Description
In Romania LGBT people and allies are not visible in their fight for equal rights. ACCEPT, the oldest LGBT organization in Romania, lacks a highly developed structure and appropriate means of integrating and training people that want to make a difference and join the cause. Working with volunteers is sometimes difficult and unsatisfying for both sides, volunteers and staff. The objective of the project is to promote LGBT rights by developing ACCEPT Association’s capacity to work with volunteers and LGBT allies’ involvement in ACCEPT’s activities. This project will increase the capacity of ACCEPT to work with volunteers in a systematic and organized way. 12 volunteers will enter a mentoring program and will receive training on areas that will help them develop their own initiatives. 5000 allies will be reached through at least 2 initiatives of our volunteers. We will be assisted in our project by 2 experts in communications and non-formal education but also by experts that we usually work with in areas of law and education.
Summary of project results
In Romania, LGBT people and allies are not visible enough in their fight for equal rights. ACCEPT, the oldest LGBT organisation in Romania, lacked a highly developed structure and appropriate means of integrating and training people that want to make a difference and join the cause. This project started from ACCEPT Association’s need of developing better volunteering programmes for those who want to bring their contribution to their cause. The association was already working with volunteers but they were involved scarcely, without any strategies for development and learning. The entire volunteering process has been built together with the volunteers, so they were involved in planning and developing the volunteering department - the learning process, the initiatives developed and the general way of working. Through this project the Promoter managed to build the capacity of almost 40 volunteers that learned about LGBT activism and human rights. They developed a volunteering system based on autonomy and formed 3 volunteering initiatives: QUEERO - an online space dedicated to LGBT culture, QSpace - organising events for the LGBT community and Rainbow Families - a support group for parents and families of LGBT children. All 3 initiatives organised periodic events and produced contents about culture, history and human rights for LGBT empowerment. Both the association and the volunteers needed some structure and a better approach towards volunteering and this project helped them evolve towards that direction. Having a person dedicated to coordinating the volunteers, the Promoter succeeded to organise itself in order to manage new people who wanted to volunteer at ACCEPT but also those who were already volunteers and needed support and motivation. Volunteers were constantly supported by ACCEPT employees that functioned as mentors for them in their development. After this project, volunteers know better the association, its programmes and its vision towards activism. Through these 3 initiatives, ACCEPT managed to train activists for LGBT rights and to grow the level of involvement of the society in LGBT initiatives. They reached almost 10,000 people in Romania during the activities developed within the project.
Summary of bilateral results