History
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Historically, CUNY has been at the forefront in establishing women's centers on its college campuses, which focus on empowering and addressing the needs of its diverse women population through counseling, workshops, and referral services. Since the 1970s some of the Centers have opened and closed intermittently and their existence has been somewhat tenuous because of limited resources.
Today, there are ten Women's Centers on CUNY campuses, three are based on community college campuses: BMCC, Kingsborough CC and LaGuardia CC; and seven at the senior colleges: Brooklyn, John Jay, Medgar Evers, Queens, York, College of Staten Island and at the Graduate Center.
The oldest women's center in the U.S. was established at Brooklyn College in 1974. Staten Island Community College and Richmond College, which merged to become the College of Staten Island in 1976, founded some of the earliest Women's Centers and Women's Studies programs in the nation. The Queens College Women's Center was founded in the 1970s to serve the college students, faculty and staff and the name Women's Center was changed in the year 2000 to "Womyn's Center". Medgar Evers College's Center for the Development of Women started in 1981, this Center was established at the bequest of the Crown Heights Community. In the 1990s, two other Women's Resource Centers were established, Kingsborough Community College, which opened its doors in 1990 along with Borough of Manhattan Community College, established in 1991. By 1993, John Jay College created its first women's center. The resources that the women's centers operate with are limited in terms of funding and staffing. Two centers are student-run, Queens College Womyn's Center and LaGuardia Student Women's Center. At Hunter College, the Ellen Morse Tishman Women's Center, established in 1983, with certified social workers and graduate interns providing confidential counseling and crisis intervention in such matters as sexual harassment, domestic violence, and sexual assault closed in 2004 due to budget cuts. Similarly, Baruch College's women center, which was founded in 1978, has ceased to operate. Unofficially, York College had a women's center since 1987, and in 1991 the Women's Center was incorporated as a student-run organization, but the official date of the women's center's inception at York was in 1998 when a full time HEO was assigned.