{shortcode-734fec4adaf94af0276c0c8dc5aaab3672b5af3e}

Harvard College will close the designated spaces that previously housed the Women’s Center and the Office for BGLTQ Student Life, following a July decision to shutter those offices — along with one for minority students — and fold their staff into a new center within the Office of Culture and Community.

The new “Harvard Foundation” — where staff from the former offices were reassigned — will be based out of Grays Hall, a College spokesperson confirmed, where the Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations was previously located.

All three spaces will now be available for registered student organizations to book for events through the new center, according to a note on the OCC website.

Senior Director of the Harvard Foundation Habiba Braimah and associate director Matias Ramos discussed the change in a meeting with several Peer Advising Fellows on Sunday, according to two PAFs in attendance, following weeks of confusion among students about the future of the centers.

The Women’s Center and Office for BGLTQ Student Life operated out of the basements of freshmen dorms — Canaday and Thayer Hall, respectively — for more than a decade.

College Dean David J. Deming wrote in a July message that the revamped Harvard Foundation is committed to serving all students and will offer additional services for low-income and first-generation students, veterans and members of the military, and “religion, ethics, and spirituality work.” The Foundation’s webpage does not mention race, gender, or sexuality.

{shortcode-7dc8cf3fa61a35c66faaef9b737cfd026eb6e910}

During Sunday’s session, Ramos indicated that the Foundation is not planning to provide funding for student organization events that are not clearly marked as open to all, according to three PAFs in attendance.

Decisions on how to allocate funding have not been finalized, Ramos and Braimah said. But they said that under the framework being discussed, the board meeting of an affinity organization may not be eligible to receive funding, whereas an event put on by that organization that is made open to all students would be eligible.

The prior Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations had a Student Advisory Committee that distributed upwards of $50,000 in grants to student organizations in recent years. In the 2023-2024 academic year, the SAC board distributed $97,000 collectively to student organizations, according to an annual report from that year. Affinity groups and cultural organizations — such as the Chinese Students Association, Black Men’s Forum, and Ghungroo — constituted nearly all of the student groups that received funding.

In the past, student organizations would typically apply to become SAC member organizations to become eligible for funding. To obtain funding for an event during the 2024-2025 academic year, an organization would have to demonstrate that the event served and was “open to the entire undergraduate community” and enlightened the student body on “aspects of race, culture, religion, ethnicity, and sexual orientation.”

A College spokesperson declined to comment on whether the criteria for how the Harvard Foundation offers grants to organizations would change.

Eli M. Visio ’26, co-president of the Harvard Queer Student Association, said that Associate Dean for Culture and Community Alta Mauro stated in a meeting with him in early August that she did not know whether grant meetings held by the SAC board would continue as before.

The changes follow repeated declarations by President Donald Trump and his administration that universities’ diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are illegal. Trump has asserted that such programs are “immoral race- and sex-based preferences” that violate federal civil rights law. and administration officials have specifically demanded that Harvard dismantle its DEI offices as a condition for the return of federal funding.

The webpage of the revamped Foundation affirms that it will support programming “that showcases the wide spectrum of life experiences within the Harvard College community and fosters student engagement with different perspectives, values, and identities.”

But elsewhere, the Foundation is walking back its support of programming around students’ particular identities — previously central to its work.

Student leaders of the First Year Retreat and Experience — a pre-orientation program for incoming freshman funded by the Foundation — announced in June that the program could no longer hold evening events for LGBTQ, Asian American and Pacific Islander, Black, Latino, and rural students, per administrative guidance conveyed to them through Foundation staff members.

“Due to university guidance, we are no longer able to host identity-specific Affinity Spaces as we have in past years,” one of the program’s student co-chairs announced in a message to team leaders that was later obtained by The Crimson.

Instead, the program would shift to “culture-oriented events that are empowering and open to all,” according to the message.

—Staff writer Cam N. Srivastava can be reached at cam.srivastava@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @camsrivastava.