About 130 state residents journeyed to the Illinois State House May 8 to lobby legislators for an easier name-change process, a grant-making program helping schools with sex education and other measures aimed at supporting the LGBTQ+ community.
Their visit was because of Equality Illinois’s Advocacy Day, an opportunity for Illinoisans to meet with elected officials to both rally support for the LGBTQ+ rights organization’s legislative priorities and share personal stories about how these issues affect them.
“Sharing your story is so important because it puts a face to the issues and helps others see why this legislation is important,” said Brian Johnson, CEO of Equality Illinois.
Mike Ziri, director of public policy for Equality Illinois, briefed attendees on the organization’s five legislative priorities this year before they were sent to the capitol to lobby officials.
Among Equality Illinois’s agenda items is Senate Bill 2930, which requires nonprofits that report grants of $1 million or more to other charitable organizations to disclose diversity information about their boards on their websites.
Ziri described SB 2930 as “an important bill to make sure these large, powerful foundations and nonprofits have boards that reflect the communities in which they serve and operate—and that qualified, talented individuals from diverse communities know that they can serve on these boards, and be counted and included as their full selves.”
Equality Illinois is also pushing two house bills aimed at making it easier for transgender people to update personal documents to better reflect their gender identities, Ziri said.
House Bill 5164 modernizes the state’s name-change process by allowing name-change records to be impounded and removing the requirement that people publish their name change in a newspaper.
The other measure, House Bill 5507, allows Illinois residents to request documentation from a state judge that they could use to update birth certificates held by another state or country.
Both bills have already passed the Illinois House of Representatives.
Karla Bailey-Smith, who helps run a safe housing space for transgender people in Bloomington, Illinois, brought along a friend living in the home to speak about HB 5507.
Bailey-Smith’s friend, who moved to Illinois from Texas, is trying to change her name on her birth certificate, but Texas’s restrictions have prevented that, she said.
They met with the staff of Republican state Sen. Sally Turner (44th District), recounting her friend’s story and explaining how the bill helps her, Bailey-Smith said.
“They didn’t seem negative about it,” Bailey-Smith said. “My experience with advocacy is that, by telling those personal stories, or having a person with you who will benefit from this legislation if it’s passed, we can get it done.”
Other measures on Equality Illinois’ agenda include Senate Bill 3384, which requests $20 million in state funding for supporting public school districts that want to teach age-appropriate, medically accurate and inclusive sex education, and a resolution that would urge the Illinois Supreme Court to require consistent training around LGBTQ+ and HIV cultural competency for all attorneys, judges and courtroom staff.
Mirza Shams, a therapist with the Chicago Therapy Collective, said the resolution is important to them as someone who immigrated to the U.S. from Egypt as an asylum seeker in 2015.
“Cultural competency in the legal process is very necessary, because it does not only include language, but also includes patterns of thinking and feeling,” Shams said. “What happens is the migration process involves predominantly people of color or LGBTQ+ people, but attorneys are predominantly white.”
Shams said giving assistance to attorneys, judges and other courtroom staff will help “fill in the gaps” for workers who are not of the same background as the people they’re working with.
“That’s why this resolution is so important,” Shams added. “Without that cultural competency, there’s no bridge between the attorney and the client.”
Shams was among a group of people from the Chicago Therapy Collective visiting Springfield to advocate for some of these policies. Iggy Ladden, founder of the Andersonville-based group, said they were there to advocate for the bill that would mandate board-diversity reporting for large nonprofits.
“We find that there’s a lot of funding bias and resource bias when folks who are being served by these nonprofits aren’t represented in their boards,” Ladden said.
State Rep. Kelly Cassidy (14th District) and state Sen. Mike Simmons (7th District), the only two openly LGBTQ+ representatives in the Illinois General Assembly, spoke to the advocates during a pre-lobbying rally. Gov. JB Pritzker also stopped by to take a photo with the group.
Cassidy and Simmons encouraged the advocates to treat the Capitol as if it was their own house.
“Winning elections is math and doesn’t make you a better, smarter or stronger person,” Cassidy said. “It makes them your employee, and that’s the attitude I want you to take into that building.”
The post Illinoisans lobby state legislators for LGBTQ+ measures appeared first on Windy City Times.