GUTF Youth Advisory Board Meeting Mins Q2, 2026

Written by Julia E., Youth Advisory Board Chair

Meeting Summary
To begin our Youth Advisory Board meeting, we discussed some of Give Us the Floor’s recent achievements and events. These include attending LGBTQ+ Advocacy Day to push for pro-LGBTQ+ legislation at the California state capitol, a gender-affirming clothing swap in Rochester, NY, attending a Youth Empowerment Summit in New Mexico, and receiving a grant for an upcoming research project for App 3.0. There are also plans for more gender-affirming clothing swaps elsewhere in the U.S., pending funding.

We then discussed whether we would like to add Youth Advisory Board notes to a public-facing blog (this blog!). The board unanimously voted yes to this, and preferred that we post summaries of our meetings so they can be publicly viewed.

Next, we talked about potentially creating sub-committees within the Youth Advisory Board to tackle some projects. Example sub-committees are an outreach committee focusing on building external connections, a video content team, an in-app engagement team, and a few others. Instead of sub-committees, it was suggested that YAB members focus on tackling different projects, with each member contributing to help complete them. The first project YAB decided to take on is creating a series of video confessionals edited together to advertise GUTF and amplify youth voices within GUTF. The YAB members split between members who would focus on production and coming up with ideas for the videos and the members who would want to participate in the videos and give their video testimonial. There are plans to work on this project between this meeting and our next meeting.

Then, we talked about recruiting more YAB members and the method we wanted to use to recruit. The goal was to formalize the process of accepting new members to board. The YAB board decided to both create a new page on the GUTF website specifically for the Youth Advisory Board and add to it an application form that facilitators and community members can fill out to apply to join the board. Those applications will then be reviewed by YAB periodically. This form is currently being worked on.

Finally, we talked about where the board thinks GUTF should be focusing its time. Ideas include: focusing on finances, receiving more community feedback, getting the GUTF news channel up and running so announcements about what GUTF can easily be found, and potentially adding art/poetry of community members to the blog.