ABOVE: City of Orlando’s Diversity, Inclusion and Equity Senior Specialist Felipe Sousa-Rodriguez gives a speech at last year’s Orlando Youth Summit. (Photo by Melanie Ararat)
ORLANDO | The City of Orlando, Zebra Coalition and LGBTQ organizations across Central Florida will be celebrating and educating LGBTQ youth with the upcoming Orlando Youth Empowerment Summit.
The fifth annual summit will take place at Valencia College’s West Campus on Oct. 19 from 9 a.m.-4 p.m. The event is free of charge.
Focusing on youth aged 13-24, the summit will provide a variety of workshops on topics such as healthcare, LGBTQ history, intersectionality, consent, religion, overcoming bullying and more.
This is the second year that Zebra Coalition has partnered with the City of Orlando to lead the event. The Zebra Coalition is a local organization whose mission is to assist LGBTQ youth with various programs to combat issues such as homelessness, abuse, isolation from families and bullying.
“It gets them out of their comfort zone a little bit,” Heather Wilkie, Zebra Coalition’s executive director, says. “It gets them to able to network with other youth who are going through possibly similar situations that they are. And oftentimes with younger people they end up being siloed in their own schools, so what this does is it’s a way to get out of your own school environment and meet other people.”
Other organizations partnering with Zebra Coalition and the City of Orlando include QLatinx, UCF’s LGBTQ+ Services, GLSEN, One Orlando Alliance and more.
This is the first year that the summit will be providing workshops for parents as well. In partnership with Gender Spectrum, a national organization dedicated to creating gender inclusive environments for young people, there will be workshops for parents or guardians of gender-nonconforming children and teens to learn about raising a child that “doesn’t fit into society’s notions about gender.”
The parent workshop will be led by Gender Spectrum’s director of family support. It will be at the same time and the same place as the summit and admission costs $10.
“I think [these workshops are] important because it gives youth a safe space to be who they are and learn about issues that may impact them, whether they know it or not,” Wilkie says.
Besides the workshops, the event will also feature confidential HIV and STI testing from Hope & Help, a lip sync battle and performances from young LGBTQ performers.
The featured performers include stand-up comedian Brianna Rockmore, electric violinist Jose Navarro, spoken-word poet Kathryn Ross and drag queen Sorcha Mercy, who will perform a “drag transformation” with tips and tricks on how to do drag makeup.
Zebra Coalition plans to continue to work with OYES to provide these workshops and events for years to come.
“We want to make sure that we have this opportunity for youth every year,” Wilkie says. “Oftentimes [LGBTQ youth] will be introduced to content that they may have not even thought about before, and so [the summit] gives us the ability to educate them. And it also gives the community a reason to come together to talk about these issues.”
For more information and to register, visit OYES’ website at OrlYES.org.
