On The Road: National Association of College Admission Counselors, Baltimore, MD

“Good Morning, Baltimore.” I arrived yesterday in Baltimore, MD. And I had to make a Hairspray Musical reference at least once. I guess this is the official start to the Campus Pride Fall travel season. Woo Hoo!

Although I am not at a college, I am attending for our first time the National Association of College Admission Counselors Conference (NACAC) hosted this year in Baltimore, MD. The theme of the conference has something to do with “crabs” – so I took a picture of one of the volunteers. Poor thing. All I could think about was Mr. Crabby Patty from the cartoon Sponge Bob Square Pants. She was a good sport and let me take a photo. Thanks!

While this is not a LGBT conference, Campus Pride has invested time and money into doing outreach around our LGBT-Friendly CampusClimate Index (www.campusclimateindex.org). Our goal being at the conference is to make more colleges aware of the Index, our LGBT-friendly college fairs and how to best recruit openly LGBT students to their campus. Campus Pride submitted two workshops to the conference and presented one today, the other one will be tomorrow. The workshop today was in collaboration with our educational partner the Point Foundation (www.pointfoundation.org) --who is simply fabulous. Campus Pride loves working with Point Foundation. Todays workshop will hopefully be one of many more educational efforts we do together in the future.

NACAC has been great to network and learn more about the world of college admissions. More and more LGBT youth are coming out before college, so this profession is very anxious to learn how their campuses can be more LGBT-inclusive in outreach efforts to this new demographic -- LGBT prospective students or straight ones with LGBT loved ones. Quite franky, NACAC professionals seem to be starving (not for crabs aka– the hats) for resources on this topic -- it’s a big deal as enrollment numbers at most colleges will continue to decline nationally.

Campus Pride is glad to be hear – it is quite expensive for us to commit dollars in our travel budget for such conferences, so we hope we can come next year too!

Btw, I found a fabulous bed and breakfast that iswell-priced for downtown Baltimore, very convenient to the Baltimore Convention Center – plus they are “gay owned and operated.” The name is the Scarborough Affair (http://www.scarboroughfairbandb.com/) and I highly recommend it – tell Barry and Claudette that Campus Pride sent you!