O0620 Oct.5: 2:55pm - Building Community Capacity to support Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender Health through Grass Roots Organizing

Program Goals:
At the start of 2018, a group of queer-identified undergraduate, medical and graduate students, healthcare professionals, and community members from the Greater Capital Region and Michigan State University met to discuss LGBTQIA+ community health and wellness needs. From that initial meeting we established Queering Medicine, a grassroots coalition that follows the tradition of queers taking their health into their own hands by seeking sustainable healthcare system changes. Since 2018, Queering Medicine has grown from a group of five individuals to more than twenty and recently entered a collaboration with the local LGBT resource center. We see ourselves in privileged positions, within the institutions in which we have been trained, to improve healthcare for those most at-risk in our community.

As a decentralized project-based organization, we seek to meet collaborators where they are, allowing individual leaders to create knowledge in ways that take advantage of their strengths, resources and lived experiences. The goals of Queering Medicine include the following: strengthen relationships between the medical community and queer people, provide capacity building to enhance queer health, and translate health information into digestible communication.

Evaluation:
Queering Medicine (QM) aims to strengthen our position as a collective community health organization committed to expanding and empowering LGBTQIA+ health through program evaluation. Our evaluation will consists of questionnaires that evaluate the impact, effectiveness and accessibility of our flagship projects: Provider Meet and Greets, QM Knowledge Building, and QM Websit .

Discussion:
Queering Medicine proposes that university-based research and knowledge has a responsibility to be translated and disseminated to the community. Access to affirming and informed healthcare services is vital to a thriving and diverse queer community in the Lansing area. Since 2018, Queering Medicine has grown from a group of five individuals to more than twenty and recently entered a collaboration with a local non-profit, The Salus Center. We see ourselves in privileged positions, within the trans-, queer- and homo-phobic institutions in which we have been trained, to improve healthcare for those most at-risk in our community.

We work to affirm and support the health and wellness needs of LGBTQIA+ individuals and identities in the Lansing area. Queering Medicine recognizes the historically exploitative nature of relationships between institutions of higher education, medical schools, the LGBTQIA+ community, People of Color, and other minoritized communities (Brandt, 1987; Huang & Coker, 2010; Wilder, 2013). We seek to deprivilege university knowledge by elevating the experiences of LGBTQIA+ folk. Queering Medicine is mindful of the need to decenter white, male and other historically overvalued identities that, too often, become situated as the norm in healthcare education (Dovidio et al., 2008). In order to address queer health, the public health community needs to include grass roots leadership.