KPU youth leaders awarded for pride advocacy
Destiny Lang and Liam Ruel were recognized by Sher Vancouver for outstanding advocacy and leadership in the 2SLGBTQIA+ community
Destiny Lang (left) and Liam Ruel (right) were named Emerging Youth Leaders by the charity Sher Vancouver. (Submitted)
Two students from Kwantlen Polytechnic University were recognized for their leadership and community activity within the 2SLGBTQIA+ community.
Destiny Lang and Liam Ruel were selected as Emerging Youth Leaders as part of Sher Vancouver’s 2024 January Award. The award, given by the Metro Vancouver charity, recognizes youth who have demonstrated outstanding commitment, leadership, and advocacy in the community to advance 2SLGBTQIA+ rights in Canada.
Lang is a third-year fashion design and technology student at KPU and a Pride peer leader. Ruel, a recent KPU graduate with a bachelor of arts in psychology, co-founded KPU’s Pride Society and was also a Pride peer leader. Lang and Ruel are both student researchers for a KPU study aimed at improving the educational experience of 2SLGBTQIA+ students.
Because of their personal experiences and love for social justice and design, Lang finds advocacy work to be extremely personal.
“My personal motto is I want to serve looks and serve the community, so I speak to my two major interests of queer advocacy for social justice in general, but also fashion design and art,” they say.
Their activism began even before they attended KPU. In high school, they became dedicated to making queer youth visible and safe through various initiatives.
When Ruel started school, he says he found “there wasn’t any support or community for queer and trans students, which was quite an isolating experience.”
“[In meeting] other queer and trans students, I realized these weren’t uncommon experiences that I was having.”
At KPU, Lang and Ruel got involved with advocacy work and community building through various initiatives — whether it was creating the Student Pride Group, helping maintain the recently opened Pride Centre, or pushing for more system support for 2SLGBTQIA+ students on campus.
One significant accomplishment was Lang’s successful campaign to add gender-affirming health-care coverage to the Kwantlen Student Association’s student health and dental plan.
“I made it my personal goal to make sure KPU students should access gender-affirming care coverage because people should not have to choose between paying for their health care or tuition or other basic living necessities,” Lang says, “because I believe health is a human right.”
Their recognition through Sher Vancouver’s Emerging Youth Leader Award was an emotional and hopeful moment for both Ruel and Lang.
“For me, getting to read through all of the work that everyone who was recognized under the award did was something that made me feel really hopeful,” Ruel says. “There’s been a lot of negative news around queer and trans rights … and getting to see so many youth actively engaged in advocacy in their communities … brought me a lot of hope.”
Lang reaffirmed the value of community and the influence of group activism.
“It brings me a lot of hope that we’re not just out here doing all this work alone,” they say. “I hope it also motivates more activists to take on work because it’s more important to come together now more than ever.”
In the future, Lang and Ruel hope to be heard in positive ways. Lang wants to encourage accurate representation through inclusive fashion design and Ruel looks forward to continuing to bridge research and action.
“Queer people, trans people — we have always existed, we will keep existing, and we’re still going to be here together,” Lang says.
