PrismND will be hosting a Facebook livestream event Tuesday at 8 p.m. to address questions from the Notre Dame community related to allyship and LGBTQ issues.
In an attempt to further their reach and better understand the issues that community members are facing, the organization decided to host a Q&A session. They created an online forum, which closed Monday night, for questions to be submitted through, which they hope to find topics that are most indicative of the community as a whole from, senior Baylea Williams, PrismND’s president, said.
“We knew there were a lot of questions in the community, so we wanted to get the information out there because a lot of people just don’t know where to go,” Williams said.
Williams said the organization hopes to promote participation and an understanding of allyship using social media as a first step. After the forum closes, the officers and members of the organization will sift through the questions and, if time permits, answer all of them throughout the livestream, Williams said.
“We really have no expectation about the questions. It’s more so trying to answer what questions people have — whether it’s specifically about their personal life or about the community at large or about their faith life,” Williams said.
In addition to creating a safe space for questions about LGBTQ and allyship issues to be answered, the group also hopes to open the doors and help students on Notre Dame’s campus to get more involved in allyship. Junior Justine Wang, moderator and coordinator of the Facebook livestream and the organization’s diversity and allyship committee chair, said the submitted questions are necessary in order to understand the atmosphere of campus.
“Advocacy is only effective when we seek to understand the setting we are operating within, and every college campus responds differently,” Wang said.
Though the main goal of the livestream may be to help students in the LGBTQ and ally community find answers to their questions in a safe atmosphere, the organization also hopes to have an influence on the rest of Notre Dame’s campus by developing a deeper understanding for the problems faced by members of the LGBTQ community.
“Every human has a right to their sexuality,” Wang said. “Allyship is about acceptance more than anything, so by uniting the allies on campus, PrismND will be able to have a powerful presence.”
