“I really see queerness tying these pieces of environmentalism together because there’s a phrase in Tla-o-qui-aht: Hishuk-ish tsawalk, and it means everything is interconnected or everything is one.” — Sully Rogalski
Coastal Queer Alliance may be new, but it’s already making an impact in Tofino. This grassroots organization is proving that environmental sustainability isn’t just the work of environmental groups, it takes a whole community. Co-founder Sully Rogalski shares how queer advocacy and environmental stewardship go hand in hand, reinforcing the idea that everything is connected.
Recognizing Tofino’s reputation for progressive movements, Sully saw an opportunity to build a more inclusive and welcoming community. “There’s a lot of really cool and a lot of really groundbreaking work and a long history of activism and civil disobedience that I’m really, really drawn to,” they reflect. Sully and their friend John Sweeney started Coastal Queer Alliance in 2021 with a mission to create representation, resources, and opportunities for queer folks in the region.
One of their initiatives is Queer Surf, a monthly summer meetup created in collaboration with Surf Sister, which works to reduce barriers for queer individuals in surfing. Another key program, Shifting Frameworks, offers specialized workshops to educate organizations, businesses, and individuals on how to interact with queer folks. Tourism Tofino is one of several local organizations that has participated, learning how small changes can make a big difference. “Changing your language from making gendered assumptions to non-gendered assumptions is one of the easiest things that you can do to just cue to queer people that this is something that you’re thinking about and create a much more comfortable experience for them,” Sully explains.
They also emphasize the interconnectedness of queer advocacy with environmental advocacy and, by extension, Indigenous movements. Grassroots action can weave these threads together, creating collaborative and supportive communities where they haven’t previously existed.
Sully’s work offers an important lesson: when businesses and communities come together to uplift marginalized voices, they don’t just create change—they build lasting, equitable futures.
You’ll also learn about:
- Connections between queerness, environmental stewardship, and Indigenous movements.
- Inspiring examples of solidarity and grassroots organizing in Tofino.
- How to start making your tourism business more inclusive.
- The responsibilities profit brings in creating equitable opportunities.
- Advice for starting your own grassroots organization.
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Show notes
Clayoquot Biosphere Trust — An NGO leading biosphere stewardship, philanthropy, and community building.
Coastal Queer Alliance — A non-profit organization committed to creating resources, augmenting representation, and facilitating collaborative opportunities for the queer community.
Surf Sister — A surf school focused on ensuring everyone feels included and encouraged to embrace the sport.
Tourism Tofino — Tofino’s official not-for-profit destination marketing and management organization.
Episode transcript
This transcript was generated using AI and has been lightly reviewed for accuracy.
Sully Rogalski: I think we can look side to side and find so much solidarity with people who are working in any given region towards, like, a future that is more equitable or more just and say, like, how do we connect? And so how do we share practices between us, or how do we learn from you and you learn from us? And that’s just relationship building.
It’s just listening and trying to work together. Trying to teach one another.
David Archer: Welcome to Travel Beyond. I’m David Archer from Destination Think, recording from Haida Gwaii, the territory of the Haida Nation off the north coast of British Columbia in Canada. On this show, we look at travel’s role in making a better world, and we highlight leading destinations and changemakers. Our guests are taking local action that the world can learn from, they’re helping to regenerate ecosystems, communities, and economies, and they’re often making positive change happen from the bottom up.
Many of the voices we’ve highlighted are part of the Destination Think Collective, a peer group of ambitious forward thinking destinations working toward a better future for travel and the planet. And today’s episode is all about grassroots organizing in Tofino’s queer community and how that work intersects with many other kinds of positive change we’ve been talking about.
There’s a lot we can learn from today’s guest about the way queer advocacy overlaps with environmental action and Indigenous movements. It’s having a positive impact on sectors like tourism too. Sully Rogalski is the co founder and executive director of the Coastal Queer Alliance based in Tofino.
Sully is relatively new to the area compared with some of our guests. They grew up in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, a small city on the Canadian prairies. They spent some time working in the Toronto music industry until the COVID pandemic arrived with all of that turmoil. And so in 2020, Sully moved out to Tofino at the invitation of their childhood friend, John, and together the two of them founded the Coastal Queer Alliance in 2021.
Sully told me that they really appreciate the history of activism and civil disobedience in the area. That kind of community spirit is one of the things they love about living here, and I’m sure that’s inspired some of the work they’ve been leading. That includes programs like Queer Surf, a monthly summer meetup that seeks to remove barriers to surfing for queer people.
Those barriers include financial barriers for gear and lessons. Transportation and various forms of systemic and social discrimination. Queer Surf is a collaboration with Surf Sisters, a Tofino organization that has been encouraging women to take up the sport together since 1999, and that’s just one example of collaboration as we’ll hear.
