Hello everybody welcome back to the hamelcast I'm Jillian I. I'm Bianca. And today we are joined by

Zeke Stokes, vice president of programs at Glad. How are you doing? Thank you for

having me. Thank you for being here. It's a pleasure. I've listened to the

podcast and love everything you're doing and can't wait to be a part of the conversation.

Oh my goodness.

Yay! Well, speaking of loving everything you're doing, we love Glad.

Thank you.

And we're here really specifically to talk about Spirit Day, which is October 20th. Absolutely. which is October 20th.

Absolutely coming up October 20th it's the day when the whole world goes purple in a

stand of solidarity with LGBTQ youth and in a stand against bullying. It's been around for about six years, started in 2010,

actually by a middle school student in Canada. Her name is Brittany McMillan.

She's in college now, but she saw all of the epidemic of suicides happening in the news that year,

Tyler Clementi, others, and she wanted to do something to make a difference in her own community.

So she organized her class to wear purple one day and it sort of took off and before you knew it it was a

sensation all across social media she was just a middle schooler so she didn't have the

capacity to sort of manage it all so she reached out to

reached out to GLAD and we began to work with her

and we still work with her to this day.

So it's always the third Thursday in October,

which is historically sort of the height of bullying, you think about it when kids go back to

school you know there's a few weeks everyone's getting settled in by the middle part of

October you know the clicks have formed and October is the time when we actually see a spike in in bullying.

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