She says the culture center on campus provides services that can level the playing field, including peer mentoring, counseling, academic services and other programs.
“We’re a full-service department,” she says. “It’s not some frivolous club or anything.”
Dr. Fran Dorsey, acting chair of the Department of Pan African studies at Kent State University and ABCC’s immediate past president, says culture centers face many of the same obstacles they’ve struggled against for decades.
“We’re still a young, growing, struggling organization, and there are a lot of things that we’re doing,” he says. “We haven’t had a major benefactor to donate large sums of money for us, so we could be self-sufficient. We go to our conferences every year so we can sit down and learn from one another. We’re finding out the struggles we were engaged in 30, 40 years ago are the same struggles we’re dealing with today.”
Dorsey says finding funding for the centers has always been a major roadblock. And as more multicultural centers arise on campuses, he says the funding crunch will continue for Black centers.
“We’re still being underrepresented,” he says. “Those who speak for us have little knowledge of us. If I have to struggle to find money, it’s
kind of difficult for me to concentrate on what I need to do to be teaching. And if I’m struggling individually, I’ll never be in the position to help my community if I’m saving the next dollar to pay my own bills.”
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