A coalition of LGBT youth from Pennsylvania traded ideas and best practices with LGBT activists from across the nation late last month, tapping into the wealth of experiences they accumulated in their first year in operation.
Pennsylvania Student Equality Coalition sent 22 young people to the 24th annual National Conference on LGBT Equality — Creating Change, held in Baltimore the last weekend in January.
This marked the first time the conference was held in the Northeast region in a decade, and PSEC executive director Jason Landau Goodman said the state’s LGBT youth activists jumped at the chance to attend.
“Creating Change is regarded as the premier national conference on LGBT equality,” Landau Goodman said. “Leaders and local organizers gather each year to discuss cutting-edge tactics, and we thought it was very important that youth leaders be exposed to these networks and to the power of the national movement.”
Nearly 3,000 people participated in the conference, including federal leaders such as Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan and state-level allies such as Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley.
Each of the PSEC attendees represented a different county in the state and ranged from the student president of a high-school gay-straight alliance to a graduate student who made national headlines last year as the target of homophobic comments from a professor.
The contingent attended an array of the more than 250 workshops and organized its own session on youth-led organizing that drew a crowd of about 60.
Several PSEC members presented during the discussion, exploring the state of the youth LGBT movement by examining youth action during the suffrage and civil-rights movements and discussing their own experiences as members of one of just a handful of youth-run LGBT groups in the country.
“We only know of three other youth-led LGBT organizations in the nation so we’re pretty unique, and it was important for us to be able to raise the level of discourse about youth engagement in the community,” Landau Goodman said, noting that he attended similar workshops at the previous two Creating Change conferences that were hosted by a different group. “I was exposed to a lot of my first narratives on youth-led organizing the last two years so to now be a presenter for a workshop like this was really powerful.”
Landau Goodman also sat on a panel on safe-schools legislation with representatives of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network and activists from Massachusetts, New York and West Virginia.
While each state is dealing with its own unique impediments to safe schools, Landau Goodman said it was beneficial to hear about the different initiatives and efforts activists are pursuing to secure better treatment for the LGBT youth of their state.
“We talked about the progress that each state has seen and the tactics that are being employed to promote and defend safe schools,” he said. “It was very interesting to hear the contrast between the work being done in Pennsylvania and in other states — while we’re fortunate that we’re not fighting back any bills that would take away support for LGBT students, we have a whole different set of challenges. So it was really great to bring that up in a forum and have us learn from them and them from us.”
About 30 people turned out for the second annual Pennsylvania Youth Caucus, a networking opportunity for PSEC leaders and other young people from the Keystone State.
Based on this year’s success, Landau Goodman said PSEC is already looking forward to heading south for the 25th annual Creating Change in Atlanta next year.
“It was productive and meaningful,” he said. “The delegation went to a wide range of discussions, made incredible connections and returned to Pennsylvania more empowered on a national level.”
Last month, PSEC held its second winter convening Jan. 13-15 at Penn State University, where members adopted three new affiliates: West Chester, Villanova and Wilkes universities. The coalition also voted to create a new region, Appalachia, to give rural youth a greater voice in the organization.
Jen Colletta can be reached at [email protected].