Yesterday, I attended Our True Colors - a LGBT youth conference for the state of Connecticut. Overall, I enjoyed the conference, but there were a few things that didn’t work out quite as expected. For one thing, my black North Face jacket went missing part way though the day. I’m a little irritated by that, but well what can I do about it now?
I left Stamford at about 6:30 am, stopped at work to pick up my camera, the drove up to University of Connecticut (UConn) where the conference was being held. After checking in, I went to part of the opening keynote before heading out to prepare for my first workshop of the day.
My first workshop was entitled “Exploiting Technology to Further Your Mission.” In retrospect, that was probably a bit abstract for the age of the people attending. (Most high school, with a few college students, and middle schoolers thrown in) Partly as a result of that, and partly due to the day’s low attendance (see below), I only had one person attend. Worse, he was not involved in any form of LGBT organizing or activism; he’d been drug along by a friend. We ended up talking about the uses of technology in Physics since that was his major. Overall, it was a complete bust.
My second workshop (title “Practical Lessons in Managing Your Volunteer Base”) was more of a success. While I only had one person show up again, this time the attendee was there because they were actually interested and needed advice. I ran through my slides, but since it was just the two of us it really became a one-on-one counseling session. That type of one-on-one interaction is what I enjoy the most about teaching, so for me the workshop was more than worthwhile.
As I mentioned before, Saturday attendance was way down. Apparently, most of the high school students come up on Friday when they can come on school field trips. Also, the weather was bad (rain + some snow) so a lot of people stayed home.
After my workshops were over, I went to a workshop on over the counter drug use by LGBT youth. It was absolutely fascinating. This was a topic I knew next to nothing about, so I learned a lot from the workshop. I’ll probably be putting up a separate post about that workshop.
After the last workshop, I volunteered to help with the cleanup. I worked with one other volunteer to take boxes from the conference and load them onto the truck to go back to the True Colors office. Once we got mostly through that, we broke for a few minutes to eat a quick dinner. (It was during dinner that my jacket walked off.) After dinner & hunting for my jacket a bit, I got recruited to follow the truck back to Manchester and bring the driver (Brian - the volunteer I’d worked with earlier) back to the conference. All told, that trip took about an hour.
After getting back, I spent a little more time hunting for my jacket and then checked out with the volunteer table to head home. (It was about 9:30 pm by then.) On the way out, I stopped to talk with a guy nicknamed “Dragon”. Turned out we had a lot in common - including our shared difficulties in social situations - so I was able to give him some hopefully useful advice. We ended up talking for about 30 minutes before I took off to head home. I got home around midnight, talked to Matt and some friends from work who were over, then crashed.
