See you in Knoxville

I'm traveling to the National Order of the Arrow Conference next week. Will I see you there?

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville (Photo by Bubbahotepblues via Wikimedia Commons)

The National Order of the Arrow Conference is, for many of us, a long time coming.

I still remember, vividly, when I got a call in late 2019 with an offer to be part of the inaugural ArrowPride staff at the 2020 conference. I was ecstatic to see what the first-ever sanctioned LGBTQ+ space at a national Scouting event would look like — and even more excited to be a part of making it happen.

But you all know how this story ends. By the spring, all of our plans were dashed. The conference was cancelled due to the pandemic, with no clear date for its postponement. Now here we are, a full two years later, preparing again to bring this vision to life.

The pandemic, of course, is still with us. With a new, highly-transmissible variant of the virus emerging, I have my fingers crossed that the conference won’t become a super-spreader event. But I will, nonetheless, be traveling to Knoxville tomorrow, to the University of Tennessee campus where I’ll meet up with 7,000 of my closest friends.

My role on the ArrowPride team next week is all about storytelling. Leading up to the conference, I created a series of Pride Profiles, some of which I’ve shared in this newsletter. Those profiles will be displayed as posters inside the ArrowPride space, available for anyone to peruse and read throughout the event.

While I’m on campus, I’ll be conducting the ArrowPride Living History Project. Every afternoon, I’ll have a studio open to any delegate or guest who wants to come tell me their story. Our goal is to capture some of the history of the LGBTQ+ and allied community in Scouting. If you’re going to be at the conference, I strongly encourage you to stop by. It can be as quick as having your photo taken, and as long as a 30-minute interview. You can sign up for a time slot in the studio here!

What else can you expect from the conference? Well, in addition to ArrowPride, there will be three other affinity spaces on campus: Scouts of Color, Scouts with Disabilities and Women in Scouting. And then, of course, your traditional NOAC fare: Training sessions, outdoor activities and path-trading galore.

I hope to see some of you there! Please stop by ArrowPride or the Living History studio, or shoot me a message if you’d like to meet up separately. For those who aren’t attending, I’ll be using this newsletter over the next couple of weeks to send out dispatches and recaps from the conference.

Safe travels!