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ICG’s Trey Ramsey Presents on IDEA and LGBTQ+ Initiatives at APGA 2024

Published on: Published in: Blog

By Trey Ramesey, Outreach and Inclusion Manager (they/them)

Presenters from “Queering the Garden…” while attendees participated in community-building. Left to right: Michelle Israel, Director of Exhibitions, Lewis Ginter; Kavanah Anderson, Director of Learning and Community Engagement, Duke Gardens; Victoria Munro, Executive Director, Alice Austen House; Trey Ramsey, Outreach and Inclusion Manager, Ithaca Children’s Garden. Photo credit to Kavanah Anderson.

From June 24th to the 28th, I attended the American Public Gardens Association’s annual conference in Boston, MA. This was my first time attending the conference in person, after two virtual conferences in 2020 and 2021. I was able to attend thanks to a Garden Scholar award from the IDEA (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, & Accessibility) Center for Public Gardens. It was truly amazing to meet so many passionate members of the public gardens community who are all working toward shared goals of engaging the public with nature and plants and to see people in person who I’ve been working with online for years. I attended many amazing sessions on a variety of topics. From one session I attended,  “Is it Inclusion, or is it Tokenism? Access, Disability Inclusion, and Allyship in Public Gardens,” I am excited to apply lessons about engaging the community to understand and accommodate relevant and specific access needs. From “Branching Out: Empowering Teens and Tweens with Nature-Based Programming,” I look forward to applying lessons for better engaging middle- and high-schoolers at the garden through leadership development and wilderness skills.

But I wasn’t only there as an attendee–I also presented in two sessions. I was a panelist on “Getting to the Other Side of Barriers and Challenges,” discussing ICG’s efforts to re-invigorate our IDEA work. I also led the creation of the session “Queering the Garden and Growing Beyond Binaries: LGBTQ+ Inclusive Programming in Public Gardens,” where I shared ICG’s ways of making our programming welcoming of LGBTQ+ participants and families, along with my co-presenters from the Alice Austen House, Duke Gardens, and Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden. In particular, I highlighted how ICG ensures our registration process welcomes families and participants of any gender and family makeup. I also shared how we prepare our staff to work with LGBTQ+ youth. I was proud to represent ICG at the conference and to be able to bring back so much knowledge, multiple connections, and wonderful experiences to the Garden.

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