Educate, empower, embrace: A club's impactful initiative at Bethel College
Gay-Straight Alliance and BeLonGTo hope to combine into one club, with the common goal to educate and diversify Bethel.
Bethel College is made up of a variety of students, who all bring unique perspectives and experiences to the campus. Students can share their individualism with the community through numerous on-campus avenues. One notable way for students to get to know their fellow students is through clubs.
While some clubs, such as the Board Game Club and Bethel Barbecue Club, allow students to examine an activity or interest, others allow students to explore and celebrate identity. The Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) is one of those clubs.
A relatively new club, GSA was formed in 2022 as an offshoot of BeLonGTo, another identity-focused club. BeLonGTo, according to its president, Hayden Honomichl, a senior from Great Bend, is an “anonymous LGBTQ support group on campus. … Essentially, we’re a space where if you identify within the LGBTQ community, or you’re questioning … you can come to explore and feel celebrated.”
Although BeLonGTo served a notable purpose on the Bethel campus, the club leadership felt that it was lacking in some areas. GSA was created to fill those areas. GSA’s president, Lucy Buller, a junior from Newton, described the motivation for the new club, saying, “BeLonGTo specifically meets anonymously. … The GSA was developed more as an event-focused club … including people beyond members of the LGBTQ community. It gives them a place where they can be involved.”
The GSA emphasizes education and outreach, while BeLonGTo emphasizes the creation of a space for people belonging to the LGBTQ+ community. Isaiah Smith, a sophomore from Great Bend and Vice President of GSA, said that that mission is one of the things that attracted him to the club. “I think my goal is when I leave Bethel, I want to make it a more inclusive and safe and accepting place for LGBTQ+ members. [The] GSA is a great way for me to do that.”
“I think my goal is when I leave Bethel, I want to make it a more inclusive and safe and accepting place for LGBTQ plus members. [The] GSA is a great way for me to do that.”
Isaiah Smith
Buller emphasized the importance of groups that speak awareness and information about minority and marginalized groups. “A lot of the hate you see in the world comes from a lack of knowledge,” she said. “GSA’s goal is to combat that lack of knowledge.”
Smith reflected on the success of the GSA, despite it being a new club with limited resources. “It’s kind of cool to see a very small club being able to come out of nowhere and do lots of events. … We’ve been able to give resources, educate people, give out stickers, pride flags, and pronoun pins, and actually see people use them. … It’s reassuring that we’re doing the right thing.”
Buller shared similarly: “[The] GSA had a budget of $400 last semester, and we put on 10 events. … We definitely learned to do a lot with very little.”
Even though the GSA and BeLonGTo only recently split into two clubs, there are plans to potentially recombine the two. In a Feb. 29 email sent out by Buller, she announced that BeLonGTo and GSA would be combining into a completely new club called the Bethel College Pride Alliance Council.
Although the plan to combine the clubs is made, it still depends on approval by the Student Government Association (SGA). If the SGA approves the move, leadership and meetings of the two organizations will merge.
Honomichl explained some of the rationale behind the decision, saying, “It kind of felt like we were spreading ourselves too thin. … Plus, BeLonGTo and GSA do a lot of the same activities. A lot of the time we were doing events together. So, we feel like it would be best to combine into one central club.”
Regardless of the name of the club, Buller summed up their goal well, saying, “It doesn’t matter how you identify, what you look like, or who you are. We want to make sure that everybody has a right to feel accepted and welcomed in this community.”