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Creating Change
Creating Change
by Kelly Mulligan
Imagine
a 16-story conference hotel. Now imagine that for five days in November,
every single room in the place (and most of the rooms in the surrounding
area) were booked by LGBT activists. You might think that you'd never
want to leave, especially if you were four LGBT activists from Vermont
and the hotel was in Miami Beach, Florida, host city of the National Gay
and Lesbian Task Force's 16th Annual Creating Change conference.
Celebrating its 30th anniversary this year,
the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) is one of the country's
oldest social justice organizations for the LGBT community. With more
than 2000 participants from all across the country, Creating Change is
the largest conference for LGBT activists in the nation. It works to include
LGBT activists of all stripes: Gay Straight Alliance leaders from a state
college in Ohio work alongside LGBT community center board members from
Los Angeles, Lambda Legal outreach coordinators from Atlanta, and HIV/AIDS
educators from New York to educate themselves and each other on how to
be better activists and advocates for the LGBT community.
The theme of this year's conference was
a continuation of the past year's theme, "Building an Anti-Racist Movement
for Social and Economic Justice." Conference attendees participated in
discussions about racism and how to build an anti-racist movement. They
could also attend institutes and workshops on dismantling institutional
racism in LGBT organizations as well as building organizations that are
multi-ethnically representational.
This year at Creating Change, Vermont was
represented by three of us from the R.U.1.2.? Community Center - Christopher
Kaufman, Shawn O'Hara and me - and Kara DeLeonardis of Safe Space. In
between fielding questions about Howard Dean and civil unions from other
conference participants, we attended five days of institutes, skill-building
academies and workshops on everything from bisexual activism to the feng
shui of cyberspace, from building a winning coalition for Election 2004
to intersex advocacy. R.U.1.2? Executive Director Christopher Kaufman
did double duty, serving as a faculty member for the pre-conference institute
on community centers, sponsored by the National Association for LGBT Community
Centers.
Creating Change is about more than just
workshops and handouts, keynote speeches and informational statistics,
though. Creating Change is an amazing opportunity for activists from all
over the country to come together and share experiences and advice, successes
and failures. Two thousand LGBT activists all crammed together in one
Miami Beach hotel, and sometimes the conversations between participants
about creative tools for funding are just as valuable as the funding workshops.
It's a chance to learn as well as a five-day-long
pep rally for the kind of work that we do and how important it is that
we keep doing it. And so, while we might have been hesitant to leave (our
hotel was about a hundred yards from the beach), we returned home newly
excited and full of lots of great new ideas for the LGBT activist work
that we do in our community every day.
Kelly Mulligan is the Program Assistant at R.U.1.2? Community Center.