Coastal Queer Alliance has been working alongside many other local organizations, including the Surf Rider Foundation, which we heard from in season one and Tourism Tofino. Here’s Brad Parsell.
Brad Parsell: Hi, I’m Brad Parsell, Executive Director at Tourism Tofino. Thanks so much for being with us today. We are proud sponsors of this second season of the Travel Beyond podcast, brought to you by Destination Think and based here in Tofino.
And I’m really excited to have Sully Rogalski on the show today. Uh, as you’ll hear, uh, at Tourism Tofino, we’ve been working with Sully and the Coastal Queer Alliance through their Shifting Frameworks program, which provides organizations and businesses with education about creating queer safe workspaces and why that’s necessary.
They’re doing such incredible work on the west coast of Vancouver Island, and it’s really, really important to Tourism Tofino that we do as much as we can to create a safe, inclusive, and accessible destination. The Coastal Queer Alliance is just another example of some of the positive momentum happening locally and across the world in many communities within the travel space.
I’ve learnt about many other cool things going on through the Travel Beyond podcast that features other destinations, and some of those destinations are part of the Destination Think Collective. Tourism Tofino is a founding member, and it’s a growing group of ambitious destinations that care about the future of travel and the planet.
We have all kinds of folks in the collective, from Queenstown in New Zealand, to Denmark and Copenhagen, and uh, all points in between. Uh, it’s been really, really inspiring to learn from those folks, and I hope some of this stuff resonates with them as well. So thanks so much for listening. I’m so excited to showcase some of the leadership here in Tofino and I’ll now turn it back over to David and Sully.
David Archer: Thanks for that, Brad. Surfing is a big part of local life within the queer community and beyond. So it seems like the perfect place to start this episode is with a surfing story. Get ready for an inspiring conversation about finding ways to bring people together, create community and change the world.
Here’s Sully.
Sully Rogalski: My name is Sully. My pronouns are they, them, and I’m the executive director of Coastal Queer Alliance.
David Archer: Can you tell us about, a little bit about life in Tofino? Like, what do you love about this place? What keeps you here?
Sully Rogalski: There’s so much that keeps me here. I mean it’s, yeah, it’s a beautiful place to live.
The access to nature and stewarded nature is just so present. There’s like so many spots on any given day that will just hold magic depending on So definitely I think that’s what calls a lot of people out to Tofino is the, the beauty, you know, the ability to surf, um, kind of being a pretty unique spot in the ground scheme of the island, I guess.
But I think that there’s something really special about Tofino in terms of, not necessarily it’s community, um, I think it’s a, that’s a pretty broad term that we use to describe a lot of things, but like where Tofino is situated in terms of how many people are contributing to a future that I’m really excited about living out here.
I think there’s a lot of really cool initiatives and a lot of really groundbreaking work and a long history of activism and civil disobedience that I’m really, uh, really drawn to.
David Archer: Yeah. That’s great. Yeah, we’ll talk a little bit about that in a bit too, but you mentioned surfing. Do you remember what it was like the first time you got to surf here?
Sully Rogalski: Yes, I do. I’m glad you asked this. Yeah, I had visited here, John and I visited here for the first time in the summer of 2018 together and I was living in Toronto. He was living in Vancouver. We were both so broke I don’t know how I, like, scrounged up the funds to, to come and visit him on the coast and we ended up doing a bit of an island road trip.
We didn’t have a car, so we were bussing everywhere. We didn’t have any money, so I remember when we got to Tofino, we were like, we bought some bread and we were staying at the little Airbnb, or at the little B&B above Tofino Sea Kayakers and we just opened up these chai tea bags and, uh, used them as like a mix for French toast.
Like, we were like, we were, we were traveling on a budget. Um, and somehow we made our way out to Live2Surf and uh, you know, we did the whole, we rented the gear and we, we didn’t know that uh, North Chesterman was a beach, which is the closest beach to Live2Surf. So we walked all the way down two kilometers to South Chesterman carrying our boards before we had figured out that we could like sandwich ourselves between them.
So I, like my arms don’t even reach like, you know, I’m trying to carry it. And when we got in the water, it was, it was, it was awesome. It was glorious. But, um, yeah, that memory and kind of just, you know, coming to Tofino for the first time as like two queer people, really not having a lot of access to transportation or, or money or, or any of these things has definitely informed John as one of the other co founders of Coastal Queers.
Yeah, it’s really informed a lot of the work that we do is kind of our first experiences in Tofino, where that was an awesome, awesome time. And we made the most of it. But had we come to Tofino and we saw a poster that said like, queer surf, free gear, free lesson, text us to get a ride. We would have been like, how do we move here right now?
You know, so that’s, uh, when we look to build queer surf, which we did in 2021. Those are some of the pieces that we wanted to address right from the get go is the barriers that people have in accessing a lot of the same things that um, that draw people out here initially.
