A Curious Thing

During my two years of AmeriCorps Service at Generations Incorporated I have found member development training to be an enriching experience. At GI we are surrounded by helpful and knowledgeable individuals who are constantly willing to share their experience. What I believe enriches the program the most, however, is the constant invitation to AmeriCorps members to enhance the program as they see fit. This is one of my experiences doing just that.

Let me start by saying that I am a 23 year old gay man. I have never felt unwelcome or unwanted at Generations Incorporated, and I have never felt anything but encouragement regarding my ability to express myself openly.

It wasn’t until the end of my VISTA year when I was cleaning out my desk, and found some evaluations of a training on LGBT diversity that had been presented to AmeriCorps members a few years ago, that the thought of such a training even crossed my mind. The evaluations of this training were to my surprise almost universally negative. I did some research and contacted a member of the corps from that year who confirmed that the training had been unsuccessful. You can’t blame anyone really. Sometimes trainings work, and sometimes they don’t. As VISTA in charge of volunteer training last year, few are more familiar with this phenomenon than I. Nevertheless, I took the opportunity to collect some constructive feedback while I had this former corps member on the phone.

Fast forward to about 3 months ago, in the middle of my second year of service as an AmeriCorps Lead. I decided I would take another crack at LGBT diversity, but this time with an important twist.

In my VISTA position last year I learned a thing or two about presenting information to groups of people. One thing that I picked up on was that especially where diversity is concerned, you need to give your audience a stake in what you’re presenting. I know it’s wrong to assume, but I feel safe in assuming that those who sign onto a year of AmeriCorps with Generations Incorporated expect to be exposed to youth issues and older adult issues. LGBT diversity doesn’t have to be dealt with separately from those things. This progression of logic led me to the following Google search: LGBT aging Boston.

This search brought me to the website of the LGBT Aging Project. A non-profit organization in Boston that provides resources and hosts social gatherings for LGBT identified older adults. I called the volunteer contact there, who informed me that they would be excited to host our corps at one of their weekly lunches in February. I emailed the corps to gauge feasibility and was met with such an outpouring of interest that I actually had to start a waitlist, because they could only host 10 of us.

We just got back from the lunch, and not to seem overly gay, but it went fabulously. Before the guests arrived the assistant director of the Project gave us a short orientation to the issues that face older adults today. Namely their sense of alienation from the movement that our generation has chosen, their inability to function socially among their straight-identified peers because of their generation’s widespread lack of acceptance, and also the differing issues faced by men and by women within the community, and how to serve one group without alienating the other. It was great to hear about these issues from someone with such firsthand knowledge.

After we had helped set up and the guests had arrived, we sat with them and chatted them up. One of the guests at my table was English, and one of the AmeriCorps members at my table had lived in England for a time, so they had a wonderful conversation. It was great to hear about their various experiences and their differing areas of expertise. We were even able to jot down some names of prospective volunteers.

All in all it was a great start to my mission. Today’s event started a meaningful and productive conversation among our corps, now the challenge will be to continue this conversation, keeping it productive while constantly giving it new meaning.

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Garen Nigon is an AmeriCorps State Lead at Generations Incorporated. You can e-mail him at GNigon@GenerationsInc.org.