Although three members of ASLCC missed an important Senate meeting on Jan. 25, they brought ideas back to LCC from the Creating Change conference in Baltimore. The conference was held Jan. 25 to Jan. 29.
“I went to community-building workshops and also talked to a lot of folks on how to engage people in the LGBTQ community,” said Jenny Lor, vice president of ASLCC. “A lot of what I’m working on in ASLCC is strengthening my leadership skills and being able to translate those skills to other people as well. It’s important for me to be able to work with other people and to help them identify their leadership capacity and to really nurture those skills.”
“I think that I was able to get a lot of really practical things out of the conference. I think any time when going to a conference, you always learn something new,” Lor said.
Lor, ASLCC President Mario Parker-Milligan and Vashti Selix, the Senate’s gender and sexual diversity advocate attended the conference. Consequentially, they were not present at the Jan. 25 ASLCC meeting, at which the consequences of Parker-Milligan’s and Selix’s academic ineligibility would have been discussed.
Lor said this was bad timing and beyond the conference attendees’ control.
Parker-Milligan said his experience at the conference gave him an idea. In the near future, he plans to have the Black Student Union and a few other student clubs host showings of the film Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin.
“This film is about the life of a pacifist, nonviolent activist that organized a march on Washington and was given little credit for it,” said Parker-Milligan. “He was openly gay and outlived Martin Luther King Jr. and a lot of civil-disobedience activists.”
Lor wanted to attend the conference because she felt there were a lot of interesting workshops that could benefit LCC.
Some of the skills she is trying to learn include how to work from the ground up by community-building and how to work with allies.
“This conference offered those culturally specific trainings,” Lor said.
Lor said she thinks about what she can do to be a part of positive change. She works on ensuring tuition is available for all students so they have access to a higher education.
“A lot of the things that the conference did on a larger scale, (members of the Gay-Straight Alliance) try to do on a smaller scale. It’s a lot of social events,” said Max Jensen, vice president of the GSA.
“We’re also going to be getting people into positions where they can advocate others and for the community,” he said.
Jensen said the LGBTQ community had something for everyone at the conference.
“It was a really great conference. I have never seen something that big,” he said. “The speakers were amazing.”
In order to make LGBTQ feel empowered, Lor believes she needs to educate herself about issues that are important to her community. She recognizes that she has a couple of interests acting as a person in position of leadership, a woman of color, and identifying herself as queer.
“I think education, partnering with allies — people who are and aren’t members of the community — and trying to find a common ground is important,” Lor said.
“Oftentimes, I don’t see people in positions of leadership who look like me and who come from the same communities. It’s rare that we see women in positions of leadership,” Lor said. “So, when you do see people in positions of leadership who are queer, Asian and first-generation American, you think that it’s actually obtainable.”
Because the conference was “a success” last year, Parker-Milligan and ASLCC Treasurer Tracy Weimer decided to place the conference within the ASLCC budget last summer, with $3,500 being allocated for the trip. In her capacity as gender and sexual diversity advocate, Selix did the groundwork in recruiting, organizing and leading the delegation.
“I went into the conference confident with my goals of networking and gathering resources that would benefit LGBTQ students at LCC. Overall, both years have been life changing experiences,” said Selix. “As a queer woman of color, there aren’t many places that accept or empower all of my identities, so to be in a space where that’s the case is the most affirming and healing experience.”
For more information on the Creating Change conference, readers can log on to http://www.creatingchange.org.
