4 2 ▼ ju n e 6 , 1 9 9 7 ▼ j u s t o u t
V IE W F R O M H E R E
Volunteering for our youth
Providing support and economic safety nets for young people can be done creatively—and it needs to be done
v
by
Patricia Nell Warren
resident Clinton thinks that more o f us
nies are selective about whom they pick. In short—
should volunteer to do good things.
for the non-straight student, the transition from
high school to college is far rockier than it used to
More time, energy, money and TLC is
needed, he says. I agree. It’s a nonpar
be. The economic load can be just as crushing as
tisan message that should galvanize
those bigoted attitudes in high school.
everyone in the country, no m atter what their
The arithmetic is simple and brutal. A gay/
politics. Hillary Clinton will probably add that it
lesbian/bi/trans senior out in high school + family
takes a village to volunteer.
hostility + rising tuitions = no support for college
from Mom and Dad. Or try it another way: A high-
In the gay village, this message should give a
school student out + leaving home because o f
little lift to people who are feeling burned out.
family hostility + living independently + jobs
Volunteers are the people who make things hap
hard to get = a hair-raising economic challenge. Is
pen. Yet activist dem ands on our time and money
it any wonder that some kids turn to the street or
are spiraling, as legislative attacks on the com m u
nity increase. I could spend my whole day faxing
the sugar-daddy system to make ends meet?
letters to legislators in support or protest o f this or
Indeed, some suicides among sexual minority
that bill. Nonprofit AIDS organizations tell me
youth can surely be traced to
that donations are down. Ellen or no Ellen, we
econom ic d esp eratio n . The
have a ways to go.
trend has already been reported
among heterosexual youth, as
In my opinion, one effective way to do the
most with volunteering is to do it for our young
in Boston recently, where a high-
school youth co alitio n d e
people. A fter all, they are our future. More specifi
cally, we can help provide legitimate economic
manded jobs and job training
safety nets for our needier kids, because some of
from the city government as a
them aren’t going to make it otherwise. I’m talk
remedy for the spike in suicides
ing about scholarships, for those bright students
among them. If straight kids are
who are going to be our future, our year 2001 in
seeing the c o n n ectio n this
law, politics, the media, medical research, social
clearly, it’s time for the gay
work, history, etc.
community as a whole to see it,
too.
As a com m issioner o f education in the Los
Angeles Unified School District, and as a speaker
We constantly hear hetero
who travels the country, I have seen the danger
sexual parents complain that a
signs among the kids that I know. W hile many gay
college education can cost well
adults are consumed with anxiety about partner
over $ 100,(XX) these days. Some states are thinking
benefits, while some adults are consumed with
of starting tax-free investment programs for the
anxiety about whether kids are having safer sex,
benefit o f straight parents. Time for us homosexuals
the fact is, our young people are consum ed with
to start thinking along these lines. It is very much in
anxiety about just getting through school and into
our interests, even for those of us who have no
the job market.
children, to start thinking like parents of our next
More and more, I am seeing the bright lesbian,
generation. If the government won’t help us, forget
gay, bisexual and transgender students from low-
the government. We can bootstrap it ourselves, just
income families, or families who have thrown
as people did in the Chinese American community
them out, who are going into debt for large amounts
for a long time, when they knew they couldn’t count
o f financial aid. O ne East L.A. girl I know is
on the “outside world” for startup capital.
entering her junior year o f college (m ajor in
Why don’t our kids just apply for scholar
political science) $20,(XX) in debt.
ships? Terrific idea. But it’s debatable how many
Working your way through school is a good
o f those thousands o f mainstream scholarships
American tradition. Many of us older folks did it.
might be given to openly gay students. Sexual
But today the game is different— more dangerous,
minority scholarships do exist, but information
more stressful. Many more kids come out in high
about them is not widely available, and there
school. How many jobs are available toopenly gay
aren’t enough o f them. In Los Angeles, where
kids? I’ve already seen the students who dye their
perhaps 65,000 o f our 650,000 students are gay,
hair back to normal, get rid of their lip bead, cover
lesbian, bisexual or transgendered, we have half a
their tattoo, and act super straight so they can pass
dozen local scholarships, and I am working to
at M cDonald’s or a computer-training program.
fund raise for one more. Several— out of even
Today’s job training isn’t always free, and com pa
10,000— is a small drop in a very big bucket. We
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could probably burn up the national total o f sexual
minority scholarships in Los Angeles alone.
