Lysa Salsbury has spent the last eight years working to advance gender equality on the University of Idaho campus.
Anthony Outman | Summer Arg
Lysa Salsbury has worked for the University of Idaho Women’s Center for eight years as administrative assistant and program coordinator. Salsbury will officially take the role of director starting July 1. The Women’s Center promotes gender equality on campus.
She is now one step closer.
After previous Women’s Center Director Heather Gasser’s resignation at the end of the 2013 spring semester, Salsbury was chosen out of three finalists to be the new director. She will officially take on the role starting July 1.
Salsbury, a British native, said that she first became aware of social justice issues during visits as a child to foreign countries with her diplomat father and her mother, who helped coordinate development projects in the countries.
“In a lot of the countries, the stratification of income level and class level and access to education and other resources was so painfully obvious,” Salsbury said.
Salsbury’s work with women’s rights began when she was a student at the University of Leeds, where she was assaulted her first week as a freshman.
“There weren’t very good resources at the university that I went to,” Salsbury said. “I didn’t know what to do so I kind of channeled my anxiety and trauma from the situation by being involved in advocacy to raise awareness about violence against women.”
She volunteered to drive a women’s night bus that provided women a safe way to get home from campus, and also helped plan the Take Back the Night event in Leeds while she was a student.
After graduating, Salsbury married her husband Tom, and moved to the United States, his home country. Salsbury, who is multilingual, began working as a freelance translator while her husband attended Indiana University to get his graduate degree.
Salsbury said that after several years of doing work for gas and oil industries, she started to look for something new. She went to the international office at Indiana University and began working with exchange students, including a group of Angolan women.
“I was really blown away by talking to them about life in their country, and the challenges they faced,” Salsbury said. “I started realizing that ‘Wow, I really like working with international women students’.”
Salsbury and her family moved to the Moscow-Pullman area in June 2005 after her husband was offered a job at Washington State University. Soon after, Salsbury applied for and obtained the Administrative Assistant position at the UI Women’s Center. She was promoted to Program Coordinator after Gasser became the center’s director in 2008.
As the new director, Salsbury said that she plans on continuing Gasser’s work to find a larger location on campus for the Women’s Center and the LGBTQA office but also wants to implement different changes.
“I recognize that there are some student populations that are currently underserved by the Women’s Center,” Salsbury said. “I really want to find a way to reach out more to those students.”
Among those underserved students, Salsbury said, are international students, students of color and men. Salsbury said that she also hopes that the center can begin working with UI faculty to create research fellowships that will further explore gender equality.
Paige Davies, AmeriCorps employee and Salsbury’s co-worker, said that Salsbury has the necessary qualities to be an effective director.
“She can really relate to the students as well as faculty and staff,” Davies said. “She’s a passionate advocate.”
Julia Keleher, LGBTQA Office and Programs Coordinator, also works closely with Salsbury and is confident the new change will be a successful transition for the center.
“She’s bringing a really exciting direction,” Keleher said. “She has great passion for gender equity and feminist leadership and action.”
Salsbury said that it’s important to remember that the success of the Women’s Center is not only the director’s achievement.
“The Women’s Center works because there’s a group of incredibly committed and dedicated individuals working on these issues,” Salsbury said. “It’s so beyond the scope of one person’s work and one person’s vision.”
Azumi Smith can be reached at [email protected]