Gay Men's Health Leadership Academy - A taste of assets

The Gay Men's Health Leadership Academy converged on Easton Mountain in upstate New York this past weekend... Here is a post on ASSETS from their blog - the strategies section should be posted above your desk if you work with, or want to work with, gay men. Check out the rest of their blog for more fabu.

What does it mean to engage with gay men from an assets and strengths-based perspective?

As leaders in gay men’s health work, we could benefit from taking a critical look at the ways that we tend to focus entirely on the challenges and deficits in gay men’s culture, while largely ignoring the strengths and assets of gay men-- strengths that could be brought to bear on these challenges and deficits.

In our conversation today, we will discuss the following questions:

1. Do you love gay men in your work? Do you sometimes hate us?

2. What are the FACTS about gay men—how do we establish a fact?

3. How can we speak about us (and these facts) in a way that acknowledges our real challenges and deficits (GET REAL), while celebrating our many strengths and assets? How can we bring our assets and strengths to bear on challenges we face?

4. What conspires to keep some of us thinking about gay men’s deficits predominantly?

5. What strategies can gay leadership use to restore balance to the picture of gay men’s strengths and deficits.

What conspires to keep us thinking from a deficits-based foundation:

1. Media: we very seldom see positive media representations of our culture. Media stories (and the press releases that generate them) are often focused on the crisis-of-the-week among gay men.

2. Research/science: Research in gay communities tends to focus on deficits and problems, instead of strengths that could be utilized. There are counterexamples, for example research that has shown how family support leads to resilience in gay men.

3. Education system: Still largely structured to inculcate a negative view of gay youth. This is slowly changing.

4. Religious institutions

5. Government

6. Families

7. Ourselves

Strategies for doing assets based work

1. Provide a critique of programs/campaigns/efforts that are deficits-focused. Help the organizers of such efforts to see how they may have made gay men’s strengths invisible.

2. Seek balance between strengths/assets and deficits. This is not about making invisible our deficits—it’s about restoring some balance to a conversation that has been focused largely on gay men’s deficits. We want to hear about the strengths!

3. Confront Horizontal Hostility— this is the tendency for oppressed people to take out their hostility on others in the oppressed group, instead of on the oppressor. Other gay men (and our allies) are not the enemy.

4. Remind colleagues and friends about gay men’s strengths

5. Seek out strong gay men and ask them to share their strengths with you. Share your strengths with others. Model your assets. Celebrate each other.

6. Challenge institutions that insist upon speaking only of deficits. Teach them about gay men’s strengths.