Leaders in Education, Advocacy & Dialogues (LEAD), a program that provided training and consultations for student organizations on supporting peers of diverse social identities, has been shut down.
While the university said that the program was shut down by Georgetown’s Center for Multicultural Equity and Access (CMEA) after a regular review, students say that funding cuts to the CMEA led to them losing their jobs.They also said that they experienced increased supervision and criticism of language around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the months before the termination of LEAD.
A university spokesperson said that the CMEA decided to cancel LEAD after the Division of Student Affairs reviewed the program.
“Recently, as part of a regular Division of Student Affairs review of strategic goals and the best way to serve Georgetown students in light of available resources, the Center for Multicultural Equity & Access (CMEA) decided to close the LEAD program,” the spokesperson said.
LEAD began as a student-led club but became a paid position for students when it was brought under the CMEA in Fall of 2023.
According to the program’s now-deleted webpage, LEAD facilitators served as “peer facilitators and consultants in diversity and social justice education.” These students would “provide developmental, constructive and inspiring conversations, workshops and trainings on issues regarding diversity, identity, and inclusion.”
Rachel Zhang (SFS ’26), a former LEAD facilitator, said that the program aimed to help campus organizations access robust, personalized diversity trainings.
“LEAD was an easy option for organizations who wanted a DEI training of some sort or recruitment training of some sort to reach out to and consult with and discuss,” Zhang said. “I think at some point we became a sort of DEI consulting org.”
Due to changes in federal funding, immigration policy, graduate program enrollment levels, and utility costs, Georgetown University faced a $52 million deficit in November 2025. Through cost saving measures such as a hiring freeze, reducing expenditures, and a pause on merit increase for staff wages, the university has reduced spending by $72 million to $82 million.
Zhang said that CMEA staff implied that the program was cancelled due to budget cuts. The university did not comment on this specific claim.
“The main impression I got was that we all knew CMEA was under funding pressure, and as they were talking about budgeting, there was no more room for LEAD,” Zhang said.
She explained that from Spring 2025 to Fall 2025, LEAD did not have a dedicated supervisor. In Fall 2025, they were assigned a new supervisor who was not as active, according to Zhang.
“There was not really one specific person to fight for us because it was not necessarily any remaining administrative person’s desire to run LEAD,” Zhang said.
The university said that the club has experienced shifts in participation from students and staff.
“It has seen varying periods of activity, following shifts in student interest and staff resources,” the spokesperson said.
Kyndall Jackson (CAS ’27), a former LEAD facilitator, said that their new supervisor cautioned them from using language tied to DEI initiatives that the Trump Administration has targeted. After entering office, the Trump Administration released several executive orders targeting DEI initiatives at universities, threatening funding cuts.
“The people in charge of us were a bit uncomfortable with us talking about the topics that we usually talk about like diversity, equity, inclusion, implicit bias, race, wealth, and inequality,” Jackson said. “So it just got really difficult to do the job that you need to do without those words.”
The university spokesperson said that the program was not shut down due to concerns regarding their content. However, they did not comment on whether students were cautioned to avoid certain language.
“The closure of the LEAD program was not driven by external forces,” the spokesperson said. “As a Catholic and Jesuit University, Georgetown is an academic community dedicated to creating and communicating knowledge and providing an excellent undergraduate, graduate and professional education.”
A former facilitator, who was granted anonymity due to concerns about retaliation, said that in the program’s final months they faced additional levels of monitoring that were new to the primarily student-led initiative.
The former facilitator said that one such flag was brought against their presentation for the LGBTQ resource center, which the Voice was able to confirm after reviewing the presentation’s version history.
“In our presentations, we put LGBTQIA+ and they said that we couldn’t do that,” the former facilitator said. “Being part of the identity that is the A [asexual], [it] felt really isolating, and that I wasn’t welcome in the facilitation that I was helping prepare.”
The former facilitator said that they were notified in the early spring that the program would not continue into the next academic year.
“We had asked our supervisors to help us find alternate positions on campus, and the only options that they gave us as trained facilitators for multiple years was a front desk position,” the facilitator said.
The LEAD facilitators used to be paid over the summer to prepare training materials for meetings and conferences early in the academic year. Now, because the program was canceled, they will no longer receive that funding.
“All of us lost our funding and a source of income for the summer, which has been really difficult to navigate personally because I am on SNAP and Medicaid,” the former facilitator said. “I already don’t have a lot of funding or a lot of money, and I relied on things like LEAD to be able to afford groceries and things like that.”
As a recent graduate, Zhang said she felt that LEAD was valuable for Georgetown’s organizations. She worries that organizations will miss out on the diversity training she provided during her time at Georgetown, given the pre-professional nature of many club environments.
“Having implicit bias training is normally not necessary for student-to-student interactions, except in this unique Georgetown environment where we’re doing a lot of student recruitment and student hiring,” Zhang said. “It’s a lot of work to replicate that sort of stuff when someone else isn’t doing it for you.”
As an African American student, Jackson explained that calling out discrimination and microaggressions can be difficult. She worries that without LEAD, more individual students will have to shoulder that burden.
“I think a lot of students are just missing out on being exposed to a world outside of their own,” Jackson said. “We force people to think about questions that they never really thought about in regards to identity, race, social positioning, and things of that sort.”
Editor’s Note: Rachel Zhang has contributed to the Voice’s reporting.