David Archer: Yeah For those who are unfamiliar, can you give us a little background on the Coastal Queer Alliance and what that is?
Sully Rogalski: Yeah, absolutely. Coastal Queers works to create representation, resourcing and bring queer folks together in our region. Yeah, so like I said, I moved out here in 2020 and that was the first kind of uh, winter season of COVID and it was a very isolating time to live in Tofino, I’m sure for everybody, but I had just moved here and it was, yeah, it was a really, really hard time to meet people, hard time to connect with anyone, and let alone for queer people.
John and I kind of spent that winter in our one person bubble just looking around being like, hey, are we the only queer people out here? Like, most certainly not. So where is everyone and how do we connect with each other? There’s very, you know, few signs of visibility in Tofino in terms of any sort of, you know, rainbows or cues to the community in that way.
We did a lot of research that winter like posting on trading posts and bulletin boards asking if there was anything that had been going on for the queer community and looking through old newspapers in the region and by and large it just seemed like there was no problem. Nothing that had ever been formalized or nothing that we could, certainly nothing that was active that we could support at that point.
So in the spring of 2021, we started out with a small grant from Clayoquot Biosphere Trust and we hosted a zoom meeting. We just posted up posters around town being like, are you interested in learning more? Are you interested in connecting? And we had about 20 folks come out to that meeting, and they really helped shape our perspective.
Um, we talked a lot about barriers at that meeting. Barriers about, like, what it feels like to live out here and be queer, and some of the things that we experience. We also talked about how to combat those, and kind of, that’s where Queer Surf was born out of, and that’s where a lot of our the initial groundwork for our organization came from is that meeting of trying to look at the answers that people gave us and sort them into feeling like, okay.
People are really missing a connection to community. There’s no access to finding each other. People are missing crucial resources in terms of health care and education and job support and you know business support and people are missing like an advocacy platform or the ability for people to for them for somebody to come and just like connect with somebody that could maybe support them in their region with some of the specific barriers that they’re accessing or that they’re having trouble to access.
David Archer: Okay, yeah, so you, you sort of interviewed the community about the, the barriers that they were facing and then, and then formed the organization in response to that.
Sully Rogalski: Yeah, and, and John and I also had a lot of our own, um, experience, I think, shape the reality of what Coastal Queers, uh, looks to support. You know, it’s, it’s called Coastal Queers, and that’s definitely the, the aspect of supporting queer folks, but what to, meaningfully supporting queer folks in our region look like.
It means that you have to recognize that a lot of people are living in trailers or that a lot of people are houseless or attached to staff acomms with poor conditions, or, you know, that not a lot of people have money or a lot of people face food insecurity or all of these other interconnected pieces and barriers that folks are facing, which a lot of people face out here.
But once again, when you’re queer, there’s kind of that additional layer of.
David Archer: So these were some of the challenges that you were observing kind of just during your research. And was there a portion of that that came from previous experiences in other cities or other places as well?
Sully Rogalski: I think that we really focused on our local community, um, in terms of like the tangible supports that we knew that we needed to start providing or the gaps that we were looking to fill but yeah we always kind of approached our larger understanding of queerness with like a recognition and solidarity with like a borderless queer future. I think like being aware of how queerness is being treated in other parts of, uh, the world is really relevant to the queer community at large, um, and to our local community here especially.
You can feel so isolated when something tragic happens, um, to a queer person somewhere, somewhere else, and you, you don’t have someone to connect with in your own community about that.
David Archer: Along the way, Sully mentioned some of the barriers facing queer people, and a little later on I asked them what the term queer means to them, what makes someone part of the queer community.
Here’s what they said.
Sully Rogalski: It’s a good question, and I think it, it, I can come at it from a lot of different places, because I think that queer is, from a terminology standpoint, um, or maybe like an umbrella term for the community. You know, we have this acronym, 2SLGBTQQIA whatever variation of that anyone might have heard.
That has kind of arisen out of these specific, um, identities that have been developed, kind of, throughout, you know, starting kind of in the 1960s, bringing into popular, or more popular, conscience. Queer is, has been used as a slur in the past, maybe still considered a slur to some folks, um, who grew up in that era.
Queer is also accepted as kind of an umbrella term to talk about the entirety of any number of those identities under that umbrella. Queer, I think is can the term queer can be a personal identity. I think it can be an identity that relates to sexuality or gender or your political standpoint. Um, I think it can mean something that is as a community, the queer community, it’s also something that you can hold I’m a queer individual.
It also at its basis means like subversion. And so I think that it’s something that has so much. Anybody can take what they want from that word and I think that that’s probably the most beautiful thing about it is that at the heart of it there’s as many ways to be queer as there are people on this planet and I think that everybody hopefully can see themselves in the organization or the work that we do or wherever there’s queer work being done.
