Lydia Luk, community developer for PeerNet BC.
Lydia Luk is finding a new way to teach inclusivity outside of the realm of queer-based centres.
On Nov. 22, at the swanky Sheraton Hotel in Surrey, the hotel lobby is drowning in rich perfume. Luk comes into the hotel with rolled up flip boards, stands and a grocery bag of smelly felts in her arms. She is dressed in jeans, a purple t-shirt and running shoes.
Luk, community developer for PeerNet BC, is there to speak at the Cities Fit for Children conference.
Luk is a former youth worker for GAB Youth, now called Qmunity, a centre based in Vancouver for queer youth. She now works at PeerNet BC, an organization also based in Vancouver, that works to educate people about community issues such as race, gender, age and inclusivity.
“Most of my work throughout my life has been around facilitation and community engagement stuff,” says Luk.
Luk helps to provides workshops for people who are interested in community development. The workshops involves how to work with youth, how to identify oppression and how to make spaces inclusive. Participants in Luk’s workshops often include people who work in community development on a municipal level.
“It’s always been positive,” says Luk. “Sometimes it’s challenging, because we’ll have folks that are challenged by our process because it’s a shift of power and procedure that they’re not used to.”
Her workshop includes an activity about engaging youth. Groups are tested on the most effective ways to involve youth, and discussion includes topics like tokenism. As the groups list off their answers, most get them right, except the table of municipal political types.
“Sometimes, they don’t see that the type of civic engagement that they are thinking of is still very capitalistic and bureaucratic,” Luk says. “I think it’s a new experience for a lot of folks.”
Luk has been extensively involved in her community. In 2005, she was a youth worker for Gab Youth Services, and then moved on to be the youth program coordinator when it became Qmunity, Vancouver’s queer community centre.
Luk first became involved in community development by attending anti-homophobia workshops through GAB. Luk says that by volunteering with GAB, she was later given the opportunity to work with The City of Vancouver. She was contracted for the Four Pillars Project, which allowed her work to be focussed less on prevention and more on working with queer youth in a positive way.
Luk spent years as a contract worker for different workshops in the city before she was able to get a position a Qmunity.
“I think a lot of times, for a lot of young people, you don’t really get hired on for a position, but you get all these opportunities for these one-shot workshops. I was kind of going around doing things for the city of Vancouver, and continuously doing anti-homophobia workshops for GAB Youth Services,” says Luk.
Although at the time, Luk’s passion was to work with queer youth, she says that working at Qmunity didn’t always give her the flexibility that she wanted in order to affect a spectrum of communities.
“I had changed,” she says. “I had grown up and I wanted to explore some of the other facets of my life, which I found hard to include in the work that I wanted to do at Qmunity. So, I wanted to do things that weren’t just queer youth based, and I found a lot of it was still very white and mainstream.”
During her time at Qmunity, Luk had tried to start programs with youth centred on accessibility, but found that she had little support from her co-workers.
“The work environment started to shift and change, and it was hard to be the only person of colour in the space, and to also be the youngest. I think that a combination of those things, the work environment wasn’t always supportive of who I was,” says Luk.
After leaving Qmunity, Luk found her position at PeerNet BC, where she found “a better fit.”
Luk finds that through her work at PeerNet she is able to work with and address the concerns of multiple communities, and not just the LGBT community. The work environment is more supportive, she says.
