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 It’s important to empower young people to get out there and bring about change. Twenty10’s new program does just that, reports Adam Bub.
Many young people are looking to improve the scene and give back to the community in practical ways – but there aren’t always enough avenues that allow such participation. Twenty10’s Q&A Leadership program is out to change that.
While Twenty10 is renowned for working with queer youth coping with homelessness and other problems, Q&A takes an entirely different approach by helping young people, aged from 18-28, who are ready to foster leadership skills to help steer the future of our community.
“It’s time for change,” Meredith Turnbull, Twenty10 Executive Officer tells SX. “We wanted to provide young GLBT people from all walks of life an opportunity to talk about the stuff we don’t like to talk about in the community, like what’s hurting us and what we can do differently to stop those negative things from happening again.”
Penrith local Raquel Lowe, 18, is completing a Diploma of Welfare Work at TAFE and sees the program as a “stepping stone” to working with gay and lesbian youth. Inner west resident David ‘Puppet’ Belasic works for Carers NSW and is the former Vice President of the Harbour City Bears. He hopes to promote the inclusive environment of Sydney’s bear community to younger people, and to work with the straight community to make Oxford Street a safer place.
While their aims are different, Lowe and Puppet share a common desire to enact change from the ground up.
“Everyone from the group has got something out of it,” Lowe tells SX. “It’s definitely changed my view of leadership and myself.”
Puppet agrees that the program taught him some invaluable life lessons. “Being a leader isn’t about having a position, it’s often about how to provide leadership when someone breaks the rules or steps out of their authority. It’s something that anyone in any position or place could do and could learn a lot from,” he tells SX.
Q&A wraps up this week with a closing retreat in the Southern Highlands, topping off a program that began in March earlier this year, with a four-day Blue Mountains retreat that facilitated the creation of a strong – and sometimes difficult – group dynamic.
“The space is amazing. It’s a very challenging and personal,” Puppet says. “You share it with a diverse range of people. There was me, a bear wog, a drag queen, government workers, creative and musical people, people from trade unions, and more anarchist far-left types.”
After the retreat, a monthly workshop day was held over six months, where participants discussed readings and did relevant activities, and also met leaders in the GLBT community.
Driven by the notion of ‘adaptive leadership’, the program encourages young people to become dexterous and passionate leaders by looking beyond the face value of things by challenging assumptions instead of proposing short-term ‘fixes’ for social problems.
“Throughout Q&A, I felt my age a lot when other people spoke,” Lowe confesses. She recalls a particularly difficult exercise that involved all 14 participants putting together a 700-word speech about the GLBT community without pen or paper. “There were clashes and people talking over each other, but it’s the process that’s most important,” Lowe highlights.
Puppet agrees that it’s the steep learning curve that made it worthwhile. “It’s been a rollercoaster. I went into it gung-ho, then after the retreat I had to walk from Leichhardt to Oxford Street, because I needed that time to de-fragment my mind,” he says. “Recognising that you’re naturally reacting to something, and using that to inform you to take the next step, that was the challenge.”
Some of the issues raised in discussions included public perceptions of GLBT people, gay rights and new ways to campaign for social change. But one of the strongest concerns was about the role of drugs and alcohol in the community, says Turnbull. “It struck all of us that organised Q&A that there’s this great sense from the young people that there’s not a place for them in the community just because they don’t want to do drugs and drink alcohol or hang around pubs,” she says. “They want to explore their sexuality differently. Part of their journey has been about asking, ‘How can we create spaces for ourselves?’”
It took some years to secure funding for (it’s funded by Twenty10 supporters and run by FAR Social Enterprise), but the Q&A program has been a resounding success that could translate into a regular program each year incorporating people from regional areas and across Australia, reveals Turnbull. She says: “The aim is to build a strong network of people who have similar skills and motivations and to hopefully harness that and create new ways of intervening in their community.”
While change certainly won’t happen overnight, it takes just one young person to dip their feet into the waters of social change, and watch it ripple. For these young people, the best is yet to come.
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