Ashli Au
Ashli worked with Arts Research Internship Awards (ARIA) at McGill University with the support of Dr. Claudia Mitchell, a professor within the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill. Her research explored the tangible steps taken by individuals and groups that work with and for queer youth to foster community amidst COVID-19.
Community Engagement Initiative
Ashli sought to identify leading examples and innovative approaches to reaching 2SLGBTQ+ youth during the pandemic. She interviewed five queer youth group program leaders to identify key community building strategies. Read her Programming for Queer Youth report.
Report
The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent shift from in-person support networks to online community programming has changed the way that some queer youth access the 2SLGBTQ+ community and experience social belonging. In light of this, Ashli Au and Dr. Claudia Mitchell looked at how and why certain programming decisions were made, what led them to do so, and what learnings can be applied to the future. They interviewed individuals that work with queer youth-oriented organizations across Canada and conducted a literature review on existing research on the topic. In doing so, they explored what challenges community organizers anticipated that queer youth were experiencing and developed recommendations on how programming could be modified to address the needs and experiences of queer youth in COVID-19 and into the future.
Read Ashli’s blog: A 2022 Pride Reflection: The Complexity of Connectedness for LGBTQ+ Ukrainians
Bio
Ashli Au (she/her/elle) is a second-year law student at McGill University based in Montreal, Canada. She is an active member of the 2SLGBTQ+ community having worked with Capital Pride Ottawa, EGALE, and McGill’s Subcommittee on Queer People amongst other organizations.
Keywords
2SLGBTQIA+, youth, COVID-19, social isolation, belonging, accessibility, resilience, virtual, online, Canada, unscheduled, intersectional identities