Board Member Craig Thomas reviews the new Center for Inclusion website. Photo courtesy of Samantha Ruggles.

Meetings facilitated by the KC Center for Inclusion have led to authentic conversations and problem-solving. Now KCCI’s board president has some requests.

On a rainy Tuesday evening in August, more than 60 people gathered at the Linwood YMCA for the Kansas City LGBTQIA Leaders Forum. These quarterly forums were started as a way to bring together community leaders and members to network, share ideas, and grow together.

The Kansas City Center for Inclusion (KCCI) has been facilitating these meetings since October 2017. KCCI’s original intention was to continue a tradition of community-focused meetings that groups like PROMO and individuals like Mitch Levine, a board member for the former Lesbian & Gay Community Center of Greater Kansas City; Felicia Kyle, and others helped facilitate in the past.

To date, KCCI has facilitated four meetings. What has been neat for me is to see the organic evolution of these meetings from a roundtable discussion (in October) to a town hall setting.

KCCI hosted the first forum’s roundtable discussion at the Kauffman Foundation Conference Center. All attendees had a set time to talk about their respective groups. Samantha Ruggles, KCCI’s interim executive director, moderated the group. From this meeting, we learned about several organizations I had never heard of, including KC Wave (the LGBTQ+ swim team) and the Women’s Chorale. It was also at this meeting that it became clear that these sessions needed more structure.

The January 2018 meeting was much larger, and it was set up to feel more like a town hall. For the first time, this meeting broke up into affinity or networking groups based on social or group focus. We learned about the Heart of America softball team hosting the Gay Softball World Series in the Kansas City area in 2019. We started seeing community members attending to find out more about the different groups and activities.

Similarly, the April 2018 meeting was well-attended. Community organizer Alex Martinez moderated, and groups like Pride KC and OutSkrts gave presentations about their upcoming events. We also spent time talking about self-harm, as this meeting followed several local and national high-profile suicides.

This most recent meeting in August was hosted at the Linwood YMCA. This space cost a bit, but we felt the community investment for these meetings was well worth it. Hosting it there helped bring this community forum to other parts of our community that might not be able to go to the Kauffman area. Mary-Christine Sandner of the Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) LGBTQ Core moderated this meeting. Among the various groups and topics were:

• Melissa Brown, newly appointed executive director for the Kansas City Anti-Violence Project (KCAVP) spoke about her organization and introduced

her team. KCAVP is a wonderful community resource, and their dedication to keep Passages – one of the oldest LGBTQ+ youth-oriented programs in the United States – going is awe-inspiring.

• The City of Fountain Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, including the founding mother Sister Glamarama Ding Dong and Sister Hunny Bunches of Oaths, spoke about their history and what they do in the community. They have done so much for KCCI and the community, including providing food for the August meeting.

Attendees at the LGBTQIA Leaders Forum. Photo: Samantha Ruggles

A good portion of that meeting was dedicated to a panel on bi-erasure. One of the KCCI board members, Athena Horton, created a recurring Monday night activity at the center called Lesbian Movie Night. While seemingly innocuous, events or meetings like this inadvertently dis-include queer or bisexual women – women who love other women. This is not the environment that KCCI is about. We want to continue to create environments where everyone feels welcome.

It wasn’t until several community leaders brought the issue up to us that we were able to recognize our mistake. When Athena Horton saw the dialogue about this issue, she reached out to the parties involved to meet in person. She then worked with community leaders Diane Burkholder and Lucky Garcia to organize a panel about bi-erasure. Diane and Lucky, together with two others, used this forum panel to discuss the systematic isolation that has occurred over the years for the queer and bisexual community.

These are discussions that need to happen. For us to grow as individuals and as a community, we need to continue to have similar discussions where we can be open, authentic, and vulnerable with each other. We need to be aware of our privilege. And we need to be open to learning to change. Whether this is removing an ableist word from a Facebook post or renaming “Lesbian Movie Night” to “Woman-Loving Women Movie Night” (as we did), it is this authenticity that will bring us closer together as a community.

In my almost two years as KCCI board president, I have made a lot of mistakes (and I will continue to do so). KCCI has made mistakes. But I have and we have always tried to be authentic with the community. We want to own the mistakes we have made. I have been thrilled to work with some incredible volunteers and staff at KCCI who share the passion for being authentic with others.

These LGBTQIA Leaders Forums should continue. Samantha and KCCI vice president Craig Thomas have worked to shape and shepherd these meetings to showcase not only the great work that our partner organizations are doing, but also the work that KCCI is doing. (Shameless plug: In case you didn’t know, we now have a resource page and are finalizing a community calendar.)

Here are my requests of community members:

• Continue to participate in these quarterly opportunities. Use them as a chance to be authentic and vulnerable with each other so that we all can improve.

• Continue to support each other. There are so many organizations with really great, passionate people doing some really cool work in the city. Only by being allies to each other can we grow as a community.

• Consider facilitating the next LGBTQIA Leaders Meeting. We (KCCI) have only been heading the charge because we want these to continue. These aren’t our meetings – they belong to the community. And we would very much love to hand over the baton.

Darin Challacombe is president of the board for the Kansas City Center for Inclusion.