Centering LGBTQIA2S+ Students

Mike Brittenback and his late husband Bill Meezan ’67 came of age before the watershed Stonewall uprising for gay rights, at a time when gay bars were regularly raided by the police and the patrons’ names printed in the local newspaper the next morning. For decades they traveled the long-arcing rainbow of equality and justice together, marching, fighting, loving, and, eventually, giving back.

Like many gay couples, Meezan and Brittenback celebrated a number of different anniversaries. They had two civil unions—the first in California and a second in order to be recognized as a couple in Michigan when Meezan took a new job. Then in 2008, Meezan became seriously ill and lay in an induced coma in the intensive care unit. When he finally woke up, still attached to the machines, they handed him a white board. “The first thing he wrote was, ‘Will you marry me?’” Brittenback says. “I just lost it. I’d been sitting in the hospital with him for 40 days.” They tied the knot (again) in 2009.

A few years later Meezan was invited to speak at UVM’s annual Rainbow Graduation, a ceremony to celebrate LGBTQIA2S+ graduates. It was his first chance to see what is now the UVM Prism Center. “To come back 45 years later as a gay married man and find this extraordinary resource for students was just so important for me,” he said at the time. “It made me think about what it might have meant to me when I first started at UVM 50 years ago, to have had that available to me, and how much richer school would have been.”

The couple decided to make a significant estate commitment to establish the Meezan-Brittenback Fund, which will enhance or establish new activities and services at the Prism Center and provide emergency financial assistance for students at risk of having to leave the University. “We all need our safe spaces,” says Brittenback. “I look back on my 74 years, and I see these cycles. There’s going to be more of these so-called culture wars, and the Center is going to have to be a place where students can come and feel safe.”

Scholarship Breaks Barriers for Women

Robin Edelman has dedicated her life to public health, including 16 years as a clinical instructor at the Larner College of Medicine, and she plans to continue to have a positive impact long after she’s gone. Edelman and her husband, David Haber, have created a provision in their will to establish the Robin D. Edelman and David J. Haber Second Chance Scholarship to benefit Vermonters aged 25 and older with financial need who are pursuing their first undergraduate degree, with a strong preference for students who identify as women.

Edelman considers herself lucky when it comes to access to higher education. She credits relatively low state tuition costs at her alma mater, student loans, and financial support from her family with helping her attain her undergraduate degree. But she knows others who were not so fortunate—particularly women, who often bear the brunt of family obligations like childcare and elder care. And she believes they pay a steep price for delaying higher education. “Over the course of my career in public health,” she says, “I was continually aware that inadequate financial resources trap people in lower socio-economic status, which negatively impacts mental and physical health, finances, and overall opportunities for satisfactory living.”

Then came an “aha” moment last summer as she listened to the story of Dr. Fiona Hill, a former official at the U.S. National Security Council whose life was changed by a scholarship. Edelman says she thought to herself, “Oh my gosh, I can’t change a whole population, but if I can make meaningful change in one individual at a time, I could have a big ripple effect in promoting gender equity, which repeatedly demonstrates societal improvements for everyone living in that society.”

Edelman says, “Regardless of what Second Chance Scholarship recipients do upon completion of a bachelor’s degree, and what they eventually contribute to society, I hope that this bequest becomes a game-changer for women in Vermont, who in small or big ways will use the scholarship to break through barriers and achieve personal and professional success.”