SCSU Women’s Center director looks to maintain, expand strong community of support

Dr. Heather Brown started as director of St. Cloud State University’s Women’s Center in July 2023, but her career in social justice started much earlier.

The only child of a single mother, Brown grew up watching her mom face more challenges than other single-income families where fathers were the sole earners.

“My mother was one of the hardest-working people I knew, and as I was growing up, I saw how hard she struggled and how many challenges she faced and I had a lot of questions about why,” she said. “Why was it that she was struggling so hard, and why was it that people who knew what she had experienced didn’t want to help her or didn’t try to smooth the way for her? Of course, when I was younger I didn’t understand the environmental context of things, and I just really wanted to figure it out.”

That led to Brown studying gender issues in religion, and becoming a first-generation college graduate after earning a bachelor’s degree from Lake Forest College, master’s from Harvard Divinity School and educational doctorate from Northern Illinois University. Her doctoral dissertation was on the connection between weight and learning in college-age women. She started her career working for community-based organizations serving immigrants and refugees, particularly women and young people. She then worked in higher education administration with a focus on research development and grant writing for different institutions, before serving as executive director of the Women + Girls Research Alliance at University of North Carolina Charlotte for several years. She then worked in publishing for some time, copy-editing and working in peer review journals before starting at SCSU.

“I really missed working with women,” she said. “It’s been my passion since I was about 16 years old, and so I really wanted to get back into that.”

Throughout her career, Brown said she has worked in the intersections of supporting people in making the best possible choices they can to give themselves the best possible opportunities, but also understanding many are existing within systems that may or may not be supportive of what someone wants to do and how they can do it. She has worked to advocate for the removal of barriers that would stand in the way of personal hard work, personal choices and personal pursuits.

“You can be the smartest person in the world, you can have as many degrees as possible — but if you live within a system that says ‘We don’t want you to succeed because of your race or how you look or what your gender is,’ you can keep hitting that wall until your well of resilience is dry, and no one should have to put up with that, because it will kill you eventually,” Brown said. “So that’s how I came to be very passionate about supporting women and supporting people who are struggling within sort of systemic challenges that stand in the way of their own personal success.”

Core of support

Since starting at St. Cloud State, Brown said she has found an “amazing core of support that’s already here.” She credits the staff already in place at the Women’s Center, as well as impassioned student employees, with making the Center an important resource for the campus and community and a great environment in which to work.

“I felt really comfortable coming into a place that’s already really doing good things, and it’s about trying to figure out what avenues we maybe haven’t explored and how to expand what’s already here,” she said. “Of course, I’ve brought a little bit of my own passion in, and we did a really nice presentation last fall on the intersections between weight-learning and gender in higher education.

“One of the issues we see around weighted learning is that if you don’t feel like you belong, you’re probably not going to stay and you’re definitely not going to complete your education. I want to see if there’s a way to bring co-curricular support that scaffolds what goes on in the classroom to help promote that sense of belonging — to improve people’s experience and sense of ‘I’m a part of this campus, and I’m wanted here and I’m welcome here.’”

Brown is proud of the variety of valuable events the Center has been putting together. It hosted a panel of eight SCSU women student-athletes, called “Playing for Her,” where panelists shared their experiences as girls and women in sports, what it meant to be an athlete and how it has affected their leadership and their community service.

“The energy was tremendous. It’s about sharing those experiences about how your lived experiences as a woman can really change the world, and not only just your immediate world and what you do yourself, but how you influence others and how you share that information and how there’s this ripple effect,” Brown said. “It really builds on — we know the cliché, and it’s a good cliché: if you educate a girl, it educates her whole community — and we saw the same thing (at the event). Those women were sharing their wisdom and their experience, and people were nodding their heads and you knew they were going to take what they were hearing and just keep spreading it out, which is really tremendous.”

Other events that have taken place or are planned for the future since Brown joined SCSU have included an event celebrating the first women’s sports bar to open in Minnesota and the fourth in the United States, the history of midwifery and how it relates to reproductive choice and health care, and an event entitled “Wearing Your Crown,” which is an opportunity for Black and Brown people to come together and discuss racism they’ve experienced against natural hair in school or in the workplace in the hopes of realizing they’re not alone and giving them resources to advocate for positive change.

A resource for all

When talking about her future plans for SCSU and the Women’s Center, Brown said it’s important for her not to say that she has goals.

“This is actually something I did in my interview, because they asked me to lay out what my vision is for the Women’s Center, and it’s actually not up to me,” she said. “It’s really up to us as a group, so what I will say is an important thing for me to do is to start learning and hearing from the people we should be serving and that we do serve about what it is they need and what they’re interested in.

“Consent is super important in the work that we do. We talk about it in terms of sexuality and of physical relationships, but it’s also important in other types of interactions as well — we don’t want to impose our vision of what the world should be. We want to work with others to help enact a better world for everybody, and we can’t do that if we don’t know what they want to tell us.”

With legislative issues surrounding reproductive rights, access to gender-affirming care and other forms of health care being discussed across the nation, Brown said it’s been a concerning time for many individuals, and certain states’ legislation is impacting where students decide to find higher education.

“We’re hearing through news stories that students are making choices now to go to schools in states that do support reproductive choice, that offer protections — and even students who may come from families who are considered sort of anti-abortion are saying ‘I’m concerned about going to a place where those rights have been taken away, because if they take away the rights to reproductive care access, what’s next? So I would rather not go to a place where I have no idea what the future’s going to hold,’” she said. “We certainly see the same thing with people who are struggling with trans health access — they’re coming to places where they can receive the support and care they need. So there’s a lot of energy around being welcoming and openly supportive, and keeping focus on advocating for everyone within the community so that people aren’t being targeted with really dangerous and harmful policies and procedures.”

For Brown, it’s important people on campus and in the community know the SCSU Women’s Center is meant to be a resource for all. The Center offers period and safer sex supplies, pregnancy tests and fun buttons designed by students.

“We try to have a lot of joy here and we work very hard,” Brown said. “We work on things that sometimes feel very life and death, and it’s super critical to help people exist and how they make good choices for themselves and their families. But we try to have joy and we try to have fun, and if someone wants to bring us an idea, we are happy to talk about it and maybe we can make it happen.”