2025 Lavender Commencement Celebration & Reception:

Date: Thursday, May 8th, 2025 3-4pm. Location: Gensler Courtyard

• Graduating Students only: Register to participate in this year’s celebration here.

Do you want to show your support even though you are not graduating or are an ally? Allies & friends are welcome to attend as guests, no need to register.

CCA's Lavender Commencement Celebration is hosted by the Office of Student Belonging & Inclusion. Our goal is to provide a venue to honor the success of our LGBTTQQIP2SA community members in a personal, entertaining, and celebratory way.

The Lavender Commencement Celebration includes:

• fun speeches from CCA faculty, administrators, and alumni
• the chance to cross the "lavender stage" to celebrate your success and to receive your lavender honor cord
• music, mini-cupcakes, and food to share with friends, family, and well-wishers!

Is the Lavender Commencement Celebration for YOU?

This is a fair question to ask yourself! First thing's first, if you are a graduating student, you are on your way to determining the answers. Here, we hope to provide some further insight that will help you to decide if participation at this event is of interest to you.

• Do you identify as a member of the LGBTTQQIP2SA community? If you identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Transsexual, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Pansexual, Two-Spirited, and/or Asexual/Aromantic, then this event is for you!

Participation for graduating students is optional. If you are eligible to participate in the Commencement ceremony, please register for the LCC here.

Are you a graduating & also a person of color or an international student? Click to learn about the Multicultural Commencement Celebration!

Lavender Graduation is an annual ceremony conducted on numerous campuses to honor lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and ally students and to acknowledge their achievements and contributions to the University. The Lavender Graduation Ceremony was created by Dr. Ronni Sanlo, a Jewish Lesbian, who was denied the opportunity to attend the graduations of her biological children because of her sexual orientation. It was through this experience that she came to understand the pain felt by her students. Encouraged by the Dean of Students at the University of Michigan, Dr. Sanlo designed the first Lavender Graduation Ceremony in 1995. The first Lavender Graduation began at the University of Michigan in 1995, with three graduates. By 2001, there were over 45 Lavender Graduation Ceremonies at Colleges and Universities nationwide. Graduating students, including undergraduates and graduates, are invited to take part in the celebration, which occurs each year the week prior to university-wide commencement events.

CCA's annual Lavender Commencement Celebrations began in the spring of 2018 on the San Francisco Campus. Initially hosted by the Staff of Color Alliance, the LCC (preceded by the Multicultural Commencement Celebration), to be a highly visible and centralized celebration of LGBTQIA+ students for their hard work and persistence toward completing a college degree. Following in the tradition of the MCC, the LCC has become a key part of the graduation celebrations / traditions at CCA. The Staff of Color Alliance, with support from the Office of Student Life and the President's Diversity Steering Group, sought funding for and hosted the event until 2019. Now, along with the MCC, it is hosted by the Office of Student Belonging & Inclusion and is considered a key end of year tradition by the Chimera community.

For decades students at colleges and universities around the country have been celebrating both their academic achievements and their cultural heritages at specialized commencement events. Many of these events are student-initiated and usually occur during the university-wide commencement weekend. These events provide a sense of community for minority students who often experience tremendous culture shock at their impersonalized institutions. For many students these events are the "payoff" for staying in school, and friends and families find the smaller, more ethnic ceremonies both meaningful and personal.

Lavender Graduation is a cultural celebration that recognizes LGBTTQQIP2SA students of all races and ethnicities and acknowledges their achievements and contributions to the university as students who have completed the college experience. Through such recognition LGBTTQQIP2SA students may leave their college / university with a positive last experience of the institution thereby encouraging them to become involved mentors for current students as well as financially contributing alumni.

Lavender Graduation is an event to which LGBTTQQIP2SA students look forward, where they not only share their hopes and dreams with one another, but where they are officially recognized by the institution for their leadership and their successes and achievements.

Lavender is an important color to LGBTQ history.  It is a combination of the pink triangle that gay men were forced to wear in concentration camps and the black triangle designating lesbians as political prisoners in Nazi Germany.  The LGBTQ civil rights movement took these symbols of hatred and combined the colors to make it a symbol and color of pride and community.