My Travels and GLBTQ youth

It's been a while because it's been hectic. Last week I was in Walnut Creek CA delivering a training with my organization. We had roughly 130 homeless service providers play hokey from their daily routines to network and learn. They were the victims of my very first experience of a trainer ever!

On Monday, the 7th, I started the day co-training a session on outreach to persons experiencing homelessness. My co-trainer has been doing this for quite some time so he was cool and calm, though I think I may have come off as a bit nervous (thankfully only one evaluation confirmed this). I had some slides to present and I talked about some of the findings from a project that I worked on last year. I hadn't been able to put as much time into prepping as I would like because later that afternoon I was presenting a session on my own with content that I had developed... in less than a solid week.

My session, which I did twice, was on GLBTQ youth experiencing homelessness. While estimates in the general population range from 3-10% of the population identifying as GLBTQ, between 20-40% of homeless youth identify as GLBTQ. They experience more trauma, rejection, abuse, mental health issues, harassment, and stigma than their heterosexual peers. It's a topic that I've done some research on and I'm really interested in pursuing in my further work. The tough part is that the language is always changing and I'm not embedded in the GLBTQ "community" in my area (if there is one) so I don't know what I am and am not supposed to say some of the time.

Lucky for me I got some really talkative people in my sessions, five the first day (seven if you count my two cheerleader co-workers) and ten the second... out of 130 people total. There isn't a lot of interest around these issues, I even had someone tell me that they didn't have any of those kids. People forget that those who identify as GLBTQ aren't running around with a sign that announces their sexuality to the world. I'm hoping that I'll get to play a part in helping some people recognize this and start to think about how to make their programs more friendly.

The sessions went really well, the conversation was lively and I didn't even get to finish my slides! Now that I've done it once I am really excited to hopefully get to try it again sometime soon and maybe develop my training into some other products for my organization? But for now I need to shift gears and get back to data.