The GLOW OUT! Rainbow Resilience Youth Conference/Assisting youth with empowerment and support

The first Rainbow Resilience GLOW OUT! Youth Conference was held at GCC on Friday. The event offered informative workshops, a panel discussion, a keynote speaker and self-care sessions.

Workshops focused on suicide risk factors, mental health issues, promoting empathy, empowerment/knowing your rights, dealing with stigmas and barriers, and sharing experiences, challenges and triumphs.

Self-care sessions involved art, yoga, healthy eating, meditation and journaling.

“Showing the youth that we support them is important,” says Sara Vacin, Executive Director of GLOW OUT!

“Just one adult, someone at home, someone at school, someone at church, that one supportive, caring adult can really help that child build a sense of resilience and strength.”

Ashton Daley was the Keynote Speaker at the first GLOW OUT! Rainbow Resilience Youth Conference at GCC on Friday.

Daley is a Youth/Young Adult Recovery Program Director at Youth Voices Matter-NY and is also a Social Worker in the Albany area.

Members of GLOW OUT! heard Daley speak at an Office of Mental Health Suicide Prevention Conference in Albany a few months ago, where he sat on a panel.

“I shared my experiences as a queer identifying trans person who lived through some suicide attempts and mental health and found mental health recovery and liked it.”

This is Daley’s first time being a Keynote speaker. He says he prepared multiple written versions for his presentation on Friday, but during his presentation he forgot it and just looked out at the audience and shared his experience, strengths and hope, trying to get the message out to young people in the audience who were asking, how do you do it?

“How do you grow up when it’s seems sometimes impossible to. How do you exist? How do you advocate? How do you bare it all, and the answer is with grace with perseverance and utilizing the supports in your community,” says Daley.

Daley says that when it comes to being a person in the LGBQ community, it’s important to be able to utilize social supports, and be able to ask for help whenever needed,

“Making sure we’re connected with our families, our teachers and communities, and making sure that we are staying well as individuals and as a community so we can all grow together, and we can all be happy, healthy youth and adults.”

Daley says he found his way by reaching into his community and being honest about his feelings and his experiences.

“This is the message I shared,” says Daley.

“I felt less alone in that I was able to feel like I wasn’t so terminally unique that I could ask for help and that people that have the same difficulties, we can all grow together, kind of compare and contrast the things that we do in order to find our wellness.”

Daley says there is difficulty between the human experience as an individual and living within the context of society.

“Me, myself in my experience, my mental health has a baseline, I have always been a bit dodgy because of my brain chemistry, a bunch of things that I just quite don’t understand, layered on top of me queer identifying sexuality and my trans identity and how society treated me because of that and the limitation it imposed and the difficulty when it came to healthcare. Just existing as a being in the world, it felt like I was starting a little further back from the start point and have to fight a lot harder, there were a lot of barriers.”

The conference was sponsored by the NYS Office of Mental Health/Mental Illness Anti-Stigma Fund.