Hopefully, um, whether you personally identify with that term or not, uh, there’s something in the work that’s being done there that’s for you.
David Archer: Were there other organizations locally that supported you in getting off the ground?
Sully Rogalski: Clayoquot Biosphere Trust has been with us since day one. They gave us our first small grant. We had never written a grant before, um, and they were really supportive in that process and have continued to really work with us over the years in terms of providing opportunities and lots of grant funding, bringing us in for consultation on other projects and uplifting our message.
I think that they’re a really a really strong, um, supporter and, and a great organization to have a connection with. Uh, Surf Sister, we formed our queer surf program with and Surfside Grill as well. Yeah. They’ve kind of been with us from the beginning. Um, we just finished up our fourth season of Queer Surf with, which you know, we have no plans to discontinue the program, but it feels kind of wild that we’re coming up to our five year anniversary, uh, this coming summer. And, um, Tourism Tofino as well has been a really, really strong support in the past few years. Um, just looking to kind of I think bridge some of those, uh, community and tourism maybe divides that, that have happened historically and I think that they, they’re doing a really great job at uplifting local community initiatives that, that help support the region and help support folks who visit the region as well.
David Archer: Okay. Yeah, tell me a little bit more about how you’ve been working with Tourism Tofino. What kind of, what kinds of projects have there been?
Sully Rogalski: Yeah, I would say one of the, the most impactful, um, pieces of work that we collaborate with Tourism Tofino on is that they provide us, um, some funding to run workshops, uh, called Shifting Frameworks.
Shifting Frameworks is kind of the banner of all of our education and the specific program that we run with them is called, uh, Queer Competency, uh, Workplace Training. Okay. And so we host these kind of three hour sessions, uh, where we invite businesses, organizations, uh, in the region to come and learn more about.
Not even queerness as a whole, as like an identity necessarily. Um, but more the systemic structural components that exist in businesses or organizations and workplaces that inherently preclude queer folks, or some of the ways that our workplaces are set up with really gendered languages or gendered assumptions.
Um, how those impact not only queer staff, but also queer clientele. Looking at specific industries which might have more barriers than others, something like surfing, like, as we went back to, you know, all of the wetsuits are gendered in surfing. So how do we, how do we provide support for businesses that want to move beyond that?
Um, when they know that maybe not everybody that’s coming in is, is going to be cisgender.
David Archer: Yeah.
Sully Rogalski: And I think that shifting frameworks also really kind of generally seeks, you know, outside of it’s, it’s not a traditional EDI training in the way that we give you a checklist and we say, oh, these are the things that you can do after this.
We definitely have some best practices that we encourage people to use, but it really is like. It’s an invitation more for critical thinking, um, about how businesses can use their socio economic leverage in our community to uplift the messaging and mission of marginalized communities and what the responsibility is when we are all, you know, when profit is involved and, and how that creates different conditions for responsibility than maybe just an individual responsibility to support queer people.
David Archer: Great. You mentioned wetsuits. Um, are there any other tangible examples like that that you can think of, um, related to tourism businesses and how they can be more inclusive?
Sully Rogalski: Yeah, I think, um, I think there’s a number of industry specific things that we could delve into, um, but I feel like off the top, you know, in any guest serving capacity, changing your language from making gendered assumptions to non gendered assumptions is one of the easiest things that you can do to just cue to queer people that this is something that you’re thinking about and create a much more comfortable experience for them.
David Archer: So does that mean things like, you know, using partner instead of husband or wife or?
Sully Rogalski: Totally. Yeah, and even uh, you know dropping it when you walk into a shop and someone’s hey ladies like just drop that. It’s just not helpful. Um, and I think that you know, one of the most maybe maybe one that takes a little bit more time or practice, but really is like using they them pronouns for everyone until we know their pronouns.
I think that that’s one that’s gaining a little bit more traction in our community. Yeah, but yeah, I don’t know that people really recognize how meaningful it is for somebody who does use they them pronouns to not be misgendered in quick customer interactions and for anybody that doesn’t use they them pronouns they can also be referred to with they, them pronouns and it causes no harm.
So anybody can be referred to with they, them pronouns for the people who it matters for. It’s really going to matter for the people who it doesn’t, there’s no harm done. So it’s a, it’s a simple, albeit not easy or overnight change, but that is definitely something that we really promote is trying to neutralize our spaces, especially before you’re looking to advertise that you’re like a safe space or, or, or something for queer folks.
David Archer: Cool. Thank you. How has the queer community in Tofino changed if at all, since you started the alliance and you know, what are, what are some of the inspiring transformations that you might’ve seen?
Sully Rogalski: Yeah, there’s been so much change and it’s all in a positive direction.
