We want to congratulate our Supportive Schools Director Craig White on receiving the 2026 Douglas O. Wilson Rising Tide Leadership Award from The Maine Council on Aging. While Craig’s work at Campaign for Southern Equality is focused on LGBTQ+ youth and school communities, at The Maine Council on Aging, they work to change the culture surrounding aging and fight ageism. This is a perspective we are grateful they bring to our work advancing equality for LGBTQ+ Southernerners.
The Douglas O. Wilson Rising Tide Leadership Award recognizes and celebrates the sustained efforts of people who lift and inspire others to implement innovative solutions to the challenges faced by older Mainers through collaborative partnerships, shared leadership and/or community building initiatives. Craig received the award for helping build, grow, and sustain a culture change movement in Maine and beyond that is reshaping our collective experience of living and aging. In 2021, Craig led the design of the Leadership Exchange on Ageism (LEA), helping the MCOA create a groundbreaking leadership program that has become a catalyst for culture change and engaged more than 500 leaders across the country. Since then, Craig has stewarded LEA’s continued evolution, bringing new thinking, tools, and insight to the program while supporting participants and facilitators as they turn learning into action. His thought leadership, generosity, passion, and compassion have strengthened the MCOA team, deepened LEA’s impact, and helped grow a movement of leaders equipped to recognize, challenge, and ultimately end ageism.
Craig was also featured as the keynote speaker at the MCOA Annual Dinner, where he spoke about the importance of multigenerational spaces, particularly for communities facing political attacks. “Imagine being an eleven year old trans kid and hearing the Supreme Court rule that you have no access to gender-affirming health care, effectively sentencing you to go through puberty as the wrong gender. It makes a difference if you get that news when you’re sitting next to an elder from the Stonewall generation, who remembers when just being trans was enough to get you arrested, or a fifty-something who was part of ACT-UP demonstrations during the AIDS crisis. And the younger generations, meanwhile, have been doing this incredible uncovering and discovering of the full diversity of human gender and sexual identities, which can be both educating and liberating for older adults. My favorite is the ninety-year-old woman I met who told me, ‘Just last year I came out as pansexual, and my life makes so much more sense to me now!'”
The Maine Council on Aging (MCOA) wrote about Craig in their press statement: “Craig White of Craig White Consulting is being honored for helping build, grow, and sustain a culture change movement in Maine and beyond that is reshaping our collective experience of living and aging. In 2021, Craig led the design of the Leadership Exchange on Ageism (LEA), helping the MCOA create a groundbreaking leadership program that has become a catalyst for culture change and engaged more than 500 leaders across the country. Since then, Craig has stewarded LEA’s continued evolution, bringing new thinking, tools, and insight to the program while supporting participants and facilitators as they turn learning into action. His thought leadership, generosity, passion, and compassion have strengthened the MCOA team, deepened LEA’s impact, and helped grow a movement of leaders equipped to recognize, challenge, and ultimately end ageism.”
They concluded: “Together, this year’s honorees show what change looks like — building policies, systems, workplaces, and communities that work better for us throughout our longer lives.”
