Youth commission to focus on health issues, hold meetings across state

During Mitt Romney's gubernatorial administration, the now-disbanded Governor's Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth occupied a tenuous position, working to promote LGBT youth programming on behalf of a governor who was often openly hostile to the LGBT community. Listening to Jason Smith, chair of that commission's successor, outline next year's agenda for the Massachusetts Commission on Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Youth, it is clear that those days are over. The new commission, operating independently of political control from the governor's office, will spend the next year working to engage not only state agencies but also the state as a whole to address the needs of LGBT youth.

"That's a mandate and a goal that the old commission I don't think would ever have dreamed of doing, addressing the totality of the community and the Commonwealth," said Smith. "Because we really want to have a commission that builds a strong consensus about, what do GLBT youth need, how do we get there, what can the government do, and at the same time where can the community step up and fill certain needs and certain goals?"
Smith said that one major difference between the new state commission and the former Governor's Commission is that the new commission is out of the youth programming business. The Governor's Commission, created in 1992, was the original sponsor of the yearly Youth Pride festival. In response to major budget cuts during the administrations of Romney and his predecessor, Jane Swift, responsibility for funding Youth Pride was diverted to a privately funded non-profit called Friends of the Governor's Commission. Yet even after Youth Pride shifted to private funding, a youth committee selected by the Governor's Commission planned the event.

The new commission made a deliberate decision to end its role in youth programming and focus on policy development, severing all formal ties to the Friends. One of the commission's two vice-chairs, Grace Sterling Stowell, resigned from the board of the Friends when she was appointed to the new commission. Smith said it is up to the LGBT community, rather than the state commission, to provide the funding and support for programming like Youth Pride.

"It's not just the Friends of the Commission who have a responsibility to GLBT youth," said Smith. "The entire gay and lesbian community, the entire GLBT community, has a responsibility to GLBT youth, and I think that's one thing we're really going to be looking for, is seeing, is the entire GLBT community going to step forward now that we're in this time of opportunity - we have resources that are freed up post-marriage - and to step forward and really engage for GLBT youth?"

Bay Windows spoke with Smith and the commission's two vice-chairs, Stowell and Jacob Smith Yang, about the commission's plans for the coming year. The 40-member commission was sworn in last January, and over the past six months Smith said they have been building up an infrastructure to support their work. As part of that process, the commission is negotiating with the state for funding to hire an executive director to help manage the commission, which currently has one paid administrator. The commission has also worked to maintain state funding for LGBT youth programs during the current budget cycle and provided testimony to the legislature in favor of a bill to make health class a requirement in public schools and against a bill that would require students to bring parental permission slips to participate in any discussions of LGBT issues.

With some of the infrastructure-building work behind them, the commission is turning its focus for the coming year to gathering information about the state of LGBT youth in Massachusetts, paying particular attention to disparities in health and safety between LGBT youth and their straight peers; within the LGBT community, the commission will focus on the disparities between white youth and youth of color.

"One issue ... is looking at the LGBT issues in the context of disparities and specifically looking at youth of color and how they're disproportionately affected on various issues. If you look at issues of suicidality, that's one that always pops to mind in terms of youth of color tend to be more affected," said Yang.

Smith said the commission will be working to see what information it can gather drawing on existing state surveillance programs. Members of the commission attended a June 19 presentation at the Department of Public Health looking at data on LGBT youth pulled from the statewide Youth Risk Behavior Survey that looked at different health risks between LGBT and straight youth as well as the risks facing LGBT youth of color. The commission will also be investigating what information it can pull from data sources such as emergency room reports, school reports and other potential sources of demographic data on the risks facing LGBT youth.

And in a break from the work of the Governor's Commission, the new commission will be getting out of Boston to speak with young people and youth service providers around the state. While the Governor's Commission's meetings were regularly held in Boston at the Department of Public Health, the new commission is taking its meetings on the road. On July 16 the commission will meet in Hyannis, followed by an October meeting in Worcester, a December meeting in Brockton, and a meeting in March of 2008 in Springfield.

"We definitely want to invite people from the public to come and give input" during the meetings, Smith said. While LGBT youth from groups like gay/straight alliances (GSAs) will likely be hard to reach for the Hyannis meeting over the summer, Smith said once the school year starts up the commission hopes to combine the regional meetings with trips to meet with GSAs and other youth groups.

"Our hope is that in the meetings in Worcester and Brockton, those are during the school term, that we might be able to do site visits in particular to GSAs in those areas, meet with students more one on one," said Smith.

The goal of the commission's information-gathering process is to use what they learn to develop specific policy recommendations for any state agency that has an impact on the lives of LGBT youth. The current commission, like its predecessor, has formal ties to two executive departments, the Department of Public Health (DPH) and the Department of Education (DOE), both of which receive state funding for LGBT-related programming and services. The new commission also plans to reach out to other agencies that deal with youth, including the Department of Social Services, the Department of Youth Services and the Department of Corrections, to help them meet the needs of the LGBT youth that they serve.

"Our hope and our end result is to really set out a plan and build a consensus in the Commonwealth of everyone who works with GLBT youth of something that's measurable, that the state can act on and that the community can act on to improve the health of LGBT youth," said Smith. "It is to produce a plan, but I think this first year we do need more information."

Beyond gathering information, the commission also has other priorities. One is recruiting more youth, women and people of color to join the commission. Under the legislation that created the commission, most of the members of the 40-person body must be sponsored by one of 12 different LGBT or youth service organizations, and Smith said the "relatively Byzantine system" has been a barrier to expanding its membership in those areas, particularly in recruiting youth. Yang is heading up a membership subcommittee to look at ways to expand the diversity of the commission's membership.

Stowell said the Governor's Commission primarily got youth involved through its youth committee, which planned Youth Pride, but she said at most there were only one or two young people.

"I'd like to see more young people on the commission because the old Governor's Commission maybe had a couple, but the youth committee was meant address that, and not that there isn't a role for a youth committee, but they weren't voting members of the commission, and I think it's important to have youth who are actually on the commission," said Stowell.