Yeah, when we started Coastal Queers, like, we knew a couple of queer people around, but it was like trying to connect with anybody who wasn’t in your initial circle. You might like download a dating app to try to find friends and three swipes, you’re in Port Alberni. It’s like, there’s like, you know, it was so hard to find people out here.
And for the first couple, you know, the first couple building years of Coastal Queers, it really was like, we are just putting people in a room and we’re, we’re putting out an event and we’re hoping that people come and sometimes there’s three people that show up, sometimes there’s 30 people that show up and, uh, we’ve had different, you know, closed and open events.
So, uh, events that are open just to queer folks and then events that are open to everyone. I think what is so beautiful about the queer community at this point, I have such a special place for this little community, this big community in my heart. I think it’s really special at this point to host events and see people coming in pairs, coming in duos.
They recognize their friends. They’ve met their lover at a Coastal Queers event. They met their neighbor at a Coastal Queers event. They just see somebody that they recognize from the co op. And there’s really is like so much more of a sense of, because I have been at every Coastal Queers event that has happened in our region for the last three years.
I obviously am a pretty connected person to a lot of, a lot of queer folks. I’ve seen a lot of their faces, but being kind of on the periphery of events sometimes and just hearing people say like, oh, I recognize you, or oh, you work here. Oh, I remember you from the last queer surf. Those are things that are really, really special.
Hearing people make plans to hang out outside of Coastal Queers events. I’m like, yes, make your friends, like find your, find your people out here. And, um, yeah, I think there’s like any number of really beautiful stories that, that I could share. But one in particular that that I always come back to is, uh, we had a, we had our annual general meeting, I think, in 2022 online.
There was a couple new faces, didn’t recognize everyone, and, uh, kind of a couple on one screen and then an individual person. We put them in a breakout room and they ended up finding out that they were neighbours. And, I just, and then they were able to meet in person. And then they formed this connection and now they’re all great friends, we’re great friends.
And, yeah, something as simple as just like, coming together in a digital space and then seeing how that creates real connections online, or in person. It’s just so special how things work out here, I think.
David Archer: Yeah, yeah, that’s wonderful. I mean, you’re really enjoying making those connections. Is there any other thing that you’re most proud of, uh, that’s happened as a result of Coastal Queer Alliance?
Sully Rogalski: We just started a program. We’re in our initial stages of it. It’s called Make and Mend, and it’s a program that’s being directed by our friend Nos, and Nos is an excellent facilitator, such a great space holder, and just a really crafty person. And so Make and Mend, um, Make and Mend pairs it’s arts based activities, hands on activities that people can learn in the course of a couple hours, uh, with a conversation that might be tough or might be hard to work through.
And so, for the first, uh, session we did one called Grief and Repair, and it was holding conversations about how we move through grief collectively and as a community while we were mending. We were sewing and, and patching up, um, different projects and the response that I heard from that workshop was so, so good.
So beautiful. I think that a lot of the initially with Coastal Queers, a lot of the things that a lot of the events that we were hosting focused on just bringing queer people together to experience joy in the region. And, you know, at the same time as we’re working on addressing the very real barriers that exist for queer folks out here, um, when we were coming together with our community, like we just wanted to have fun, you know?
And so that felt like such a great foundation. to kind of run with for a couple of years. And at this point to be able to look at our community and say like there’s enough trust here, there’s enough relationship here that we actually can begin to help each other as a community outside of our personal relationships as, as friends or as you know, people that may know each other outside of this space.
It feels really special to be able to cultivate such a a vulnerable and intimate and carrying an accountable space, uh, for folks to work through things that are, that are tough in our community and to be able to provide that sort of support out here feels, um, really exciting, especially because we’re just at the beginning of the program.
David Archer: Yeah, amazing. So there, there are different types of advocacy that are needed right now, right? There’s queer advocacy, environmental advocacy is another whole topic. How do you think queer advocacy intersects with environmental advocacy? If it does?
Sully Rogalski: I’m so glad you asked this question. We just hosted a Shifting Frameworks for Surf Rider.
Um, this is kind of a specific stream of education that we’ve worked around developing, uh, education specifically for environmental nonprofits or organizations, um, that really seeks to build bridges and connections between kind of the biodiversity, you know, marine bioscience that we see a lot out here.
The environmental work that’s being done to protect and restore the coastline. The sovereignty of the nation, whichever nation you’re doing the work on, whichever nations you’re doing work in. And then queerness, and how queerness builds this thread throughout. And so, I deliver this presentation with one of our board members, Nikki McCarthy, who is from Heshkwet and Hluhlat.
