Caption: Mount Holyoke announced a donation matching initiative in honor of Juneteenth and Pride month last week. On June 25, the College stated that community members “gave more than $25,000.”
By Shanze Hasan ’21
News Reporter
On Juneteenth, the Mount Holyoke administration announced a Community Match program for financial gifts made by students, staff, faculty and alumni in recognition of Juneteenth and Pride month. The initiative, led by the Office of the President and the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, will strive to match community members’ donations to three charitable organizations: The Loveland Foundation, the Marsha P. Johnson Institute and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
Juneteenth (June 19) is a holiday that celebrates the emancipation of enslaved people in the U.S. While the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, it was not until nearly two years later that news of freedom reached Galveston, Texas. Pride Month, a celebration and recognition of the LBGTQ+ community, was created to commemorate the Stonewall Uprising, a revolt against police brutality by transgender women and Black and Brown drag queens.
In order to commemorate both events, the College matched donations made from June 19 to June 23 to the organizations they identified up to $50,000 with a maximum of $150 per donor. According to a June 25 article on the College’s website, 332 community members gave “more than $25,000.”
The article continued, “A one-time opportunity for a matching gift initiative was made possible by a gift to the College.”
Alongside posting information regarding the launch of the program on the school's website, Facebook and Twitter pages, Mount Holyoke’s official Instagram also released a post informing the community about the initiative.
In the comments section of the College’s Instagram post, many students and community members expressed the opinion that the money in question should instead be used to directly help marginalized people on campus. Some gave alternate ideas for funding, such as hiring more professors of color, organizing talks surrounding race and the history of racism and loan forgiveness for low-income students of color.
One user commented, “Please invest in the QTPOC community on campus. Actions taken within the institution are stronger than those given to other institutions.”
Another commenter wrote, “It feels like Mount Holyoke is shrugging off its own responsibilities and implicit power for how to support its own QTPOC community by drawing attention to other non-profit institutions. While I acknowledge the gesture to support these very deserving organizations, what can Mount Holyoke in all of its abundance do for its own QTPOC community of students, staff, faculty and alums?”
The Mount Holyoke News reached out to the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, which was not able to provide a statement on the Juneteenth donation initiative at this time.