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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

community events

Community forum to address homelessness in LGBTQ community

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When assessing issues the LGBT community faces within Bloomington, members of Prism Youth kept discussing homelessness.

Prism Youth community is an inclusive social group for youth. The group celebrates all sexual orientations, gender identities and gender expressions. Any person between 12 and 20 years old is welcome to join.

Prism Youth will facilitate a panel focusing on homelessness and the LGBT community as a way to help bring light to the issue and work as a community to help fix it. The event will be from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Bloomington.

This event is free and open to the community and has no religious affiliation.

“Through the members’ research, we discovered that 40 percent of homeless youth identify at LGBTQ people,” said Sam Harrell, adult leader in Prism Youth.

Harrell, along with four other community members, will sit on the panel to discuss the aspects of discrimination the LGBT community faces that leads to 
homelessness.

The community heads of the event that completely designed and organized everything are youth members, Harrell said.

The event will start with a brief introduction from Prism Youth discussing their club, which will be followed by an information session headed by Evelyn Smith, prevention programs coordinator at Middle Way House. Following the session, the panel will commence.

The panel will be made up of Harrell, Smith and three people that have either experienced homeless in their past or are currently suffering from homelessness.

“We will be discussing accessibility within Bloomington for the LGBTQ community and what providers can do to help,” Harrell said. “You can have good policies, but if people aren’t feeling welcome, they will not feel comfortable going.”

The event will end with information regarding volunteering at the Interfaith Winter Shelter, a low-barrier homeless shelter in Bloomington. The first day of its seasonal opening is the day of the event.

Prism has served more than 250 youth since its inception in February 2014 through special events and weekly meetings. There are around 50 members that are currently active and come on a regular basis. There is a council of nine members that make decisions for the organization and determine the overall direction of Prism.

“We also have four leadership committees that serve different functions, so all in all, there are 15 youth on our youth leadership team,” said Laura Ingram, youth program director of Youth Prism. “One of the committees we have, our largest at 10 members, is the education and training committee. They are the ones that planned the community-wide event.”

Prism has weekly meetings and activities at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Bloomington and at Hopscotch Coffee. Additionally, the group volunteers at the Interfaith Winter shelter monthly and is very involved in giving back to the community, Harrell said.

This panel is one of the many community events the group helps facilitate each year. For every event, the group meets to discuss possible topics, solely decided by the youth members.

“The overall goal is to help make our shelter safer,” Harrell said.

Harrell originally started helping with Youth Prism as an intern as part of her social work graduate work. She said she continued at Prism after graduation to act as a resource for the youth members and to do whatever she could to support the ideas of the youth.

“We need to tell our community members what these people need to do to make them feel safe and protected,” Harrell said.

Youth Prism will be collecting both monetary and item donations which will be given to those experiencing homelessness in the 
community.

Item donations include things such as socks and travel-sized personal hygiene products.

The monetary donations will be donated to Stepping Stones, a local nonprofit transitional housing program for homeless youth and the item donations will be donated to the Interfaith Winter Shelter.

Ingram said one of the main concerns about LGBT individuals experiencing homeless is a lack of education and awareness about the issue.

“This is why our youth felt it important to hold a community wide event centered around this,” Ingram said. “They really wanted to bring awareness to this and educate our community about these concerns.”

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