And she is probably somebody that could speak a lot more eloquently to this than I can, but I really see queerness tying these pieces of like environmentalism together because there’s a, there’s a phrase in Tla-o-qui-aht, His-shuk-nish-tsa-waak and it means everything is interconnected or everything is one. And this is something that a lot of businesses have taken, you know, a pledge to understand, a lot of organizations and people in our community. I think, have this idea that yeah, if we, you know, rip up all the trees, the ocean is going to suffer, if we, you know, kill all the bears, then the salmon are going to be, you know, there’s, there’s all these ways that the ecosystem is interconnected, and then there’s all these ways that humans have an impact on the ecosystem.
There’s also this general idea, I think, that you know, maybe in dominant culture that humans kind of sit at the top of this pyramid of, of our world. And I think that a lot more people in our region at least are, are tapped into the idea that humans are just one interconnected component of a much larger ecosystem that’s happening.
I think that environmental stewardship, although it would have been called many different names throughout the course of history has been going on for time immemorial, the same time that queerness has existed for time immemorial. So inevitably there will be pieces that overlap there. And I think that there are people who have been doing this work for a long time in the environmental region, um, or maybe organizations that haven’t really tapped into the solidarity that can exist between many different people working for a just climate transition or for, um, queer rights and how all of these pieces come together.
Like, you just need to look at the cause. You just need to go back. You know, when colonialism happened, who was impacted? Everyone. Okay, so like, at the heart of it, where can we find these threads that connect our mission towards? Like, we don’t all have to be working on the same mission. We just have to be tapping on, like, the mirror in different places until it all cracks.
Because the system is there’s only so much incrementalism will do. Like, we have to have a subversion of the way that society is is existing. Capitalism is not the answer to get us out of the problems that capitalism created. Capitalism, a result of colonialism. So there’s all of these pieces that, you know, whether you’re aware of it in these terms or not, I think we can look side to side and find so much solidarity with people who are working in any given region towards like a future that is more equitable or more just and say like, how do we connect?
David Archer: Yeah.
Sully Rogalski: And the biggest way I would say. That you can do that is just by asking people that are doing different work in your region like what are you doing and listening to them and being like, oh that kind of sounds like what we’re doing over here and so how do we share practices between us or how do we learn from you and you learn from us and that’s just relationship building.
That’s just listening and trying to work together. You know, yeah trying to teach one another.
David Archer: It seems like, you know, it’s interesting you mentioned the, you know, time immemorial from, um, you know, the, the Indigenous side and the queer side. It sounds like part of the job is to listen across cultures in some ways and say, you know, your struggle is also my struggle.
Sully Rogalski: Yeah, absolutely.
David Archer: Yeah.
Sully Rogalski: And how we do that without, like, likening ourselves beyond the point of honesty. Yeah. Like, how we can just witness each other and say, you are impacted by something. You are impacted by a number of things that some of which I’m also impacted by, and they might be impacting me in a different way, but wouldn’t we be stronger if we could recognize both the inherent power dynamics that exist in all of us and in all of our relationships and then create new relationships or, or trust in those relationships to move beyond those power dynamics at an individual level.
That’s how we get to the future.
David Archer: Yeah. Are you seeing signs of hope in Tofino’s? The broader culture of the region.
Sully Rogalski: I suppose one example I think, uh, happening in our region that I’m excited about is. It’s our work with Rising Tide, which is a Nuu chah nulth youth surf group. And we’ve been working with them, uh, kind of peripherally for, for a little bit, but more specifically this summer, um, meeting up with them and having their youth out at our events and running some workshops with them.
And they have a different mission. They have, you know, getting Nuu chah nulth youth in the water is their mission. Our mission is getting queer folks in the water. So obviously our, our overlap on the Venn diagram is queer Nuu chah nulth youth. How do we get them in the water? But more broadly, how do we recognize that anybody getting in the water that is not kind of this maybe stereotype of who we see represented in our surf culture over and over again builds more of a conscience for the visibility that is and isn’t there for different people to access this sport.
And I think that we’ve learned a lot of practices from them. They’ve learned a lot of practices from us. And more than anything, that relationship is there. We just keep keep going with one another. We keep inviting each other in and saying, Is this exciting to you? Does this feel good to you? What’s, okay, what’s your strategic plan?
How can we fit in there? What does our work do that complements one another? How can we always be uplifting and building in aspects of your work so people can find out about it? Because even though we have different missions, Um, there’s so much that we’re doing that contributes, like I said, to that.
We’re going in the same direction, so how do we continue to uplift one another?
David Archer: Yeah. I was wondering if you have any advice for someone trying to set up an organization like Coastal Queer Alliance in their own communities. If you have any thoughts about, you know, especially rural communities.
Sully Rogalski: Yeah. Well, when we started Coastal Queers, we always joke that, uh, we always joke that we started Coastal Queers as a nonprofit because we knew that nobody would just give to queer people money.
