About Our Name
The Short Story Behind Our Name
After three years of discussion and planning, The Women’s Resource Centre changed its name to the Guelph Resource Centre for Gender Empowerment and Diversity! It’s a mouthful, we know, but we think it’s important for people to understand why we chose to do this and how we came to a decision on the name. The complete story can be found here. For quite some time now the Centre has been open to everyone – not just women-identified folks – but our old name definitely implied that we were a Centre just for women.
At the same time as we were trying to include gender-queer and intersex folks in the name, we have also been actively working to create a more comfortable space for women of colour and women from divers cultural, ethnic and religious backgrounds as well as folks with different abilities. One way is to include the word Diversity in the name. This means that the name can be read in a couple of ways, as being for a diversity of genders as well as a diversity of backgrounds.
Since we are primarily a resource centre, we are currently working towards building a resource collection that reflects the diversity of feminist experiences worldwide. Because we recognize the broad spectrum of issues and thoughts considered to be “feminist experiences” we are continuing to expand our resource library with a focus on improving resources for transfolks, people with disabilities, the Aboriginal communities, people of colour, and many other minoritized communities. We are continuously and actively working to create a safe, anti-oppressive space that promotes diversity in all forms.