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It’s been wisely observed that in the battle for inclusion for all families, people—and not just ideas—are what change hearts and minds.
Through now world-famous photo exhibits such as Love Makes a Family, the nonprofit Family Diversity Projects, based in Amherst, Massachusetts, brings the lived experiences of real people in diverse families to schools, community centers, houses of worship, and workplaces. The organization’s work has changed many hearts and minds. It was founded, recalls cofounder and codirector Peggy Gillespie, in recognition of a profound need for change.
“My daughter is multiracial, and she experienced something as a three- or four-year-old that showed me right away that I needed to do some education around issues of race in the school she was in,” Gillespie explains. “Her best friend told her that her brown doll had an ugly skin color. It was the first time she ever brought a doll to school, and she really liked this doll.”
“Her friend who said that was the daughter of my best friend, so I knew she wasn’t hearing this at home. It’s the culture. It’s just ‘the way things are.’”
Things didn’t stay that way for long. Gillespie teamed up with Gigi Kaeser—who at the time happened to be a classroom teacher of Gillespie’s daughter—to create Of Many Colors, an exhibit (and book) combining photographs and interviews with people living in multiracial families. The project proved highly successful, following a warm reception in the Amherst public schools with a more extended tour.
Their early success—and a desire to more fully engage the experiences of multiracial families headed by same-sex couples—led to the creation of Love Makes a Family, which includes families with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender parents. This time, however, reception in the local public schools was far from uniformly positive. When the then-superintendent barred the exhibit from elementary schools, Gillespie explains, “it set off a year-long controversy that felt like the biggest controversy that Amherst had ever seen.”
Love Makes a Family became a touchstone for organizing around family diversity in Amherst. Initial administrative reluctance—as well as outright hostility from a small faction of right-wing parents—spurred the creation of high school Gay-Straight Alliances and LGBT parent groups. Thanks to representation from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, a legal precedent was created, protecting such exhibitions as a matter of free speech.
Gillespie says that when the exhibit ultimately came to elementary schools—in Amherst and, as time went on, across the country—youngsters got it from the get-go.
“When Love Makes a Family finally went into the elementary schools, and kids got to sign guest books and such, one of them wrote, ‘What was the big deal? It’s just families,’” she says. “One wrote: ‘We’re all created equal. Remember?’”
“The kids got it so much quicker,” she says. “Talking about family diversity with kids, if they’re taught early enough, makes a huge impact. I’ve heard that from a lot of the kids that grew up in Amherst, that it influenced them to think about and talk about topics of family diversity.”
In its subsequent and ongoing projects such as In Our Family and Nothing to Hide (on mental health in families), Family Diversity Projects engages ever-widening audiences in such conversations, challenging exclusive, normative conceptions of what it means to live and love as a family.
“We’re sometimes asked, ‘Are there any normal families in this exhibit?’” Gillespie says. “Well, what is your definition of that? This leads to the creation of some pretty interesting dialogue or discussion. Is a family where somebody’s deaf not “normal”? A family in which there’s mental illness? Gay parents? A single parent?”
In addition to challenging exclusion, raising visibility of all types of families plays a crucial role in positive identity development for children in diverse families.
“A kid at a local school said to his teacher that he’d seen a family just like his, with a black father and a white father and a black son,” Gillespie says. “He’d never seen a picture of a family just like his, and here it was on the wall of his school. ‘That’s just like my family!’”
“Clearly it has a pretty huge impact in terms of making a school safe enough to talk about this stuff,” Gillespie says. “Kids see families on walls of the school. So even if people protest, they hear the school saying, ‘Yes. Your family is important. We want to honor that kind of family, too.’”
Family Diversity Projects welcomes partnerships with education, business, and faith communities seeking to engage and honor family diversity by displaying an exhibit. The organization’s advertising budget is zero—its great success attributable entirely to the quality of its reputation—but Gillespie emphasizes the organization’s commitment to working with all interested groups.
Churches and synagogues struggling with family diversity are especially welcome and eligible for large scholarships to display a Family Diversity Projects exhibit, thanks to a recent grant from the progressive international Arcus Foundation.
“We’re always seeking donors, both individual supporters and corporations, but we never say ‘no’ to people who want to display an exhibit based on finances, always and especially with public schools and churches,” Gillespie says. “Anybody interested in exhibiting can contact us.”
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