Progress Report on Be Strong Families’ LGBTQIA+ Initiative
Thanks to the tremendous generosity of our donors, Be Strong Families raised over $50,000 through our end-of-year annual campaign to create partnerships and resources that are specifically focused on better serving the LGBTQIA+ community. Here’s an update of our progress:
We have refined our three main goals for the Initiative:
To develop and sustain conversations that promote equitable inclusion of LGBTQIA+ children, youth, and adult family members
To ally with and share information on how mainstream family-serving programs can best support LGBTQIA+ families
To promote understanding of SOGIE (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Expression) as a normative part of adolescent development
These goals are consistent with our stance on anti-racism and equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI). They also are responses to requests we received from partnering organizations and parents to help them in supporting LGBTQIA+ families—especially inclusive of BIPOC children and families—who are underserved by mainstream family service and education providers. We know that the LGBTQIA+ community is growing, but support and resources continue to fall short.
The Café People: Doing What We Do Best
For the past several months, we have been focused on not reinventing the wheel, but rather on forging partnerships to advance the work. We are delighted to announce that we are working closely with Family Builders / Youth Acceptance Project and Human Rights Campaign, All Children All Families as well as members of Be Strong Families’ National Parent Café Leadership Team and consultants to design two resources:
Revised Parent Café in a Box—with questions audited and new questions added to support equitable and full inclusion of LGBTQIA+ parents and the issues facing them. Initially we had planned to develop a separate deck for LGBTQIA+ parents, but we came to the conclusion that full integration of the issues would be a more effective strategy.
A Café—deck and training—for conversations among parents whose children’s gender identity or sexual orientation does not conform to their expectations. This Café will build on the best practices of family acceptance, assisting parents with understanding the enormously negative consequences of rejection and with navigating this difficult terrain with their children with compassion and love.
Both of these should be to press by the end of the Summer.
Spreading the Word
At the beginning of the year, we were focused on how to strategically assist our clients / partners in child welfare with serving the needs of LGBTQIA+ youth in care. We were tremendously heartened that the Children’s Bureau issued a memorandum detailing their plans to support this direction in child welfare system improvement. In early April, we published a blog on the current guidance.
As a part of our continuing commitment to our internal and outward facing EDI initiative. Be Strong Families is auditing our training curriculum with an external consultant to ensure we are using an LGBTQIA+ lens. Ahmad Abojaradeh, a Program Consultant who brings a wealth of expertise and lived experience, has partnered with our National Director of Training Robyn Harvey to implement this audit, which will be an ongoing and long-term commitment. Since January we audited two of our most requested training curricula—“Vicarious Trauma and Vicarious Resilience” and “Communicating with Families.”
In addition to our ongoing curriculum audit, Ahmad has provided technical assistance to our design team responsible for creating a new #WoWTALK Café for youth and emerging adults. The technical assistance provided includes the review of questions and the creation of questions that are inclusive as well as questions that speak to the lived experience of LGBTQIA+ youth and emerging adults. The new #WoWTALK deck team also included youth who identify as a part of the LGBTQIA+ community.
As part of our Staying Strong and Positive for Ourselves and Our Children webinar series, we hosted seven English webinars on LGBTQIA+ topics in conjunction with our Annual Campaign in late 2021. Since January 1, 2022, we’ve hosted the following webinars for the Spanish-speaking community:
Empowering Youth by Promoting Healthy Adolescent Development
Be Strong Families intends to publish a resource for parents and youth that would assist with navigating puberty, specifically with respect to sexual orientation and gender identity expression issues (SOGIE). We are currently in conversation with several psychologists, exploring university partnerships, and talking to youth- and family-serving organizations to determine our niche and what format would be most helpful. Do we need an infographic? A fact sheet? A resource brief? A series of podcasts or videos? We are also in discussion with researchers interested in pulling the information together and working on the ultimate product. Have an opinion? We’d love to hear from you.