BSM students participated in the second Annual Youth Summit, sponsored by OutFront Minnesota that took place at Good Samaritan Church in Edina on May 7.

Created last year by current junior Elizabeth Kupchella and recent BSM graduate Parker Breza, the Youth Summit is a coalition with the Sisters of St. Joseph that helps educate people about LGBTQ youth, while also integrating Catholic values.

The event is not sponsored by BSM, but many BSM students attended the event. Juniors Molly Keady, Leo Driessen, and Macy Rooney, helped lead the event this year. “All of us are really passionate about the LGBTQ community and not only being advocates, but also educating people about it, and the second annual Youth Summit was a great way to do this. The leadership team and I taught people on certain topics, and the Sisters of St. Joseph’s taught other topics, kind of like classes,” Keady said.

While educating and advocating for the LGBTQ community, the event also integrated Catholic values. “We start the day off with mass to keep the Catholic theme. After that, we broke off into small groups, also known as the workshops,” Keady said.

To create these workshops, the leaders let everyone who attended write down what they wanted to talk about, so the workshops could be catered toward topics they were passionate about. “We gave everyone post-it notes and asked everyone to write down questions they wanted answered. We then used their questions to form the workshops,” Driessen said.

After the workshops, they reconvened and had a big group discussion. This time was used as a chance for the people at the event to ask any questions they may have had. “The group discussion was a chance to talk about things we said throughout the day and we even had a panel of experts on these topics come in and help answer any questions,” Keady said.

Because the event is sponsored by OutFront Minnesota, many different demographics from around the Twin Cities came to the Youth Summit. “A lot of high school kids went, along with parents and teachers. OutFront Minnesota sponsored it, so they got a lot of people to go. It was super cool that so many different communities attended” Keady said.