Journeys: An LGBTQ Center Retreat

Journeys: Understanding Self & Building Community is an annual LGBTQ Resource Center Retreat made possible by the Tagliabue Initiative and the generous contributions of individual alumni donors. Each year, we take 30 students for an overnight experience hosted at the Calcagnini Contemplative Center in Bluemont, VA.

Purpose & Learning Outcomes

Purpose

The purpose of this retreat is to provide a space for members of the LGBTQ community and its allies at Georgetown to gather in order to share personal stories, to reflect on individual and community formation, and enter into thoughtful dialogue regarding the nature of the many communities that comprise the broader LGBTQA community at Georgetown. This unique opportunity to come together in a setting outside of campus provides students the freedom and context to be in a space where they can be fully themselves, without fear or judgment. It is our hope that through this engaged experience, students will gain a deeper understanding of their formation of self and how they can actively foster community, both at Georgetown and beyond. It is our belief that fostering formation leads to transformation.

By sharing openly with each other and being vulnerable together, students can come to know their peers more fully. Through reflection, both individual and shared, on their lived experiences, students can develop an authentic appreciation and respect for all that we are, and that we are NOT. Small group and large group discussions will help lay foundations to build solidarity both within and between our varied communities. It is our goal that this will allow for what Fr. Kolvenbach calls “the formation of whole persons of solidarity.”

Learning Outcomes

Provide a clearly articulated space for formation by design. This intentional reflective and learning space, which draws upon Ignatian understandings of deepening conversations, will allow students to synthesize and link their lived experiences with their intellectual understandings, and their knowledge of the world.
Enhance skills towards sophisticated self-management by providing them with a series of progressively more complex opportunities to do small and large group work.
Foster a deepened awareness of how to create better well-being for themselves as individuals, and as a community; and provide a safety net for each other, which is particularly challenging in this community.
Explore allyship and the development of whole persons of solidarity by examining the relationship between allyship and solidarity.