Penn Dental Medicine Creates LGBTQ+ Fund with Leadership Gift

Erin Cross, Director of Penn’s LGBT Center, with Dean Mark Wolff as the School hosted its inaugural Pride Celebration in 2019. The School will work closely with the Center on the new LGBTQ+ Fund’s initiatives.

Philadelphia – With a major gift from a Penn Dental Medicine alumnus, the School has established the LGBTQ+ Fund with the goal of identifying LGBTQ+ based biases in the dental profession and ways to dispel them. The $50K leadership gift launches the Fund with the goal of eventually endowing the fund to support research and programs in perpetuity.

“A central tenet of Penn Dental Medicine’s mission statement is a commitment to fostering a humanistic environment where all individuals and their integrity are valued, respected, and empowered,” says Penn Dental Medicine’s Morton Amsterdam Dean, Dr. Mark S. Wolff. “As an academic community, understanding the root of homophobia, transphobia, and bias related to actual or perceived sexual orientation and/or gender identity requires intentional study.”

A top priority of the Fund will be to explore research and programming that can lead to best-practice models and suggest policy recommendations that can have profession-wide impact through scholarly publications. It is anticipated that the types of activities may include such efforts as internal climate surveys of the Penn Dental Medicine community; data collection, analysis, and dissemination of results of attitudinal surveys about comfort levels and concerns; development of enduring resources to support current and future students; research opportunities to work collaboratively with other offices at the University to explore LGBTQ+ issues more broadly; training programs exploring sexual orientation and gender identity bias and offering guidance for managing difficult conversations; invited speakers and conferences/symposia focusing on topics related to the LGBTQ+ community; and providing resources for education and advocacy so all Penn Dental Medicine community members, regardless of actual or perceived gender identity and sexual orientation, are supported to live authentically.

While this Fund will be the first dedicated resource at Penn Dental Medicine to support such efforts, the School hosted its first annual Pride Celebration in October of 2019, held virtually in 2020 due to COVID-19, and has an active LGBTQ+ student organization, the Penn Dental Pride Alliance.

It is anticipated the School will work closely with Penn’s LGBT Center and other relevant University resources and personnel on the Fund’s initiatives.