12 Feb

Who Are Brighton and Hove City Council’s LGBT Workers Forum (LGBTWF)?

Posted by Guest Writer

Guest Post by Holly Smith

Brighton and Hove City Council’s LGBT Workers Forum (LGBTWF) celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. The forum is open to any council staff that identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. The management of the LGBTWF is undertaken by an elected steering group of six staff, that attempts to reflect the demographic membership of the forum.

We aim to support LGBT staff through a mentoring scheme, as well as networking and social events, such as our annual attendance at Pride, and our recent Winter Social held at Project 56, which raised over £300 for the LGBT Switchboard. We also provide information and hold events for council staff, such as our first LGBT conference, which took place in March last year.

We work hard to eliminate the homophobic, biphobic and transphobic experiences that some of our members’ experience. We recognise we have made some impact, however we still feel there is some way to go. We proudly recognise the achievement of becoming the top performing local authority in the Stonewall Workplace Equality Index 2012, however we recognise that Stonewall’s work does not include trans people, so we are working pro-actively with trans members of staff as well as other external groups and organisations to identify ways to improve workplace equality for trans people.

We also engage and support in partnership working with local LGBT charities, organisations and events, such as ‘Allsorts Youth Project for Holocaust Memorial Month, and the currently running ‘Ourstory’ LGBT history charity exhibition in Brighton Jubilee library as part of LGBT History Month.

Also for LGBT History Month we are hosting a groundbreaking debate with high profile speakers, which will try to build bridges between faith communities and the city’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. The event – ‘Swords into Ploughshares: Building Bridges between the LGBT and Faith Communities’ – is on Wednesday 15 February from 6.30pm to 9.30pm at Brighton Unitarian Church in New Road, Brighton. Please email lgbtworkersforum@brighton-hove.gov.uk or phone 01273 291280 if you would like to book a place at this free event.

The LGBT Workers Forum can also be found on twitter at:  @LGBTWF

 

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 12th, 2012 at 11:00 am and is filed under Community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.