Hi! We’re Sarah (they/them) from Minneapolis, Foley (she/they) from Washington D.C, and Em (she/her) from NYC! We are a trio of Queer Co-leaders who found our little chosen family through the November Project community. We wanted to take the time during Pride Month to tell you all a little bit about us, queer friendships, and the impact it’s made on our time leading our respective NP cities!
How We Met
Our origin story is really just a matter of multiple people telling us “hey you should know each other.” Sarah and Em were introduced not long after they both stepped into leading their cities by mutual friends. Sarah and Foley met while leading the same team for a virtual challenge in D.C. And when Foley stepped into leadership, Sarah started the group text that never died, introducing Em and Foley.
We officially ended up in the same place for the first time in 2021 at Summit in San Diego; also the birthplace of our matching “glad you’re here” tattoos. We would at no point deny that our friendship escalated quickly, and we’d have it no other way.
About Queer Friendships
For me, (Foley) this queer friendship is a space where I feel seen completely as myself — even across long distances. I love my immediate community formed through my regular activities, like writing, running and participating in my neighborhood life. But these disparate groups don’t always nurture the full expanse of my identity.
Queerness is not always visible, but it still informs a lot of the ways I move through the world. So does my inherent desire to be a positive community member in all the spaces I inhabit — including in my leadership of NPDC. When I’m at a crossroads and I don’t know what decision is best for me, I look to two identities as my true north.
Sarah and Em are human embodiments of this compass as we check in every Wednesday before our workouts. They’re also the comfort I need when the path forward is thorny, and they’re there to celebrate my unexpected successes along the way. Plus, they are very, very funny together, and we all need a little levity.
How we’ve impacted each others leadership
Foley, Sarah, and I (Em) all stepped into leadership around the same time. For all of us, a big part of our early leadership was helping our cities transition back to in-person workouts. That time in NP was a wild one for us all, but especially as new leaders trying to navigate a situation that other leaders had never been in. That definitely was the start of a relationship where Sarah and Foley were some of the only ones who truly understood what leading was like at that time.
We’ve become a sort of leadership sounding board for each other. As Foley mentioned, we do weekly Wednesday check-ins. We send an audio message to each other when we wake up or on our way to our respective workouts. We allow ourselves to feel what we’re feeling that morning, whether it is totally hyped for what we have planned, or completely over it and ready for a nap. Sometimes we’ll check back in after to gush about our members or remind the group that your community can work wonders for your mood. We ask for advice when dealing with tricky situations in our cities, and we celebrate when something we were excited about goes as wonderfully as we had hoped.
If it appears to members that co-leaders have special relationships with other Co-leaders, it’s true. The passion we have for this job and community connects us, and for this trio, being queer too is a big added bonus!
How much we love this friendship
For me (Sarah), our little trio is healing in many ways. I didn’t start to understand the full expansiveness of myself until I was 25, didn’t come out as gay until I was 30,and invited people into my non-binary identity when I was 32. When I see queer youth sharing themselves and their identities with the world so much earlier than I did, I feel a pang of jealously for that lost experience – despite being so fucking happy and proud of them. Em and Foley give me that queer bestie experience that I didn’t have when I was younger. To be seen and so fully understood by two of my closest friends because they share the queer identity with me is something that makes our group sacred to me. And our group chat is so much of the normal stuff – funny jokes, silly things we did, crushes, book recommendations. But most of those things are centered around queer culture – funny QUEER jokes, silly QUEER things we did, QUEER crushes we have, QUEER book recommendations and it makes me feel like I can fully express and celebrate this part of my identity. In addition, our levels of empathy are so much greater – we pause, make and hold space for each other, and lift each other up. Our shared identity brought us together, is the thing that we center, and grounds us.
