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This week, members of Advocates for Youth staff and the Youth Activist Network are participating in the National Council of La Raza's Lideres Summit. The National Council of La Raza is the largest Latino civil rights organization in the country. Every year, they host a national conference that brings together members of the Latino community from across the country. The Lideres Summit is a pre-conference program for young Latinos (14-25) to learn new skills, network, share ideas and connect with other young leaders.
Today we presented the workshop "Beyond Straight: Sexual Minority Youth." Two of our Youth Resource Peer Educators, Ernesto and Ariel, took the lead from the very beginning in organizing this. They submitted the proposal, created the workshop, and did the majority of the presentation.
During the workshop, we discussed the challenges facing GLBTQ Latino youth as well as ways to get involved in ally work. This is the first time that the Lideres Summit has had a workshop focused on GLBTQ youth and we were so excited to help make it happen!
This workshop made me reflect on a few things...
First, while a bummer it took until now to focus on GLBTQ youth issues, hooray that we were the first and that it got to happen at all. It takes time to get national organizations that don't traditionally focus on sexual and reproductive health issues to jump on our train, but this shows that they can and will make it happen! This year workshop...next year townhall?
Second it has been really exciting to see the enthusiasm from NCLR staff to have us here, both because we finally got to meet in person after months of coordination, but also because some staff felt their own identity being recognized in the presence of the workshop.
Third, the young people in attendance (about 50) at our workshop were awesome! They participated, asked questions and swarmed our table at the end, grabbing more materials including our "I Think I Might Be..." booklets and taking the remaining condoms I had left (all in all about 150 were distributed).
And finally, shout out to Ariel and Ernesto who put an incredible amount of hard work in preparing the presentation. It paid off!
Youth-Adult Partnership SUCCESS!
More about NCLR to come. I'm here through Tuesday :)
Ariel and Sarah, you folks are bad ass!
-Ernesto
Ariel and Sarah, you folks are bad ass!
-Ernesto