Description
The project focuses on the prevention of violence and bulling of young LGBT people, prevention of suicidal attempts, drug abuse and depression amongst these people. A special attention will be paid to LGBT people belonging to the Roma minority in the Czech Republic. The project’s goal is to create a web portal, whose functions will consist of: provision of reliable information about coming-out, questions connected to sexual orientation and bullying and violence. The second function of the portal will be counseling. Along with the youth (Roma and transgender) organizations aiming at the LGBT community we will provide a peer to peer counseling and a crisis intervention for the portal clients. The project will also include working with specialists in the field of psychology, psychotherapy and social work. We will train 150 specialists and create a list of those working with LGBT people or are sensible of their problems. Through a nation-wide campaign we wish to draw attention to the fact that homophobic behaviour, conscious or not, can lead as far as to a suicide of the LGBT person.
Summary of project results
We focused on the prevention of violence and homophobic bullying of LGBT people. By creating a peer mentoring portal inspired by Norwegian experience, LGBT persons in crisis have been provided with a place that not only offers serious information but, in particular, allows communication with peer mentors, who are individuals with a similar life experience. Throughout the project, the portal received 96,604 visits and 40 mentors were approached by 1,168 people, most of whom came from outside of Prague and were under 25 years of age. The subject matter of the contacts mostly included problems with internal and external coming-out. Mentors also solved cases of homophobic bullying and helped four people with suicidal tendencies. Our activities also involved a massive campaign targeting young people. Our video has been watched by 50,000 people, we distributed 10,000 leaflets and our articles or banners have been read and seen by 21,000 people. Ester Janečková became the patron of the project, helping the publicity of the project greatly. We also focused on the training of mentors (six training sessions) and professional staff (five trainings throughout the Czech Republic were attended by 68 people). The experience from a year’s operation of the portal has shown that such a place had been considerably missing in the Czech Republic. Prague Pride will continue running the portal after the end of the project.
Summary of bilateral results
The project was supported by knowledge and experience of two excellent Norwegian organizations. Oslo pride provided us with their knowledge and experience on how to run a successful campaign combating homophobic bullying and how to use pride events to pass the message to the general public. Skiev Ungdom shared their knowledge and experience with how to successfully run a help line for LGBT in crises. The Czech team has visited both organizations in Oslo. Representatives of both organizations shared also their knowledge and experience in Prague during Prague Pride 2015. Thanks to our partnership we have managed to improve both outreach of
www.sbarvouven.cz to general public as well as peer mentoring services provided through the portal. Partnership with both organizations, but especially with Oslo Pride continues also after the end of the project. We keep sharing our knowledge on successful public awareness campaigning. This bilateral partnership most certainly strengthened capacity of Prague Pride to implement and run peer mentoring portal for LGBT people in crisis and to run successful public awareness campaign.