._

use

hotel. Now imagine that for fivc

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

Imagine a 16-story conference

. 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 old-
est social justice organizations for
the LGBT community. With more
than 2000 participants from all
across the country, Creating Change

V‘ is the largest conference for LGBT

in

activists in the nation. It works to

Qlieating Change

isee.an~l-am.azing

egopportunity for
-activists from all
over the country to
come together and
shareexperiences  
 and advice, _
successes and failures.

include LGBT activists of all stripes:
Gay Straight Alliance leaders from a
state college in Ohio work alongside

Love Call

cont‘d from previous page

the result of this dialogue.

Several public forums will
evolve into a Watershed Council for
long term planning. The Council will
bring together members of the com-
munity who have some stake in the
tlvatershed and are concerned about
Its issues. Working under a consen-
SUS-based decision-making model,
the Council will prioritize issues,
selecting problems, threats, and

 

LGBT community center board
members from Los Angeles, Lambda
Legal outreach coordinators from
Atlanta, and HIV/AIDS educators
from New York to educate them-
selves 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.” ' ‘ V
Conference
attendees partici-
pated in discus-
sions 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 repre-
sentational.
This year at Creating
Change, Vermont was represented by
three of us from the R.U.1.2.?

opportunities upon which to focus
planning efforts. Smaller focus _
groups will develop around specific
environmental issues, such as e_ro- _
sion control, storm water run_ofi',
deforestation and butferloss, flow _
regulation and flood control, or
access to swimming holes like

. Indian Love Call.

This process will give
everyone the opportunity to become
involved from the beginning, to be
contributors to this crucial document -
in its defining stages. The gay com-
munity is whole-heartedlyinvited to

    
    
    
 
 
 

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 work-
shops on everything from bisexual -
activism to the feng shui of cyber-

tion for Election 2004 to intersex
advocacy. R.U. l .2? Executive
Director Christopher Kaufman did
double duty, serving as a faculty

member for the pre-conference insti-

tute on community centers, spon-

sored by the National Association for

LGBT Community Centers.
_ Creating Change is about
more than just workshops and hand-

outs, keynote speeches and informa-

tional statistics, though. Creating
Change is an amazing opportunity

for activists from all over the country

to come together and share experi-

ences and advice, successes and fail-

ures. Two thousand LGBT activists
all crammed together in one Miami

Beach hotel, and sometimes the con- ’
versations 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. V.

Kelly Mulligan is the Program
Assistant at R. U. 1.2? Community
Center. ' -

join in this effort as people who
enjoy the river and wantto keep it
safe and accessible. Information
about basin planning and announce-

. ments for the first public forum will

be forthcoming in the next few
weeks. V

To get involved call Em Richards,
the West River Watershed
Coordinator, at 802-254-5323 x109
or em. richards@vacd. org

space, from building a winning coali-

theater & concert
programs 8:
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albums. baseball
cards, buttons,
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Frame it.’

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