Week 6:
Getting Ready for Camp

August 2, 2019

This week has had two main focuses: Action Camp final preparations and my Year in Review report based on youth evaluations. This week the weather has been a bit more mild, and so I’ve enjoyed having a few of my one-on-one meetings outside. I was excited to learn that for Action Camp, one of my duties as an operations counselor is to run the tie dye activity. I love arts and crafts, but tie dye is definitely one of my favorites. Last year for Pride, I made a tie dye shirt with stripes that matched the trans pride flag. I’ll have to go thrift shopping before camp to purchase as many white clothing items as I can find. I can’t believe camp starts so soon! At the time of writing this blog, camp is only 3 days away! I hope that I’ll have tons of pictures from camp in my next blog to make up for the lack of pictures for this week and last. I already have a pretty good idea of my schedule during camp and which cabin I’ll be staying in. I am incredibly grateful to be sleeping in a cabin with air conditioning as Illinois summers are disgustingly humid. I will really need my rest each night of camp as there will definitely be so much going on during the day. Another camp event I’m excited for is the mixer, which is essentially a dance. Youth Leaders plan this event, and this year’s theme is “woodland fantasy” which I think will be fantastically beautiful. As a member of the ops team, I’ll assist in setting up the mixer. I’m also looking forward to sitting in on a few workshops facilitated by our Youth Leaders. They have so much insight and I am proud of all the hard work they have put in all summer by fulling engaging at meetings and developing camp programming on their own time.

The gym at Youth Services has been in a state of chaos as co-directors Nat and Lizzy compile and organize all of the supplies for the week. We were very lucky this year that many of our supplies were donated through an Amazon wish list that was shared out. I also think it’s really cool that camp is offered on a sliding scale of $0-600 so that every young person who wants to participate can attend regardless of their financial situation. Keep following to see updates about camp in week 7!

The other project for this week has been finishing my Year in Review report, which I feel pretty confident about. It was challenging to convert all of my nitty-gritty numerical findings into an easy to follow written report. Some demographic findings are that 38% of our engaged members are youth of color and 48% are transgender. Youth Services offers Kinship as one of our prideSUPPORT groups, which is specifically for high school youth of color. Providing safe spaces exclusively for queer youth of color is extremely important as they are often left out of other queer spaces and face unique challenges. The evaluations also found that 93% of respondents agree that Youth Services is a safe space for them to explore their gender and sexual identity, with the remaining being neutral. 90% of respondents feel more comfortable exploring their gender and sexual identities and feel more connected to LGBTQ+ communities after participating in the Pride Program. Evaluation results demonstrate that Youth Services has a positive role in the lives of LGBTQ+ youth. The most interesting and surprising finding was that cisgender girls in our programming often have the least support. From the report:

“100% of our trans respondents are out to their family, 68% of cis respondents, and only 58% of our cis girls, compared to 86% of all respondents. Cis girls also score much lower in other categories, with 50% feeling that their family is supportive of their identity, compared to 73% of all respondents. 58% of cis and 95% of trans respondents feel that after participating in the Pride Program their family would be supportive if they felt the need to seek out mental health services, compared to 78% of all respondents. The mental health support for cis girls is even worse, with only 33% of respondents agreeing with the above statement. Cis girls and nonbinary students also feel significantly less supported at school, scoring lower than the average and trans respondents, while cis boys feel the most supported. Cis girls make up almost a third of our engaged members and the fact that they feel the least supported in many instances is important to consider”.

Writing this report was a challenging but rewarding experience, and I look forward to drafting the evaluation survey for next year to optimize the process and obtain even more useful data.