Every meeting at CampGrrl looks a little different. Club meetings can be anything from tea parties and flowerpot painting to queer trivia and teach-ins. Some nights, you can find carabiners and charms sprawled across a table during a craft session. On other nights, members snack on popcorn while watching LGBTQ+ films. 

CampGrrl was established at NYU around two decades ago and now meets every other week at the LGBTQ+ Center in the Kimmel Center for University Life. Originally created for lesbian students, the LGBTQ+ club is now dedicated to community-building, education and advocacy centered on lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer women, as well as nonbinary people. 

 For CampGrrl president and Steinhardt junior Cassandra Rendlesham, ensuring that each event offers actionable takeaways is a key priority. By intentionally integrating education into hands-on activities, the club helps attendees understand and retain important information about queer identity and history.

“A lot of times, we have freshmen who join us because it’s one of the first spaces where a lot of them feel able to be their authentic queer selves,” Rendlesham told WSN.

At the start of this year, members of the executive board took to Instagram to clarify the club’s goal of including all marginalized gender identities. This rebrand followed feedback from transgender and nonbinary students that CampGrrl’s messaging didn’t feel inclusive to queer and sapphic people who do not identify as women.

“I think because of our name CampGrrl — which is based on riot grrrl — a lot of people think this is a club for women,” Rendlesham said. “We wanted to change that stigma to be more centered so that it’s not just for women. It’s for transgender people. It’s for nonbinary people. That’s mostly from feedback from people who want to join who feel like they can’t.” 

Rendlesham’s leadership in the club has further pushed CampGrrl to avoid presenting itself as a space solely for queer women. Since serving as the club’s treasurer in her sophomore year, Rendlesham has been working to present CampGrrl as an inclusive space that caters to all gender identities. She incorporates this into programming by emphasizing this messaging in the club’s weekly meetings and conducting inter-educational events that also bring in and center trans and nonbinary voices. 

CampGrrl’s events are usually centered on a holiday or season, like Halloween-themed cookie decorating and spring picnics. Earlier this academic year, the club hosted a collage and vision board-making night to celebrate the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, a Canadian holiday that honors the around 150,000 children who were separated from their families and sent to residential schools. The craft was accompanied by learning about Indigenous people and the intersectionality of Indigenous life and the LGBTQ+ communities. 

As a long-standing queer club, CampGrrl also contributes to larger-scale events on campus such as Queer Prom, Queernival and Joy of Resistance, which are typically hosted by Queer Union and attract over 50 attendees. 

“What sets CampGrrl apart is that we do a lot of events that aren’t just educational or not just fun, but kind of combine the two,” Rendlesham said. “This is something that makes our members more grateful and also more informed.”

As CampGrrl moves forward, they recognize the need to progress in line with received input, so that people of intersectional identities feel welcome into the safe space that the club aims to create. 

“I grew up where there was not a space for LGBTQ+ people, and also LGBTQ+, minoritized gender identities — it wasn’t a thing to hang out with people like that,” Rendlesham said. “But when you have those spaces that are like, ‘Yes, this is for LGBTQ+ people and their allies,’ you know that this is a space that will have a lot of people with similar identities as you.”

Contact Zara Surti at [email protected].