Here's a rendition of an off-the-cuff talk I made to Rainbow Youth's AGM this afternoon (with some added bits).

Happy birthday! That's what AGMs are really – birthday parties for organisations – so it's great to see so many of you here. I'm here, not because I'm young, but because I'm one of Rainbow Youth's patron's, which makes me feel quite old. But I'm not as old as most patrons...just so you know.

I work in the area of social change, and I often find it hard to explain what exactly I do. So I'm going to demonstrate it. At the end of this talk, by listening to it, you will have changed, just a little, as will I have also, simply by saying it. And that, in essence, is the nature of social change.

I want to tell you two stories and link them to four ideas: gratitude, compassion, rainbows and leadership. No mean feat in ten minutes on a Sunday. So here goes.

First story: A couple of weekends ago my boyfriend and I went to stay a night at the Westin Hotel down on the viaduct. We checked in to one room with a double bed so it was obvious we were a couple. The two guys on the desk, whom we presumed were straight, didn't blink an eye and were polite and professional to the extreme.

The next day when we checked out, the same two guys were standing in exactly the same places, as if they'd been waiting for us all night. We wondered if they had homes to go to. Once again they were generous and respectful, enquiring about our stay.

Driving home I shared with Andrew how I noticed that I was feeling intense gratitude towards those two young guys for so easily accepting us as a same sex couple. You may be surprise that I would be feeling grateful for something that most may see as an entitlement in 2011. I'll come back to this in about three minutes.

My second story is that at present I am being harassed by my neighbour. Brian is mentally unwell, Christian and homophobic. Not a good combo, even with fries. I had this confirmed when he added yelling, "You f***ing poof, God will smite you and so will I," to his repetoire of wall banging, water throwing, plant stealing and midnight doorbell ringing. 

Currently I feel vulnerable and unsafe in my own house as I work with the Police and Housing NZ to work through both bureauracies' lengthy processes, given that he's not throwing bricks or wielding knives...yet. Meanwhile I am aware of the compassion I still hold for the prick, knowing that, from where he stands, he is dealing with an untenable situation – my lifestyle - in the only way he knows how.

Let me begin to bring these stories together. A couple of weeks ago I did a five day retreat run by Allan Kaplan and Sue Davidoff of the Proteus Initiative in South Africa. Sue and Allan use wonderful adaptations of JW von Goethe's "unique ways of seeing and thinking into the living phenomena of the natural world...in order to achieve a new (holistic) way of engaging with social and ecological phenomena. So that we may begin to work effectively with social complexity." 

One of the exercises was using prisms to observe colour. Isaac Newton's theory was that all colour was contained in darkness (black) and that white was the absence of colour. But Goethe proposed Newton was wrong, mooting that, in fact, colour dwells in the relationship between darkness and light.

What prisms (and rain) do is separate the planes of light and dark, shifting them slightly so they overlap. We see the warm spectrum (red, orange and yellow) when we observe light through dark. We see the cold spectrum (blue, indigo and violet) when we observe dark through light. And we see green when the spectrums exist closely together, mixing blue and yellow.

It's interesting to me in a new way now that queer communities, with all their various acronyms, have taken the rainbow as their symbol of liberation. It's also evident, I think, how my two stories exemplify that we live in a time where light and dark, for us, sit so loudly and paradoxically close together.

Finally, let's relate all this to leadership. Rainbow Youth is a leadership organisation and you, as its members, are all leaders. It's important, in taking a leadership role, individually and collectively, to understand these dialectics of the social complexity we both create and inhabit.

We need to remember to be grateful for the changes everyone has made and need still to make, even those whom we may see to have causedproblems through ignorance. And we must, without risking our self-worth and safety, be generous to those who struggle to change what they have learnt to believe to be true and right.

Simultaneously we need to celebrate, support and nurture ourselves and each other as we strive to work in this difficult space, in between dark and light, and continue to make beautiful, vibrant rainbows.