- At FiftyForward, we provide services for everyone age 50 and over in middle Tennessee, and even some caregivers that live farther away.

And it's one thing to have a desire to be inclusive, and it's another thing to live into that inclusivity and desire to welcome everyone.

(soft music) As we are beginning to work with members to really dig into inclusivity and how there might be special needs of certain communities, like the LGBT community, we looked at who are the community partners out there that are already in that space and really know much more than we do.

And so PFLAG is a group that works with parents, friends, allies of lesbian, gay, and other folks, and also has folks in those communities in their membership and in their leadership.

So we were able to work with them to stream a training.

So in each center, we have seven locations across middle Tennessee, we had a place for staff and members to come together.

A key is feeling some comfort level.

If you don't know about something, you might tend to avoid whatever that issue is, or God forbid, whoever that person is, and we don't want that.

(soft music) - Most folks know that those letters represent different identities within the community.

What those letters really signify is kind of inclusion of more than just gay, more than just queer.

- So some of the takeaways of the PFLAG training were quite basic.

There is a lot of terminology, we do feel like you we need a language around whomever we're serving.

For instance, we gravitate towards the phrase older adults versus seniors, because we know that the folks we work with prefer that kind of terminology.

So we really wanna understand in the LGBTQIA+ community, what's the terminology to use.

A lot of focus on terminology, and just respectful ways to approach people, and how to introduce yourself and come to learn what someone else's pronouns might be, for example.

Then we also talked in the training about why is it important for LGBT older folks to have places to go.

And the fact that older adults in the LGBT community tend to live alone at a higher rate, tend to have fewer social supports, so having community supports are really important.

And I think that resonated a lot with our members because all of them come to us for different reasons, wanting connection.

The PFLAG training was a great opportunity for people to listen, and learn, and ask questions, and we intend to continue those kind of trainings.