During the fall 2025 term, Sophia Guyton ‘27 and Eden Melinger ‘27 gave a short presentation about a new club they were starting. They described the club’s creation as an effort to make the campus more accommodating to students with disabilities, physical or mental, visible or invisible, to ensure that Union could be a place for everyone, regardless of disability status. They passed out a petition needed for getting it started, with the name Disability Inclusion, Visibility, and Advocacy (DIVA).
The fourth week of Winter term, DIVA held their first meeting with its co-founders at the helm: Guyton, DIVA’s treasurer, and Melinger, its President. The club’s official mission statement reads: “DIVA aims to build a supportive community for disabled students and will strive to include disability in campus-wide discussions, increase visibility of accessibility issues, and advocate for these issues to be addressed for the betterment of the student body.”
In explaining how DIVA meetings usually function, Guyton and Melinger say they “typically involve us presenting our progress in various endeavors (meetings with faculty, audits of the school’s physical accessibility, creation of a student handbook oriented towards navigating the campus with a disability, etc.). Once we’ve updated students on that, we open up our discussion to broader or more current issues people in the group may be experiencing. We offer a safe space for students to talk about the difficulties of being a college student with a disability, provide advice or guide them towards resources/people that can help, and brainstorm new things to bring up in our meetings with admin and faculty. So far, we’ve been meeting once or twice a term.”
In further elaborating on their current efforts, they share that the club’s biggest undertaking is currently what they call the Union College Survival Guide. “We got this idea from others in our parent organization, DREAM, and have been working on it since our establishment as an organization,” Guyton and Melinger explain. “Basically, we are hoping to compile a handbook that will help students with disabilities (or all students, for that matter) navigate campus physically and otherwise. We are writing step-by-step, how-to guides about many of our campus resources, like the Writing Center, Testing Center, and Accommodative Services Office, and we are working on the bigger project of an updated, accessible map of campus buildings. This map will detail accessible entrances, elevators, water fountains, and more—including what is not accessible (which is a lot). The end goal for this project is to hopefully have a physical, printed booklet that can be distributed to students. The Union College Survival Guide will take time, but DIVA continues to work on other projects in the meantime. “We are holding a lot of meetings with different departments on campus. We have regular meetings with Accommodative Services, and so far, we have met with Facilities, DEI, LDDI, Campus Safety, and more. We are making sure accessibility is on the radar of as many people in authoritative positions as possible so that change can be made on Union’s campus.”
Interested students should reach out to [email protected] for more information.
