Trans people-and particularly trans youth-have come to the forefront of political and educational discussions, especially as legislation has aimed to ensure that school personnel act as enforcers of state-level policies targeting trans youth. For this reason, and because research demonstrates that youth in schools form attachments to and receive support from school personnel, our research looks at school personnel's development as allies. By analyzing focus group data following a training workshop, we explore how participants understand their roles as allies to trans and gender non-conforming youth. We found that trans issues were salient and participants expressed new knowledge about and openness towards transgender youth, as well as care and concern for their wellbeing. Nonetheless, many participants retained frames of understanding that relied on trans people as Other and that situated their roles as allies through the frameworks of protection and care. We argue that these understandings of trans youth and the role of allies reinforces cisnormativity, and we push for a more nuanced understanding of allyship that moves beyond knowledge, beliefs, attitudes and intended behaviors as markers of allyship to ensure that allies do not reproduce cisnormativity even in their support of trans and gender non-conforming youth.

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Highlights• LGBT sociopolitical involvement may facilitate community connection and psychological well-being.• Distinct path models operated across racial/ethnic identity groups; intersectional research is key.• LGBT community connection partially or fully mediated effects of outness on well-being.• LGBT community connection fully mediated the effect of LGBT sociopolitical involvement on well-being.• Efforts to promote well-being should consider sociopolitical involvement and community connection.

Agents of change serve as catalysts for stimulating social change, particularly at community and societal levels of analysis. We often think about the characteristics of individuals who act as change agents, such as their capacity to motivate others or their training skills. However, organizations and disciplinary fields can also serve as agents of change. There is an emerging awareness in the fields of public health and community organizing as to how these respective fields can collaborate to leverage their collective insights and skills to become effective agents of change for community health outcomes. Importantly, while public health is concerned with the social determinants that shape health inequities in all communities, community organizing is focused on community issues that residents confront as constraints or problems in their daily lives. There is an inchoate understanding within the fields of public health and community organizing that the social determinants addressed in public health are often the same issues identified and addressed by community organizing groups. Both disciplines work as agents of change through their traditional efforts; however, there is promise in the evolving collaborations between these two fields. Recognition that both fields are addressing the same community phenomena is an important step, but whether collaborations and shared practices become distributed and institutionalized is an open question. Public health possesses research and analytic sophistication capable of identifying different social determinants and the pathways through which such determinants contribute to poor community health outcomes. In contrast, community organizing supplies an understanding of social change that requires the exercise of power through the participation and active engagement by those most directly affected by local issues or social determinants. One tension in this emergent collaborative practice stems from the fact that, at times, these different disciplinary skill sets are at odds. Whereas public health has a deep value of data analysis and expertise, community organizing prioritizes the participation and self-determination of those impacted by community problems. Fundamentally, the tension here is between the value placed on expertise versus the value placed on public participation. Neither value is inherently superior to the other; understanding how these two values can complement one another to address social determinants that shape community health outcomes is critical for realizing the promise of these organizational agents of change.

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