Solidarity Foundation aims to strengthen community leadership among sexual minorities and sex workers, who live in small towns and villages surrounding Bangalore, India. Also, they advocate their cause to policy and opinion makers, and media.
With our funding, a project has been set up that was specifically aimed at building the capacity of leaders from the communities, in order to strengthen their organization and work. To achieve this, a series of workshops was organized on the topics of inclusion, capacity building of community based organizations and sexual minority activism.
In these workshops, community based leaders were taught how they can challenge human rights violations and inequality, as well as how to engage with social structures and institutions to undertake advocacy activities.
Project results
3 different workshops were organized:
- Redefining inclusion
This workshop aimed to encourage urban/privileged LGBTI-community members to understand the realities of less privileged sub-communities. Topics that were discussed included caste discrimination, ageism, religious discrimination, non-binary identity discrimination and discrimination experienced by disabled people. The workshop was attended by 20 people. - Capacity building workshops
These workshops helped local community based organizations to develop key strategies on crisis response/intervention, increase their legal knowledge and reflect on their achievements and challenges. 40 community based organization leaders from Karnataka, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh attended these workshops. - Listening to Multiple Voices: Sexual Minorities Activists Speak
This workshop allowed the opportunity to reflect on the ongoing changes with regard to sexual minorities in the fields of policy and law, religion and education, media, as well as within sexual minority communities. This workshop brought 20 people together, ranging from academics to grassroots activists, from various states of India.
Community workers and activists:
- were assisted in their core work of promoting social change through the collective action. They realized how they can challenge human rights violations and inequality;
- were supported in developing a broad perspective to understand social structures and institutions (such as family, religion, media) and they engaged with these in order to undertake advocacy on behalf of marginalised LGBT members and sex workers;
- revisited their organization’s vision, mission and activities to ensure that they are relevant and clear;
- were equipped to document human rights violations with strategies to take action against these violations;
- were strengthened their practical skills, like report writing, book keeping, organizing meetings etc.
