When your main pitch to students is that you provide a “home away from home,” what do you do when your physical space is unavailable due to a pandemic?

That has been one of the biggest challenges facing University of Iowa staff in Multicultural and International Student Support and Engagement (MISSE) as COVID-19 safety guidelines have kept its four cultural centers shuttered since March 2020. Coordinators in MISSE—comprised of the Afro-American Cultural Center (known as the Afro House), the Latino Native American Cultural Center (LNACC), the Asian Pacific American Cultural Center (APACC), the Pride Alliance Center (dubbed the Pride House), and International Student Support and Engagement (ISSE)—have banded together with staff to create virtual programming that is relevant to students. And that has required a lot of outside-the-box thinking.

“How do we connect with students who have never heard of us before when we don’t have on-campus promotion opportunities? Everything has to be online. How do we even get the message to students to find us online—and then how do we get them to stay? How do we remain relevant and not facilitate burnout for students who are on Zoom all day for classes?” says Emma Welch, coordinator of the Pride House. “It’s important to us as a team to maintain the warm feeling we’ve developed over the years and transcend the sterility of being on the screen.”

Easier said than done, but coordinators like Welch and some 30 student staff members have been experimenting with different ideas for nearly a year. All the centers host Zoom “office hours,” when students are invited to log in to chat or just hang out, and most have utilized an online platform called Discord to create 24/7 channels of communication focusing on various interest areas. There have been virtual yoga classes, book clubs, game nights, and Instagram takeovers. The Afro House held a costume contest on social media for Halloween, complete with prizes, and also partnered with the Pride House and the UI Lecture Committee to host a talk with actress and LGBTQ+ advocate Laverne Cox. To kick off the spring 2021 semester, student leaders at the APACC wrote postcards to incoming first-year and transfer students to welcome them to campus and invite them to attend online events.

“The pandemic has been very sad and intense and scary for so many, but there also has been a beautiful side to it, in that people are being creative and doing things they never thought they would have done before,” says Isabela Flores, interim LNACC coordinator.

One example she notes is Podémos Hablar?, a podcast created last fall by LNACC programming assistants Chris Vazquez, an English and creative writing major from Minneapolis, and Alex Escalada, a music major from Cedar Falls, Iowa. The pair teamed up to record three episodes during Latinx/a/o Heritage Month after the idea was floated at a staff brainstorming session. In the short series, they laugh and tease each other as they discuss what they’ve been watching lately while also hitting a more serious tone on identity-related topics like language and terminology and LGBTQ+ issues.

Escalada says the response to the podcast was unexpected.

“We thought it might fly under the radar, so we were pretty surprised when we received a lot of positive feedback after the first one. People suggested topics and wanted to be guests,” says Escalada, adding that he and Vazquez picked up new skills in the process by learning how to record and edit audio. “We wanted to give space for discussion of various topics and to provide different perspectives and for it to be a very natural and informal conversation. To hear that it was enjoyable and worthwhile for so many people really meant a lot to me.”