you can rely on OComm for poster designs, or ask Eli in the Q Center, or make you own on template sites like Canva (for the later two, just run the final design by one of the OComm designers over Slack).

Active RSOs

• Queer People of Color Alliance (qpoca@uw.edu)
  • Public Facebook Page, private Facebook Group
• oSTEM (ostemuw@uw.edu)
  • Facebook Page
• Viva La Joteria (vivalajo@uw.edu or Jenesis)
  • Facebook Page

Active RSOs, Not in Close Contact with QSC 

• OutLaws (legalsuw@uw.edu)
• QueeRx (queerx@uw.edu)
• Rainbow Grads (rbgrads@uw.edu)
  • Facebook Page

RSOs, Unclear Level of Current Activity 

• iQueeries (iqueer@uw.edu)
• qMED (qmeduw@uw.edu)
• Out for Business (ofb@uw.edu)
• Queer Education Collective (qec@uw.edu)

Other Groups

• Q Center (qcenter@uw.edu, jaimeem@uw.edu for Jaimée, jms13@uw.edu for Jen)
  • Gender Discussion Group
  • Queer Mentoring Program
• Queer Faculty and Staff (Jaimee and Jen can help as a liaison to them!)
• Delta Lambda Phi  (dlp.psi@uw.edu)
• Ethnic Cultural Center (ecc@uw.edu)
  • Facebook Page, Twitter
• D Center (dcenter@uw.edu)
• Women’s Center (womens@u.washington.edu)
• wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ – Intellectual House (welebalt@uw.edu)
  • Facebook Page, Twitter,

Off Campus Groups

• Alphabet Alliance of Color (aaofcolor@gmail.com )
  • https://alphabetalliance.org/
• Trans Women of Color Solidarity Network
  • Facebook
• Queer the Land (https://queertheland.org/)
• U.T.O.P.I.A – United Territories of Pacific Islanders Alliance
  • https://utopiaseattle.org/
  • (Fania Sipili: fania@utopiaseattle.org)
  • (Tweetie Fatuesi: tweetie@utopiaseattle.org)
• Viet Q Conference (http://vietq.org/ban-conference/)
• SOMOS Seattle – LGBTQ Latinx (https://www.somosseattle.org/)
• QTPOC Birthwerq Project
  • Facebook
• POCAAN – People of Color against AIDS Network (http://pocaan.org/POCAAN/)

• API Chaya (Priya at priya@apichaya.org)
• Entre Hermanos (info@entrehermanos.org)
• Gender Justice League (Yani at yani@genderjusticeleague.org)
• Trikone Northwest (www.trikonenw.org/)
  • Facebook, Twitter
• TRANSform Washington (http://transformwashington.com/)
• OutSpoken Speakers Bureau (info@nwnetwork.org)
• Ingersoll Gender Center (info@ingersollgendercenter.org)
  • Facebook Page, Twitter
• Lambert House (lamberthouse.org/contact)
  • www.lamberthouse.org/, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram
• Gay City (info@gaycity.org)
  • www.gaycity.org, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram
• Lifelong’s HEYO (lifelong.org/heyo)
• PFLAG Seattle (pflagseattle.org/about/contact-us/)
• Youthcare’s Isis at Ravenna House (Anjilee at anjilee.dodge@youthcare.org)
• Seattle Counseling Service (info@seattlecounseling.org

As rewarding as this job is, it can also get emotionally draining. Never be afraid to take a step back if you need a break from all that’s going on in the QSC! Here’s some general practices I followed:

• Don’t work past your hours. There’s always tomorrow to work on something, so don’t feel bad for reassigning tasks you were going to do on one day for a different day. It’ll get done! Delegate more to an intern if you realize you’re taking on too much at a particular moment.
• Don’t spend all your time in HUB 131P. It’s an awesome office, but it can feel isolating if all your work hours occur there, so spread them out around 131P, the Q Center, off campus, etc.
• Spend at least one day where you don’t have any work scheduled at all. Use this time to do homework especially!
• Try not to schedule hours in the evening if you can, and use that time to rest or do homework.
• If you need to devote some time to school or something else, don’t worry about not attending meetings like JCC, SAB, or anything you have scheduled for the day. Reach out to whoever runs the space in advance and you’ll always be able to get it excused.  Always focus on yourself and prioritize your needs while being the QSC Director.

