Welcome to the 2019 Creating Change Conference!

The National LGBTQ Task Force’s 2019 Creating Change Conference convenes in Detroit, Michigan January 23-27, 2019. We are excited to host our national movement gathering in the Capital. We invite you to join in this extraordinary conference experience and community in the spirit of love, curiosity, and respect for each other and our LGBTQ family. We offer a vision of how we can be together, inspired by other progressive convenings, as we co-create a learning community together at Creating Change. We look forward to you joining us!

The Creating Change Conference convenes and welcomes people of varying, diverse, and divergent political opinions and views and strategic focus. Our individual and collective capacity to hold multiple perspectives, even when we disagree, is a valuable movement-building tool. The Task Force invites you to join, with compassion and kindness, our conference community of activists, organizers, and advocates as we work to build the strongest possible LGBTQ and allied movement. We believe that we need each other to make progress.

Creating Change is a space to bring our whole selves while bringing curiosity about other’s experiences and perspectives, and to share our own ideas, questions and experiences in order to move the LGBTQ movement forward.

Creating Change is a space that allows for expressing political disagreements and differences while at the same time holding our respect for, and interdependence with, each other. We gather each year to grow and educate ourselves and each other and engage in dialogue that gives us room to celebrate our work together and to struggle and name the most difficult things. There will be moments that this will be hard to hear but our challenge is to stay open and to hear each other and to not shut down discussions or silence dissonant voices.

We choose to honor the dignity and humanity of all people by celebrating their right to be who they are, to be whole. We challenge ourselves to recognize and disrupt power dynamics that have perpetually harmed people, particularly Black and brown people, for generations. We invite all of us to challenge our assumptions about each other and our complex identities.

Creating Change brings together a diverse group of people that reaches far and wide into our communities. While being and embracing our full selves can be exhilarating, this can be overwhelming and challenging at times. We each have different and varied ways of taking care of ourselves. The Task Force and Creating Change staff have created spaces to support you emotionally, creatively, artistically and spiritually. Please visit the Art Studio Space and/or the Wellness Hub if you need a pause that refreshes. A Spiritual Care team will also be available in the Wellness Hub. The Wellness Hub is an intentional environment offered at Creating Change 2019. Attendees are welcomed to The Wellness Hub for support with self-directed practices that promote the cultivation of their wellness during the conference. The Wellness Hub Family of Staff and Volunteers understands that Social Justice settings can be full of distress, overwhelm and may be challenging to navigate.

We look forward to being with you in Detroit!