A Birds Eye View: Behind the scenes with April Duval

By Avery Friend February 8, 2022

“Oh, boy—I’ve got to do math,” April Duval says, laughing, when asked how long she’s been volunteering with MaineTransNet (MTN).

She starts counting backwards. “2016? No, I think it was the end of 2015. My husband Ty was co-facilitating a trans and significant others meeting, meaning that if you were a trans person attending you could bring a significant cis person in your life to share. I started attending, and then…”

She’s been busy since then. In the fall of 2022 April, who uses she/her pronouns, was elected to her third term as MTN Secretary, one of the five positions of the Executive Committee. She also chairs the Capacity Team, whose primary focus is identifying organizational needs and ensuring necessary resources. 

Both the organization and the available resources have grown tremendously in April’s time with MTN, which was comprised entirely of volunteers when she first started volunteering. “There were these two coinciding movements happening,” she says about her earlier days with MTN. “As the organization grew exponentially, the things that we could do and have capacity for expanded. In the meantime, this social and political shift was happening, and the organization really became more advocacy-focused and started exploring legislative work.” 

Witnessing and participating in MTN’s ongoing and tremendous growth has proven to be invigorating and important to her own life and wellbeing. “Being a part of the active building of internal infrastructure to support our work has been an honor,” she says. “It’s been an unexpected but necessary channel for my feelings of helplessness and anger that arise from watching the intensified attacks on trans rights in the past decade.” 

April pictured with husband Ty (MTN Co-Chair) at an event at the Blaine House in 2019.

As the organization grew and trans rights became a national hot-topic, the community’s needs and MTN’s capacity to explore new areas of focus did as well. “Mutual aid specifically for the trans community developed significantly,” April says, pointing to MTN’s legislative work, youth programming, and the name change fund as examples that stick out in her mind. These new ways of engaging contributed to increased volunteer interest, and ultimately led to the current work teams.

“We realized that our focuses fit into certain categories, and initially created the work teams as a way to funnel volunteers based on their skill sets and interests,” April explains, listing the Care Team and the rural and QTPOC caucuses as examples. “So this way we were able to separate [our areas of focus] and also make sure that the voices that needed to be coming through from different communities within the trans community had a chance to do so.”

April’s role as MTN’s secretary positioned her well to step up as chair of the Capacity Team. As a volunteer who works closely with staff in her role on the Executive Committee, her finger was already on the pulse of many of the organization’s inner workings and what resources were needed to support MTN’s programs and goals. 

“We have a bird’s eye approach—we’re looking at the whole organization from thirty thousand feet,” she says of the Capacity Team, whose work is informed by regular staff reports on development and fundraising, volunteer metrics and recruitment drives, and initiatives such as the Safe Combinations thrift store. “At the same time, each individual volunteer on the ground is just as important to focus on.”

Her own goals for the Capacity Team in 2023 focus on supporting, recognizing, and creating new opportunities for those individual volunteers. Specifically, she’s thinking about ways to increase accessibility and offer different types of professional development for volunteers. 

A common site in committee meetings: April doing her best to take notes around her cat.

“One of my bigger projects for this year is to create a phone bank,” she says. “I think that having a phone bank would be a way to recognize that there are certain volunteer activities that just aren’t going to work for certain folks, and this would be something that rural folks, for example, can do from home. Functionally, it would be incredibly helpful, and there are layers of professional development that can happen from that new creation—folks can develop their skills in legislative advocacy, or develop their fundraising skills by doing donation calls.”

She also wants to explore new ways to recognize the work volunteers do and build connections both between different work teams and between volunteers and staff. “I’d really love to see the Capacity Team be a platform for any volunteer to be able to show up and have a space to talk,” she says. “Whether it’s a new idea they’d like to implement, a success they want to share with a leadership arm of the organization—pretty much every staff member is usually in our meetings, so it’s a great way of things to zoom right up the informational pathway.” 

Outside of her leadership roles, April has been a member of MTN’s rural caucus. “I’ve lived in different parts of rural Maine for most of my life, by choice,” she says. “I love it. It’s difficult, but it’s beautiful.” She and her husband Tyler, who serves as Junior Co-Chair on MTN’s Steering Committee, share a love of gardening and a dedication towards building a self-sustaining lifestyle. She’s deeply passionate about reproductive justice, and her activism and advocacy outside of MTN includes working with Planned Parenthood around reducing abortion stigma. She’s also a talented musician and is eager to return to performing live.

She’s also eager to see what’s next for MTN, which continues to grow, serve, and build community across Maine. “The most rewarding part of my volunteer experience has been bearing witness to the phenomenal and exponential growth in members, people served and supported by our work, scope of impact/projects, and volume of the voice of our organization in the world,” she says. “I am humbled to share space with such amazing leaders, and grateful for the opportunity to be a part of something so powerful and important.”