Scholarships can be rainbowed in variety. For
people who have died of AIDS, there could be
more memorial scholarships like the Peter Kaufman
Memorial Scholarship, given by the Kaufmans,
two parents who are commissioner colleagues of
mine. There could be more diversity-minded big
companies like AT&T, whose gay, lesbian, bi
sexual and transgender employees persuaded their
management to give scholarships to openly gay
kids. Or PG&E in California, who partners with
the Bay Area Network o f Gay and Lesbian Educa
tors on scholarships. More local organizations like
the Atlanta FrontRunners andtheM innesotaG LBT
Education Fund, whooffertheir
own scholarships to local stu
dents. More national organiza
tions like Parents, Families and
Friends o f Lesbians and Gays,
Gay and Lesbian Parents Coa-
^ lition International and Chil-
V dren of Lesbians and Gays Ev-
0 erywhere, and more business
organizations like the Greater
Seattle Business Association,
who all sponsor scholarships.
More foundations like Uncom
mon Cause, who gives scholar-
ships to lesb ian s, because
women are more often in an
economic shadow.
Fund-raising possibilities abound, to tweak
the imaginations o f our most financially creative
citizens. The Gay and Lesbian Issues Committee
o f the United Teachers o f Los Angeles did “ Bowl
ing for Dollars” for their Stonewall Scholarship.
The Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Education C om
mission got money the hard way— selling candy,
holding bake sales and yard sales. Students them
selves are banding together to create scholar
ships— for example, the Liberty Foundation group
at Middle Tennessee State University. At O cci
dental College, the Lam bda Emergency Scholar
ship Fund, given by the Bisexual Gay and Lesbian
Alliance, is a model o f student-based financial
aid. In Oregon, the outdoor variety show Peacock
in the Park raises thousands o f dollars each year to
benefit the Audria M. Edwards Youth Scholar
ship Fund.
At the graduate level, the National Scholar
ship Fund for Gay and Lesbian Students needs to
be vastly supported if it is going to sweep all our
needy students through a masters in any subject.
On the side, we also need more community
businesses and more national organizations like
Gay, Lesbian, Straight Teachers Network, who
will volunteer job training, low-interest loans and
paid internships to sexual minority students. Many
kids badly need volunteers who will show them
the ropes about job interviews, resumes, personal
appearance, etc.
Some scholarship prospects also need doctors
and clinics to volunteer free medical help— and I
don’t even include treatment for sexually trans
mitted diseases here. AIDS is far from being the
only health problem that these kids face. I’ve seen
an astonishing amount o f stress-related problems
among the kids I know— from thyroid problems to
ulcers. There’s Celia, an 18-year-old who landed
a scholarship in spite of her ulcers, but has a ton of
medical bills to pay on top of her financial aid.
There’s Alberto, a straight-A high-school senior,
who may be developing diabetes and has no access
to his family’s medical insurance. I’ve seen kids
whose teeth are falling out because they’ve been
out since age 14 and their families refused to foot
their dentist bills. What are these students to do?
Succeed in reaching college, only to falter there
because o f mounting health problems?
Last but not least, we need professional, re
sponsible tutoring for kids driven out of their home
high schools by bias— students who are struggling
to pass their GED test and get college-bound.
To a kid who has nothing, even $500 is a lot of
money. $500 buys books. It buys some applica
tion fees for college. The kids we help today will
be our achievers o f the millennium. The ones we
d on’t help— even the bright ones— may end up
am ong the homeless or chronically jobless of
2001. O r they may provide still more heart-wrench-
ing suicide statistics.
As Hillary Clinton says, it takes a village to
raise a child. But it also takes a village— ours— to
put that kid through school, and launch him or her
into economic independence and a proud self-
fulfilling career.
Note: Infoseek and other search engines are a
good start on locating LGBT scholarship
information on the Internet. Search under "Gay
and Lesbian Scholarships" and “Financial
Aid. ” One good Web site is Web Resources fo r
Lesbigay Teens at http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/
~chapman/index.html. For a more general
search, try Fast Web, which offers personalized
scholarship search on the Net. A good printed
source is The Com plete Scholarship Book,
published by Student Services Inc., available
through most bookstores.
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