As the lead coordinator for the LGBTQ+ Interfaith Community Group, I led regular meetings with LGBTQ+ college students exploring their connections to faith. Over the course of several meetings, I observed that students had a fairly strong understanding of their LGBTQ+ and faith-based identities, but had little understanding of how these identities affected their experience of other identities they held. 

With my educational background in sociology, I developed a workshop focused on intersectionality to help students better understand the relationships between the many identities they hold. We began the workshop with an activity that encouraged students to consider the constellation of identities they held and how their individuality cannot be expressed with just one of those identities.

With an understanding of identity, we moved on to a digital activity: taking implicit bias tests. The purpose of this exercise was to demonstrate the ways in which we may be implicitly biased about identities that our community members hold. I then facilitated a discussion about the results of the tests participants chose to take, after which we transitioned to the final interactive exercise. 

The yes/no activity was designed to help participants understand the impacts that identities can have on life experiences, and to promote empathy within the LGBTQ+ Interfaith Community Group for what other group members have experienced.

After the conclusion of the workshop, I gathered feedback from participants about the impact of the workshop. It was well received, with many students mentioning that they learned something new from the activities we did during the workshop. 

I also observed that the LGBTQ+ Interfaith Community Group had much richer conversations and deeper discussions that incorporated intersectionality principles after completing the workshop. I attribute this success to the overall format of the workshop as a hands-on experience, and the design of individual activities that successively built on each other while still meeting learners where they were.