And then we started a nonprofit and realized that nobody was going to give our nonprofit money either. So we just took on like a legal entity, um, which has come with its own learning curves. Uh, no, I would say that regardless of if you want to go through a more formalized route like starting a non profit or a charity, that’s going to come with, with legal considerations.
It’s also going to open a lot more grant avenue funding. So if that’s something that you have a background in, maybe that’s an avenue that you want to pursue. It depends on what you’re looking to do, but I would say that at the heart of any queer community is probably just queer people gathering. And so, you know, what can you do even if you, even if it feels small, um, putting up posters around town worked for us.
Um, you know, putting out a post on a trading post. There are other queer people. You are not the only queer person that lives where you live, and there’s varying degrees of safety to be aware of, of what it is like to gather for queer folks right now, especially, I’m thinking globally, down south. And how can you gather in a way that provides you as much safety as you can have, while also knowing that maybe we have to take risks to be in community sometimes, um, because it’s what keeps us alive.
Like, we have to have our people. Yeah.
David Archer: Yeah, those relationships is how we’re going to get through.
Sully Rogalski: I would say just start. Anything you can do to, to call in a friend or have coffee with someone or just put that invitation out there. There’s somebody that will take it.
David Archer: That’s great advice Let’s talk about tourism a little bit.
What’s it like here in peak season in Tofino?
Sully Rogalski: It’s hectic.
David Archer: Okay,
Sully Rogalski: there’s a lot of people you know Tofino if you haven’t visited Tofino before what people would kind of consider this this region there’s kind of a downtown core where a lot of the stores are and shops and restaurants and then following the highway out of town you get to the different beaches along the way And it’s busy everywhere.
Yeah. Yeah, it’s, uh, there’s a lot more going on, maybe, um, with like festivals and events. I think that there’s more to go to. There’s, you know, the days are long. It’s The lines are long at co op.
David Archer: Yeah.
Sully Rogalski: There’s just a lot going on. There’s just a lot of people.
David Archer: Yeah, yeah.
Sully Rogalski: I think that the way that tourism has began to change its marketing in Tofino is definitely for the better.
I think that there’s a huge emphasis now on, or I think that there’s a greater emphasis rather on how tourism can be used to support businesses and people who live in the region and how tourism and the profit from tourism can be reinvested into community initiatives that make it a better place to live as a community member full time.
David Archer: Yeah What has been? What has given you that impression that things are changing?
Sully Rogalski: I know that Tourism Tofino has a, uh, relatively new executive director who I think has really like put things on the right path, um, Brad Parsell and that they’ve also created a new position at Tourism Tofino destination stewardship management, I think.
And it really focuses on, um, that exact thing that I was talking about, like how you balance. You know, tourism as an industry and all of the pros and cons that can bring where you’re looking for the opportunity to build up local community resourcing or reinvest some of that profit that’s coming into the community through tourism for good.
David Archer: Yeah, so you’re seeing some changes with Tourism Tofino. We were talking a little about the biosphere earlier. How do you think tourism affects the biosphere around here? Do you think it’s sustainable in its current form?
Sully Rogalski: It’s tough because whenever there is a lot of people in one place, the infrastructure is going to take a toll.
And so we just had a 50 hour power outage last week. Uh, our sewage pumps stopped working. There is an old growth cedar that falls across the road and cuts off town from the rest of society.
David Archer: Yeah, talk to people who are stranded. Yeah, totally.
Sully Rogalski: And so there’s just things that happen. There’s climate, you know, we’re living in a climate crisis.
And we are out on the coast. We’re on the very tip of, like, this like you just, the road ends here, you know, and so, um, we’re not only, yeah, we’re not only impacted by things that are coming from the ocean, but also by anything that might be happening to cut off the one highway that leads into town. So there’s just things that happen in this region that you can’t control and, uh, having more people here.
At any given time, obviously it means that maybe more people are scrambling. Not everybody that visits here knows that we’re in an active tsunami zone or knows where the highest point of land is. So there’s a lot that comes into play with like emergency preparedness and messaging. I think, you know, I also know that tour or that, uh, Tofino just upgraded its wastewater sewage system.
But for every year prior to that, that had just been dumping raw sewage into the ocean and this place that like the ocean is. Some of the, one of, probably one of the main things we can all agree is important out here, you know? There’s a lot of differences, but I think we all can come to the ocean and say like, hey, let’s protect this one.
David Archer: Yeah, exactly.
Sully Rogalski: And, uh, and so it’s just, it’s, it’s a constant game of catch up. It’s a vicious cycle, you know, the more people, we, we run into droughts almost every summer. And so I know that that’s a really hard thing, like water is an essential, water is essential, water is life. And so when you have such a significant portion of the population that is not living here.