General Info
The Queer Prom is a way to ring in the new year with a social for the queer and trans community at UW. It’s been going on for about 5-6 years, and is a mix of different activities and dancing. This year our team rebranded it as a queer prom, but since it’s not as traditional as the Drag Show, you’re especially free to change it up however you want. Below are the key components of the ball – the performers, dance & music, decorations, food, and keeping in touch with the HUB.

QTPOC Student Art Market

Last year they highlighted the amazing queer student artists of color at UW. They created a google form for people to sign up and sent it to people they knew who made art. This is a great way for students and young people to make money. It was one of the most popular aspects of our 2020 Queer Prom!

Photobooth

You can borrow photobooth props and flags from the Q-Center, you can also ask to borrow their polaroid camera. However, you will have to purchase the film for the event. Usually, Q Center students purchase film at Target or a similar store.  If you take the camera with you to a store that has Poloroid film, you can compare the film packages to the camera to make sure you get the correct film type. You can also just order film online ahead of time (check to make sure you are buying the right kind!)

• You can request a photographer to take pictures at the event, we had HUB event photographer Nikeesha Gooding do this for the past two years (you can find her on Instagram and in our gmail).

Dance & Music
The main component of Queer Prom is the dancing! You can collaborate with Rainy Dawg Radio to get a volunteer DJ to host the night, or you/someone on the team can make a Spotify playlist of your own.

If you’d like to hire a DJ here are potential QTPOC to consider:

• DJ Reverend Dollars – Renee Jarreau
• DJ Phenohype
• DJ Riz Rollins

Decorations & Food
The HUB doesn’t allow things to be posted on the walls, but you can put things on tables, and things on the floor as long as it doesn’t become an accessibility issue. We had a lot of balloons, twinkly lights, glittery fringe curtains over the entrance, tablecloths, tea candles, a hand-painted backdrop, and handmade tissue paper flower/folded paper star decorations.

HUB Event Services: Deadlines & Communication
Keep in touch with your emails in the fall to ensure that the HUB gets all they need by the deadlines. Schedule a meeting with Mei-Chun by November, as most of the deadlines can be checked off in that one meeting.

General Info

The Drag Show is the QSC’s most recognized event, and its biggest of the year. 2022 will be its 20th run.  The sole focus of the show are the drag performers, and thus there’s less to worry about re: delegating tasks than the Queer Prom. Focus solely on getting performers!

Here is the contact information for the performers.  I would recommend reaching out to them again if possible, they are incredibly popular local stars in the QTPOC drag community and extremely talented. Kylie Mooncakes was a previous performer from 2020 that our audience loved, they were invited back by popular demand. I found Lüchi and Issa Man through their network and was absolutely blown away (they’ve never performed at the UW so they are especially great artists to keep in mind!) You can find all these artists on Instagram. A common rate for these type of performances would be around $150-300 for two numbers. You can look at the gmail to see communication chains with them and continue from there if you would like. You will also need a host, this can be a Drag Queen or someone else from the community with good stage presence!

• Issa Man: oatmanvarian@gmail.com
• Mikey/Kylie Mooncakes: ximikey@gmail.com
• Lü Chi: lifewithluchi@gmail.com

Potential Experienced and Tried-True Hosts:

• Randy Ford: fordrandy78@yahoo.com
• Donte Da Qween Johnson: imurhostdontejohnson@gmail.com (hosted in 2019, super successful!)

Please reach out to these paid performers well in advance of the event, around 3 months before (ex. our Drag show was set up to be on May 2st and I reached out to the performers and host in January) in order to be able to: make the event accessible, room reservations organized, advertise, recruit student performers, and set up contracts with paid performers and a host.

