The Orlando Strong Symposium will be Sept. 15-16 at UCF Downtown in Orlando. (Photo from UCF.edu)
ORLANDO | The Orlando Strong Symposium: For Our Collective Rights & Freedom will be held for the first time during Hispanic Heritage Month, running Sept. 15-16. The symposium will be a hybrid of in-person workshops and online integration.
The Orlando Strong Symposium is an annual event that gathers together leaders in local and state government with the LGBTQ nonprofit, public and private sectors of Central Florida.
Emerging from the 2016 tragedy of the Pulse shooting, Contigo Fund honors the lives who were lost at Pulse by providing financial support to organizations that plan to educate and assist the LGTBQ, Latinx, immigrants and people of color communities. While empowering said communities to fight against bigotry within Central Florida.
“Ultimately our goal is to create a backbone for the LGTBQ community here in Central Florida,” says Andrés Acosta, Contigo Fund’s community relations manager, “and create a sustainable movement by bringing resources to communities of color, with the intersection of the LGTBQ and so with the idea of building a sustainable movement, one of the most important things about the symposium is that it’s kinda like a check in we do annually. Where we can see where our movement is at, we see the progress we’ve made in Central Florida since Pulse and we get to talk about what we need to do to move forward.”
The first symposium was held in 2017, a year after the Pulse tragedy, during LGBTQ Pride Month. Contigo Fund’s foundation manager, Joél Junior Morales, says the event was changed this year due to so much activity from the LGTBQ community in June this year. He says they also felt it was a good idea to move the event to another familiar time, in this case the first week of Hispanic Heritage Month, to help bring more attention to the Latinx and people of color within the LGTBQ community as they were the communities most impacted by the Pulse shooting.
Each symposium has featured a different theme, highlighting that year’s focus. In 2020 it was COVID-19, in 2021 it was pandemic recovery and this year the theme will take aim at the slate of conservative legislation that has been coming out of Tallahassee, most of which negatively impacts Florida’s marginalized communities.
“The symposium will include special discussions on the harmful impact that the slate of laws passed through the Florida legislature will have on the rights of women, immigrants, people of color, workers, and LGBTQ Floridians,” the event’s website states. “We are living through unprecedented times which require unprecedented collective action. Together, we will do deeper dives into how these hate-inspired laws in Florida – including Don’t Say LGBTQ, Stop Woke, Abortion Ban, License to Discriminate in Health Care and Trans Youth Healthcare Ban, Anti-immigrant Laws targeting unaccompanied youth and more – are being implemented in our region and across the state and are affecting the lives of those we care for.”
A big step towards building this year’s two-day symposium was the creation of a steering committee. Local community leaders were chosen to conduct and manage projects to make the event work more proficiently. Alex Herring, the transgender services facilitator for The Center Orlando, is a member of the steering committee.
“It’s a huge symposium,” Herring says. “It’s different from last year because last year a lot of elements were done by the committee but this time there were also workshops being done or submitted by community leaders.”
There will be 12 workshops along with seven main plenaries at this year’s symposium. The workshops will feature various topics including sexual violence, microaggressions, fundraising, voting rights, HIV, harm reduction, advocacy through art and much more. The plenaries will focus on Pulse, immigration rights, LGBTQ education, HIV justice, transgender health care, advancing equity, diversity and inclusion, and reproductive freedom/abortion access.
The Orlando Strong Symposium will be Sept. 15-16 at UCF Downtown in Orlando. Registration opens at 11:30 a.m. each day with closing remarks at 5:50 p.m. To register for the event, go to TinyURL.com/OrlandoStrong2022.
