Heaps Good: SPARK

By Kat Dopper

Last week ACON launched a new social media platform and events series entitled SPARK. We had a chat with Tim Wark the Community Health Promotion Officer (young gay men) at ACON to tell us  about the new endeavour.

Tell us a little bit about SPARK?

SPARK is a social platform for same sex attracted guys and queer-friendly young people. We deliver small, casual and inclusive monthly events and we also curate a social media channel. SPARK is an ACON initiative and as such we have an interest in sharing information about HIV and sexual health but we’re also interested in creating and sharing any content that might be relevant to queer young people.

We hosted our first SPARK event on Oxford St the night before the Mardi Gras parade. It was heaps of fun and great to celebrate Mardi Gras and launch a new project at the same time!

Why did ACON decide to launch SPARK?

We decided to launch SPARK because we saw an opportunity to use social media and events to engage with more queer young people. SPARK is part of ACON’s Young Gay Men’s Project. For the past 25 years ACON’s Young Gay Men’s Project has been hosting workshops for young guys. The workshops are facilitated by peers, they span several weeks and they cover topics like sexual health, sex, relationships and just in general the gay scene in Sydney.

There’s a strong community of people who have been engaged with the ACON’s Young Gay Men’s project for a long time. Most people who come along to our workshops come along out of a desire to make new friends. We find that great friendships are formed in our workshop programs and we wanted to launch an events and online platform that would give us the potential to facilitate more friendships and more casual events for young and queer people. We also recognised that our audience LOVES social media, so we needed to develop a platform through which to talk directly to them.

 

What’s most important to you/or your organisation right now? 

ACON exists to prevent HIV transmission in the state of NSW. HIV prevention is the primary goal of ACON but in addition to HIV prevention ACON is also committed to the health and wellbeing of our communities more broadly. SPARK is specifically a part of ACON’s work with young people. SPARK shares info about sex and sexual health but we’re also interested in ensuring that young people, as new entrants into our community, are not socially isolated. We believe that having queer friends is important.

We also want young people to be knowledgeable about sexual health. Over the past few years we’ve seen a gradual increase in the number of HIV infections occurring in same sex attracted guys aged between 20 to 29. We know that queer teenagers don’t get sufficient sexual health information in schools and we want to play a role in addressing that.

How are things going with it? What struggles or successes have you had? 

We’ve done one event so far and it was great! We had a really fun time and we are starting to get more traction on our Facebook page. The most important part of SPARK is making sure we develop a really diverse and inclusive young queer and queer friendly community around SPARK. For us to do that we need to make sure that our events are welcoming and the stuff we share online is engaging.

We have also been working with ACON’s Women’s Project to make sure that we have sexual health resources and content for women. We are currently looking into developing similar partnerships with organisations that provide great resources for people with a trans history and intersex people. This will make sure that we are always engage with our diverse community. Given that we just started, we are fortunate not to have had many challenges thus far, but we are sure that we will learn a lot over the coming months.

Where would you like to be in the short term or long term? What are the long term goals? 

Our short term goal is to lay the foundations for an engaged diverse community through social events, posting relevant content and developing new partnerships. Once we have established this framework, we want to make sure that SPARK functions as a go to hub for young LGBTI people to socialise and get information on sexual health. We’d also like to continue and build upon the ways in which people can interact with SPARK in a meaningful way.

How can people get involved? 

If people are interested in our project, that is, helping plan social events, becoming a workshop facilitator or building our network with other LGBTI organisations you can get in contact with us at youth@acon.org.au

https://www.facebook.com/SPARKACON