Student Leadership
The will student leadership organization provides members with leadership opportunities and a significant voice in the program. This dedicated space for students creates community and offers a structure conducive to activism. Students discuss, analyze, and act on pressing social justice issues, practice organizing and advocacy skills, and collaborate with other campus and community organizations.
The will program cultivates thoughtful leaders who make a positive difference, in ways large and small. Students learn to recognize how overlapping systems of oppression and privilege work in their daily lives, group dynamics and organizational processes. Inclusive leadership skills are continually taught, practiced, and reinforced in the will program.
Recent examples of student initiatives include:
- Raising awareness about the school to prison pipeline while organizing to stop the building of a youth prison in Virginia.
- Creating a documentary about being Muslim at the University of Richmond.
- Producing and performing a collection of monologues about sexual assault and violence.
- Establishing a campus chapter of Students Stopping the Trafficking of People (SSTOP) to bring students together to work to end human trafficking around the globe.
- Organizing an educational campaign to expand LGBTQ+ health care access.
- Hosting the Clothesline Project, a visual witness to the impact of relationship violence on survivors and their loved ones.
The Clothesline Project
Each year, will students transform the Forum into a visual witness to the impact of gender violence on our community. Survivors and their allies anonymously express their emotions and experiences on T-shirts, which are then hung on a clothesline to educate the campus.
Coordinated by will students, the Clothesline Project is part of a national educational effort to spread awareness about the prevalence of gender violence and to strengthen people's commitment to eradicating gender violence.