Twenty10 charges on with a new leader
A year ago, Rebecca Reynolds was working on HIV campaigns in southeast Asia, vowing only to return to Australia if her dream job came up.
Now, she’s back in Sydney, running Twenty10 and filled with excitement about what the future holds for Australia’s gay and lesbian youth.
My partner Tracy and I were kind of missing home but didn’t want to come back unless the perfect job came up and then a friend told me about the position at Twenty10, Reynolds, who once worked for Positive Life, told Sydney Star Observer.
I like the idea of being able to change our communities. Young people have these dreams about how they want the world to be and Twenty10’s the kind of organisation that has the scope to let you do that.
It has been six weeks since Reynolds took on the role of executive officer at Twenty10 but she is already keen to charge on with the organisation’s plans to further branch out into regional areas and take on a stronger lobbying role.
A lot of the calls we get are from rural areas. We’d like further our training package, Ready or Not, which works with service providers on working with queer young people, so that it’s not just about leaving that as stand-alone training.
We want to go into a community and leave a structure by working with the council and local area health services and youth workers.
Within the GLBT community there is such fondness towards Twenty10 as an organisation, because everyone’s gone through that process of coming out or getting kicked out, but now we need to extend that out.
We have to empower people to take up discussions within their communities and need to make sure that it’s not just a discussion that happens around specific queer events and around Mardi Gras time.
We need to sit down and have conversations with people rather than preaching at them and we need to work more with the government who can make substantial changes to policy and recognition and rights and the issues people are facing.
info: For more on Twenty10’s work visit twenty10.org.au.
