Thus far, our trip to Denver has been inspiring, educational, and an overall bonding experience for our group as a whole.
I'd like to begin by giving a shout out to our fearless navigator of the open road, Anna. This lady drove our incredibly large vehicle for the entire journey, and couldn't even see out of the back window (see image 1.1). My hero.
We arrived at our church around 5:30/6:00pm on Saturday night, and spent our time arranging our sleeping bags and voicing fears about "the homeless people that may bang on the door and ask for money." After an extensive trip to King Soopers (the fraternal twin to our Dillons), we made a fancy frozen pizza dinner and went to sleepy town. Our free day, Sunday, was spent visiting the Denver Museum of Art, exploring the city, and becoming besties/gal pals. The townspeople were enthralled with a football game that none of us knew anything about, so we freely painted to town red and made a special trip to Pink Berry where all of our wildest dreams came true.
This morning, Monday, our group was feeling very excited and also a little bit anxiety-ridden about our first day with One Colorado. When we arrived, I think we were all equally relieved to meet our "leader," Shannon. She shared her background in non-profit work, and her personal connections to the issues that One Colorado advocates for. We spent the majority of our time in the office learning about what the organization as a whole is working towards achieving, and their reasons for pursuing the legalization of civil-unions in Colorado.
Fun Facts:
- One Colorado focuses on relationship recognition, health, safety in schools, and what they call "inclusivity," a sort of umbrella term for related LGBT issues.
- Most importantly, they're focussed on spreading more awareness and relationship recognition, in hopes of changes beliefs and stigmas surrounding the idea of union and marriage within our culture.
Personally, I felt that I had a pretty strong understanding of issues within the LGBT community before making the trip to Denver, but after today realized that there are endless angles and details to every situation, and the amount of information that was presented to us was fairly overwhelming. We completed several group exercises to try and organize all of these ideas about lifestyle and oppression surrounding multiple groups and demographics. We explored several different "isms" other than those directly applying to the LGBT community, including classism, racism, and sexism.
After all of the #learning, we found our way to a local coffeeshop, and later made spaghetti for dinner. Awe.
I think what I enjoyed most about our first day with the organization is getting the opportunity to discuss things that aren't normally adressed and discussed in everyday situations. I feel like everyone in our group stepped away feeling much more informed, and even inspired, about the things happening outside of our comfort zones, and are excited to learn even more about ways to educate ourselves and those around us.
Our group is the cutest. Bye.
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u r 2 coot
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