The Jasper Pride Festival provides countless opportunities for celebration, but this year it’s also taking the time to provide some education.
For the first time, the society has invited Camp fYrefly to take part in the festival, leading workshops with local and regional youth in hopes of reducing discrimination in schools.
Camp fYrefly is Canada’s only national leadership retreat for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans-identified, two-spirited, intersexed, queer, questioning, and allied youth. It was founded in 2004 by two professors from the University of Alberta’s Institute for Sexual Minority Studies and has since expanded to include the fYrefly in Schools program, which sees youth leaders attend classes and host workshops where they tell their own stories, demystifying what it means to be a member of the LGBTQ community.
“It’s destigmatizing,” explained Jen Dodsworth, Jasper Pride’s youth and education director. “It’s making youth aware of the fact that there’s more to a person than the letters in an acronym.”
Dodsworth said, while organizing this year’s festival, the Pride society felt it was important to offer an educational opportunity for the community’s youth.
“A festival is great because it’s about celebrating—and celebrating is awesome because it increases visibility and, of course, it brings people to town and showcases Jasper as an open, welcoming community—but we had to ask, what do we do for our own kids?
“So this is about helping the kids in our own community to be happier, healthier and just be able to talk about these very important issues.”
On Friday, March 18 youth leaders from Camp fYrefly will visit Harry Collins High School in Hinton, offering four hour-long workshops with different classes before they make the journey to Jasper to meet with students from Jasper’s Gay-Straight Alliance on Saturday morning.
Dr. Kristopher Wells, one of the camp’s founders, described the fYrefly in Schools program as education through humanization.
He said there is power in the stories that LGBTQ youth have to share and through the sharing process, those youth show their peers that—although they may be different—they’re people, too, and there’s much more to them than their sexual orientation.
“It’s about making these conversations ordinary ones not extraordinary ones,” he said, noting that the goal is to equip LGBTQ students and their peers with the tools they need to be leaders and to call out discrimination when they see it.
“When we get into classrooms, we find that students want to have these conversations,” he said, noting that a lot has changed since he was in high school.
“The reality is kids are coming out at younger and younger ages and they refuse to be victims any longer. They’re advocating for their rights to be full members of their school communities.”
This is the first time that fYrefly in Schools is travelling beyond Edmonton, Calgary and Saskatchewan.
“We’re really excited to connect with Jasper Pride,” said Wells. “It’s going to be a little pilot project for us. It’s not something we’re able to do too often with limitations on funding and travelling with youth.”
To help with the cost of travelling to Jasper, the Jasper Pride Festival Society has organized a fundraiser in support of fYrefly in Schools for Saturday evening.
Beginning at 5 p.m. the Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge will play host to Alberta Night, a movie dinner theatre, including a three-course dinner and short films curated by Fairy Tales Queer Film Festival.
Also in attendance will be Alberta’s Minister of Culture and Tourism Ricardo Miranda.
Tickets are available through the Jasper Pride website, www.jasperpride.com.
Nicole Veerman
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