Our community work over 2019-20

This has been another busy and eventful year for us, engaging with people from across the LGBT+ community and throughout the life course. There have been many new developments and highlights. Alongside the very strong delivery of our more established Community, Trans, Mental Wellbeing and LGBT Age (50+) programmes, we’ve also continued to develop newer initiatives. Our two-year LGBT Dementia Project gathered pace, including through a secondment from Alzheimer Scotland, and the work of See Me Proud has grown from strength to strength, boosted by a new cohort of champions. One of the year’s highlights has been LGBT Age’s short film Return to the Closet?; made in collaboration with Luminate it reflects on the hopes, fears and aspirations of older LGBT people in relation to care.

Much of the focus of our policy work has been on mental health, including our National Conversation on Mental Health events, as well as continuing to support our community’s involvement in the campaign for Gender Recognition Act reform.

We remain strongly focused on responding to the needs of our communities. After increased engagement with asylum seekers and refugees, we scoped the acute needs of this section of our community, and secured funding for a ground-breaking Glasgow-based LGBT Refugee Project, which launched in March 2020.

We showcased our vibrant and increasingly well-established Glasgow work at our Well Proud Information Event in the City Chambers. However, in spite of the successful development of these services, and the growing demand, we continue to lack statutory funding for our Glasgow work. This means programmes remain reliant on precarious funding, and are proving hard to sustain. In contrast, we’ve continued to secure public sector contracts to deliver much of our Edinburgh-based work.

Organisationally, we have continued to focus on promoting the health and wellbeing of staff and volunteers. And our Accommodation Working Group has been looking at the organisation’s premises, with an initial focus on the relocation of our Edinburgh office base. At the end of the period covered by this annual report we entered lockdown. Our staff and volunteers responded to this unprecedented challenge immediately and with great creativity and resourcefulness, enabling us to move within days to remote service delivery. As well as moving our group delivery online, and providing one-to-one support remotely, we extended the hours of our LGBT Helpline Scotland and set up a new outreach Telefriending Service. Our key message to the LGBT+ community has been: “We are still here for you – we have suspended face to face services and events, but we are not stopping our work.”

This year, more than ever, we would like to pay credit to our amazing staff, volunteers, and board members for their tremendous commitment to supporting Scotland’s LGBT community. It is thanks to their effort and dedication that over the last year we have been able to continue to provide an excellent service for the community, even through the challenges of Covid-19.

We are extremely proud of everything we have collectively achieved over the last year. We could not have done this without the support of our many partners, and most crucially the engagement of so many wonderful and diverse individuals from across Scotland’s LGBT+ community.

Read full annual report 2019-20