Your Life Out Cochrane continues to blossom in the community and offered slices of rainbow cake in their first public outreach, June 24, in Historic Downtown Cochrane.

Volunteers of the LGBTQ organization held the event to create further public awareness of their aims and to continue to build their growing support in the community.

Your Life Out Cochrane executive director Meaghan Fisher said she borrowed the idea from a similar offering in Yellowknife, where she grew up, 

"This is our first big public outreach and this is a thing we use to do in Yellowknife," explains Fisher. "We would stand on the corner at lunch hour and hand out cake. It's a good way to build communities and public support, and who doesn't love cake, right?"

Your Life Out has been bringing focus to issues facing the LGBTQ community in Cochrane and a major first step is to create public support and acceptance. Fisher says the barricades they first faced are falling.

"The voices I first heard were those of people explaining how wrong I was for being myself," she explains. "There was this idea that gay people want special treatment and stuff like that and people were being really vocal about that. What has happened since then is those voices have been drowned out almost completely by people who are coming out from everywhere to be supportive, to be encouraging and to be excited and enthusiastic and most of those are coming from.straight people with young kids to those grandparent age."

The significance of that acceptance cannot be understated in helping address the issues being faced by the community, she stresses.

"We have higher rates of addiction, suicide, mental illness, feelings of isolation, self-harm, all that kind of stuff. Studies show that the more outwardly accepting, the more vocal a community is about their support for LGBTQ issues and people, the greater the drop in those things. It's really fascinating how a sense of acceptance helps."

What needs to follow is programming for the LGBTQ community in Cochrane as well their involvement on town committees and even town council.

Of particular need is programming specific to queer youth, she says, and currently those services, like sexual health, mental health, support groups, parent groups, are only available in Calgary and transportation becomes an issue.

"Whether your family is or isn't accepting you're really behoving them to be able to access services because we rely on Calgary for all our services for queer folks here. If you don't have a car, Calgary can be the moon. Our mission here is to have some services available in Cochrane for people so that they don't have to go to the moon to get them."

Your Life Out held their first social event the week before and plan to have more on a monthly basis.

When Banff-Cochrane MLA Cam Westhead learned about the group he met with them in the spring to learn how he can support them. For this event, he paid for the cake.

Westhead says the Alberta government is inclusive in their vision of its people.

"I think supporting diversity in Alberta and inclusiviity is really important. We see isolated incidents of intolerance in the province and it's important we express our values of tolerance and diversity and including everybody and supporting everybody so that's why I want to support this group and others like it."

"It's our diversity that makes us stronger."