And we’re trying to do things like water our gardens or like shower. And then you know, that there’s a such a high turnover at resorts and they’re changing their pillowcases every day. And you know, it’s tough to reconcile because how do you come up with a solution that is both favorable to the residents, as well as not just actively shutting tourism down in a month when businesses you know, and when it’s the highest, highest rate of people coming, but we don’t have any water.
Like, it’s really like the land is telling us something.
David Archer: Yeah. How do you, what do you think about visitor behavior in Tofino?
Sully Rogalski: I think that there are a lot of people that come to Tofino, uh, that don’t really know about, you know, don’t really know whose land they’re visiting or that it’s Tla-o-qui-aht territory.
Um, and I think that there. There has been a lot of good work done in recent years around really promoting what it looks like to be a good visitor here. How you can help steward these lands, whether it’s participating in a beach cleanup, or whether it’s packing in, packing out, not having fires directly on the sand.
Like, you know, there’s all of these things that contribute to good visitor behavior. Can we anticipate that every person that comes is going to, like, really take that messaging in and understand the importance of of being a good visitor? No, but I think that there is a lot, all that we can do is put out that messaging and continue to market Tofino in a way that says like, you are welcome here in the traditional territory of the Tla-o-qui-aht and, you know, this is what it means to be welcome here.
Um, I think that a lot of that marketing has been done in consultation with Tla-o-qui-aht. And Tourism Tofino and other businesses that market, that market for tourism and I think it’s a good change as opposed to seeing all of these ideas of just come here and get your perfect vacation and experience and it doesn’t matter like if you have the money you can have it all, it’s like, well, money can’t buy you a seat at the table if there’s actually not enough servers to serve you.
David Archer: So, right, it can’t buy you more rainwater.
Sully Rogalski: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
David Archer: Okay, I want to zoom out a little bit if you can put your imagination hat on. What do you hope Tofino is like in 50 years?
Sully Rogalski: I hope Tofino is filled with people who love this place and who love each other, who care about continuing on the right path for climate justice, for queer advocacy, for increasing resources and access for people who are poor, who are disabled, who are marginalized.
In so many ways that this community seems to kind of push to the side right now. I really hope that something kind of turns on its head. I feel like Tofino, this place has had such a long standing history of activism, specifically for environmentalism, but I also, like, once again want to commend the work of Surf Sister of creating a very unique surf scene where you see just as many women in the water as you do men, and that is not the case in many, many surf destinations.
So there’s all of these amazing things that are being done in our region right now. And I hope that the social consciousness just continues to be raised about how we can support one another in doing that work, how we can resource our community so that we are supported as people who live here, and we are also, like, welcoming folks who haven’t visited before, who are visitors.
I always just come back to the fact, you know, when I think about tourism, I’m like, I first experienced this place as a tourist. Many of us did, unless your family lives here, or you grew up here, you know, or you’re from here. All of us are, came here as tourists and then decided to stay. There was something that caught us.
And so I really reject the idea of like localism or like, I think that it’s just not something that I want to take part in the idea that, you know, I have more rights or privileges as someone who’s lived here for longer or something. The Tofino that I came into in 2018 is different than the Tofino that I came into in 2020 is different than somebody who just moved to town today.
And we’re all going to have different ideas of what’s come before and what’s come after, um, or what can come after. But I hope that Tofino just keeps going with the good work that is being done in recognizing. Kind of the ways in which certain narratives have been uplifted in this place to really promote it or bring certain demographics here And how we can continue to poke holes in that narrative so that more and more people can enjoy a beautiful place That is a transformative place and there is so much magic here for everyone.
I hope we can just keep finding abundant ways to share in that together.
David Archer: That’s a wonderful vision. Thanks for speaking with us today, Sully really appreciate it.
Sully Rogalski: Thanks for having me.
David Archer: Great. Is there anything else that you wanted to say to our audience just before we go?
Sully Rogalski: Yeah, if you’re interested in our work, maybe I’ll just highlight, you can find more.
Uh, find out more about us at CoastalQueerAlliance.ca or at our Instagram, at CoastalQueers. And if you want to support a small non profit, you can also hit that donate button. Um, a lot of, uh, our work is grant funded and a lot of our work is crowd funded, so every penny really does make a difference in a small organization.
And to every queer person out there, stay safe. Love you. Take care.
David Archer: Thank you.
Sully Rogalski: Yeah. Thank you.
David Archer: This has been Travel Beyond presented by Destination Think, and that was Sully Rogalski from the Coastal Queer Alliance based in Tofino. For more resources and show notes, visit our website at DestinationThink.com. This episode was hosted, produced, and has theme music composed by me, David Archer, Sarah Raymond de Booy is my co producer, Lindsay Payne, Jamie Sterling, and Cory Price provided production support.
We’d like to thank Tourism Tofino for sponsoring this season of Travel Beyond, and if you like what you hear, please take a moment to give us a 5 star rating, that helps more people find the show. Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back with more next week.
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