A Panel Discussion on Working with Queer Youth and their Families
When: Wednesday, June 25 - 12:00 PM
Duration: 1 hours 30 minutes
Location: Zoom
Event Details:
Queer-identifying youth and their families face unique challenges in navigating their identities, supports, and care. These often include experiencing discrimination, bullying, and other harmful experiences that negatively impact their mental and physical health. However, they also experience thriving and positive outcomes, particularly when supported by affirming environments and communities.
Please join us for an important event with three queer leaders in the Hudson Valley, New York, who will educate us and share best practices for working with queer youth and their families. Our presenters work across various community settings and will draw from their expertise and lessons learned.
We will hear from each of our leaders about who they are, their lived experience, and their work. We will then have a panel to discuss best practices for working with queer youth and their families as we dive deep into a case study. We will then take questions from participants regarding how to effectively work with and support queer identifying youth and their families.
Our goal is to help you, as providers, to offer the best care possible to queer youth and their families throughout New York State and to help create affirming environments and communities for all.
About the Presenters:
Taleese Morrill (she/they) is a seasoned youth worker, facilitator, and program leader with over 15 years of experience in her field. She holds a Master of Social Work from Western Carolina University, where their studies focused on sexual health, positive youth development, community engagement, and nonprofit leadership.
Taleese is deeply passionate about supporting others' growth through joy and laughter while examining systems and patterns. Her work is grounded in the belief that all justice work must begin with joy, and that young people deserve spaces rooted in dignity, pleasure, and possibility.
She currently oversees a new youth-centered mental health and community connection program in Newburgh, NY.
Taleese is white, cisgender, gender expansive, neurodivergent, and middle class. Raised in poverty and familial instability, these lived experiences of trauma and systemic disconnection, alongside moving into upper middle class in adulthood, shape Taleese’s work and ability to meet people where they are—especially other white folks on their journey of unlearning.
Taleese is most alive when supporting youth in their becoming, or when helping adults grow their capacity to do the same. They also love sleeping in hammocks, in the woods, next to babbling creeks.
kk naimool is an internationally recognized and sought-after equity consultant, passionate about equity and accessibility. kk develops tools and training for groups and organizations looking to apply best practices in diversity and inclusion, cultural humility, and systemic justice. kk has trained thousands of Health and Human Services professionals on LGBTQ+ Health Equity and assisted organizations and programs to review processes to prioritize impact over intention.
In a multiyear project along with a team of LGBTQ+ researchers, activists and scholars kk helped develop an LGBTQ Cultural Competency Training Toolkit -the first ever nationally recognised standards for LGBTQ+ Cultural Competency Training.
As a community organizer, kk has served as a City of Beacon Human Rights Commissioner, served on the Board of the Newburgh LGBTQIA centre, and recently appointed to serve on New York State’s Mid-Hudson Regional Hate and Bias Prevention Council.
Charlie Solidum (he/him), MPH, is an activist, educator, and Hudson Valley native who has been an out and active member of the transmasculine community since 2006. Charlie began his career in direct services as a peer outreach worker handing out condoms on the Christopher Street Pier. As a trans man of Filipino descent, he has devoted his life’s work to dismantling structural barriers to services for marginalized communities, particularly communities of color. As a model, advocate, and literal poster boy, in 2016 Charlie was featured in the internationally-recognized #BeYouNYC transgender bathroom access campaign for NYC's Commission on Human Rights.
Before joining the staff at the Hudson Valley LGBTQ+ Community Center, Charlie served as the Program Manager of HIV/STI Services at the LGBT Network in Queens. Charlie earned his Master of Public Health degree from SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University in 2024.
In his spare time, he can be found smelling flowers, cooking elaborate meals and playing earnest covers on his guitar.