The University of Pennsylvania is playing host this weekend to about 400 LGBT students from around the nation, who will gather to learn with and from one another about current LGBT-rights issues and work to solidify the role of LGBT students in the Ivy League community.

Representatives of all eight Ivy League schools have converged for the first-annual IvyQ conference, Feb. 18-21, at Penn, which won the right to host the inaugural event in a bidding process last year.

Baylee Feore, Penn senior and head organizer of the conference, said the motivation for the event was sparked during a conversation among LGBT representatives of Penn, Columbia and Harvard at a separate Ivy League meeting about a year-and-a-half ago.

“The idea had been in the works for a while but we really didn’t make a lot of progress, and then when we all met, we thought, ‘Hey great, we can actually do this,’” Feore said. “So we started e-mailing, found contacts at all the other schools, had a planning meeting last April in which all of the schools were represented and just hammered out how to do all of this.”

LGBT groups at the Ivy League schools have held workshops and meetings in the past, Feore said, but they were on a smaller scale and not continued from year to year.

Feore said the planning, undertaken by members of Penn’s nine LGBT organizations — which are overseen by umbrella group Lambda Alliance — has been hectic but exciting.

“It was a lot of work, but it went really well,” she said. “We have a lot of high-profile speakers coming in and really great sponsorships, so people have been really generous and great to work with.”

Four plenary sessions will be held throughout the conference, led by Rich Ross, Penn grad and chair of The Walt Disney Studios; Stephen Glassman, chair of the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission; Candace Gingrich, director of youth and campus outreach at Human Rights Campaign; and Jaime Grant, director of the Policy Institute of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

Nearly two-dozen breakout workshops are also taking place in six different sessions throughout the weekend, such as “Reaching Out to Closeted Students,” “LGBTQ People in Faith Communities,” “Representation and Queer Ethnic Minorities,” “Coalition-building on Campus” and “Working with your Alumni Network.”

The workshops are led by representatives of national organizations like HRC, NGLTF, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network and Freedom to Marry, and also attended by representatives of Equality Forum, PGN, the city’s director of LGBT affairs Gloria Casarez, out local judges Dan Anders and Dawn Segal, and executive director of the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations Rue Landau.

The conference has a three-pronged approach — networking, education and empowerment — that Feore said will enable students to bring a diverse pool of ideas back to their own schools.

“All of the LGBT organizations at the Ivy Leagues have vastly different structures and different amounts of support, so we thought this would be a really great opportunity to learn from each other, see what other schools have accomplished and then try and build things at each of our own schools,” she said.

Bob Schoenberg, director of Penn’s LGBT Center, said he was impressed by the level of commitment that the Penn students invested in planning the conference.

“The students have worked very hard, and I think the outcome is going to demonstrate the effectiveness of what they’ve done,” Schoenberg said.