The 2013 Creating Change Conference, The 25th National Conference on LGBT Equality, is being held in Atlanta from Jan. 23 to Jan. 27.
The conference is one of the largest annual meetings of LGBT organizers and activists in the nation. Last year’s event, held in Baltimore, drew more than 3,000 attendees.
The annual conference, ran by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, is a five-day program featuring more than 300 training sessions and workshops. Plenary session speakers scheduled for this year’s event include Center for Community Change Executive Director Deepak Bhargava, Broadway actress and American Idol starlet Frenchie Davis and Pulitzer Prize winning Washington Post journalist Jose Antonio Vargas
The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force is the nation’s oldest political advocacy and civil rights organization working on behalf of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals. Founded in 1973, the Task Force celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2013.
“The fundamental mission of the Creating Change Conference, just as it is with the fundamental mission of our organization, is to build the political power of LGBT people in communities and states at the grassroots level,” Sue Hyde, Creating Change Conference director, told Youth Today.
Hyde said that the conference isn’t just focused around explicit LGBT-related issues, such as the controversial Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA.)
“At the Task Force, we are also very interested in issues along a spectrum of racial justice, social justice and economic justice,” she said. A vast array of speakers and presenters will be in attendance at the event, she said, addressing topics as diverse as the DREAM Act to social media training.
Several seminars and presentations are planned regarding youth issues, both explicitly pertaining to LGBT populations and addressing general concerns of the nation’s young people.
“What our goal is with young people at the conference is to both give them the opportunity to experience and learn about some issues that might slightly be out of their visions right now,” Hyde said. “We have a couple of sessions on youth suicide and youth suicide prevention. We have a couple of sessions on organizing youth in the South, [and] we have two sessions related to incarcerated youth or youth on the school-to-prison pipeline.”
Sessions regarding youth homelessness and LGBT youth populations in rural environments are additional topics scheduled to be discussed at the five-day event.
Hyde believes that both LGBT youth and non-LGBT young people are aware of, and deeply motivated by, the importance of social issues, such as socioeconomic and racial inequalities.
“For young people who are getting politically active right now, and having a political awakening, looking around them and seeing what the reality is for their peers,” she stated, “I think those issues are actually quite significant and important.”
