UFV has installed a second rainbow crosswalk. The brightly painted crosswalk is located on the Chilliwack Canada Education Park (CEP) campus between Building A and parking lot 6.
The crosswalk at CEP comes a month after the City of Chilliwack voted against the installation of a rainbow crosswalk. Kyle Baillie, director of Student Life, said that UFV’s crosswalk was not in response to the city, but was an opportunity for the university to express the environment it is working to foster on campus.
“It is just another opportunity to try and express the type of inclusive community that we’re always striving to be and be better at being,” Baillie said.
The first rainbow crosswalk was installed on the Abbotsford campus in 2016. Initially, the Pride Collective, which was the active pride group on campus at the time, voted against the idea saying that UFV had not done enough for LGBTQ+ individuals on campus to warrant the crosswalk as a show of progress and inclusivity.
Baillie said there has been a number of new initiatives on campus since this time. Directly after the installation of the Abbotsford crosswalk, UFV implemented a new easy name change policy. With a simple online form, any student can change their name at any time, no questions asked.
“There’s nothing more central to our being than our names. That’s how we’re called in the world,” Baillie said. “Being able to do that accurately and allowing people to be represented by how they identify — that’s important.”
The name change applied to everything across the university, including Blackboard, class registration, and email with the exception for the final graduation credentials, as those are legal documents. However, UFV will reprint graduation credentials at the request of any alumnus who has had a legal name change.
UFV was one of the first universities to have an “other” option for gender. They have recently been working to bring awareness to alternative pronouns and gender identifies at the Peer Resource Learning Centre (PRLC).
UFV has been working on a number of other initiatives, including the Pride Culture Conference that was held for the first time this fall in collaboration with the Student Union Society. The conference had a number of workshops including topics such as “Queerlonial: Addressing Decolonization Efforts in the Queer Community” and “Creating Dependable Allies.”
Baillie doesn’t expect a big response from the community directly regarding the crosswalk, but has noticed a positive reaction over social media. The crosswalk is more of a symbol of what type of environment the university wants to create on campus.
“I hope that people see that and say, ‘You know what, whether I identify with that sidewalk or not I know that that means that people are welcome here,’ and we believe in inclusivity and we believe in community here,” Baillie said.
Image: UFV Flickr