Student Performers
Follow a similar process done with the Queer Prom queer student art vendors for getting performers. Publish a form, reach out to people individually, and keep advertising the show to keep up interest. Here’s the performers from 2019 that you can reach out to for performing:

1. Janina Loos (janina.loos@live.com)
2. Jonathan Nguyen (jdn97@uw.edu)
3. Alexa Shikiar, Alexa Kemmerling, Destiny Roupe (alexas27@uw.edu, alexakemmerlingcsu@yahoo.com)
4. Nic Butterfield (purple8484@gmail.com)
5. Trey Tamaki (tgtamaki@gmail.com)
6. Neil Robertson (robertsonneil01@icloud.com)

• How do we recruit student performers?
  • Set up a Google Forms sign up sheet! You can find examples of these in our Google Drive. You can even make a copy of the 2020 Drag Show Student Performer Sign-ups one and just adjust the dates and times if you like. (Students are unpaid because we aren’t allowed to pay students due to ASUW policies).

• QTBIPOC Student Art Market
  • We’ve done this for two years now at our Queer Prom & the Drag Show! We wanted to offer Queer/Trans Black Indigenous and POC students a space to advertise their artwork, make money, and meet other QTPOC. You just need to set up a Google interest form. There are examples of this from previous years in our Google Drive.
  • We set up several tables in the HUB Lyceum Foyer and the students sit at these tables and sell their work throughout the event. We’ve had people sell beaded jewelry, stickers, art prints, clothing, cotton candy, and zines.

HUB Event Services: Deadlines & Communication
As usual, communicate with the HUB via email to keep any deadlines in check. Meet with Mei-Chun in February (or April at the latest if the show is in May).

1. Get HUB event services reservations solidified and any customizations needed together (ex. If you need specific tech equipment,a screen, extra MICs, etc…)  you will have time to request these for students and paid performers should they need them. You will also have time to get accessibility requests together.
   • Navigating HUB events reservations can be really confusing and overwhelming, I used previous years reservations for events like the Drag Show and Quer Prom as references when creating these! You can definitely just straight up tell the HUB that you want to reuse the previous years set-up and then make adjustments (or none!) depending on your needs.
   • I suggest making a Google form for people to write their access needs requests – this shows that you are intentionally reaching out beforehand and also puts less pressure on people to come up to you with their access needs when they can instead just put it anonymously into a form. You can also make an Instagram poll asking about these needs in addition to the form.

• See “Planning Accessible Events” on the D-Center’s resource page
  • Creating More Accessible Events [Google Docs]
  • DeafSpace
  • Making Space Accessible is an Act of Love for Our Communities
  • People First: How to Plan Events Everyone Can Attend
  • Radical Accessible Communities [PDF]

1. Outreach & Engagement
   • Reach out to people individually and intentionally- this is way more effective than just sending out a general social media post! For example, reach out specifically and strategically to those you want to attend – particularly to groups with people of color who might not feel as welcomed in mainstream white queer spaces. Reach out to the other diversity commissions and ask them to share your advertisement materials with the RSOs and groups under their constituency. Ex. the BSU and keep advertising the event consistently to keep up public awareness and interest.
   • Here is a list of groups you can reach out to: https://depts.washington.edu/ecc/ecc-rso-list/ You can send them emails with an invitation to your larger events so they at least know about them. You can also DM them on Instagram and ask them to share your posts on their stories, we did this ALOT last year and it brought much more traffic and engagement to our page and also gained us alot of new followers. Many RSOs or other commissions will ask you to share their posts too and its a great way to boost our collective event engagement.
2. Advertising TIPS!
   • You can use the website tinyurl to shorten and simplify any links that you use in your social media materials or other advertisement tools.
   • You can also use the website Canva to make posters/other media if needed on a short notice. However, since you have the ASUW Office of Communications at your disposal this is a great resource for getting beautiful posters by hired graphic designers. Be sure to request posters or other media from OCOMM at least 3-4 weeks in advance of when you want them to be put up so you have time to request revisions or edits on the poster itself if you don’t like it and also have enough time to post them up so people can see them!
   • Use HUB digital displays! These are those giant screens in the HUB that display advertisements for events and other info. You can send them your poster (you have to adjust the size, you can change the dimensions of your poster on CANVA or request that OCOMM help you with it) and they will advertise it for you for free. You have to request this about a week before when you want it to be displayed. https://hub.washington.edu/home/in-the-hub/hub-advertising/hub-digital-displays/