Queer-ONline
Start date: May 2, 2016,
End date: Jan 1, 2017
PROJECT
FINISHED
The "Queer-ONline" Training Course will bring together 33 young LGBT activists and youth workers from the wider region North Rhine Westphalia and Tuscany, aged between 18 to 30 years from August, 3th till 08th 2016. Queer-ONline is a follow up initiative of the contact seminar “Same but Different”, which was organized by svls e.V. in Mülheim a.d. Ruhr in November 2014 and the bin-national youth summit “QueeReality”, which took place in Florence in September 2015. QueerTraining is our first international Training Course and our third cooperation with the informal LGBT youth group Gruppo Giovani Glbti* Firenze (GGG). In Germany, enthusiastic groups and small associations joined forces to build up professional structures for LGBT youth work for years. However, LGBT youth work is still a very little workfield and only offered in major cities or in particular regions. Especially in the rural areas there are hardly any opportunities for lesbians, gays and transgenders to live their personal life in the public and to find likeminded people. Especially in traditional (and conservative) regions it’s not common to live homo-, bi- and transsexual relations publicly. Accordingly it’s even harder to gather with likeminded youth, to get active on regional level, to interconnect with other groups and to find appropriate counseling service for the specific situation of LGBT people, e.g. during their puberty and coming out period. Here, serious online offers (that are not commercial or focused on sexual contacts!) are needed to support young LGBT people during their coming out, their time of exploring their own personality and finding their right way of life. With the Queer-ONline Training we want to exchange PR, online communication and social network formats and online activism tools in order to widen our services and to transfer formats and methods (used by svls and GGG) to German and Italian young LGBT activists and youth workers. The main aims of this Training Course are:- to train how to use social media for campaigns that raise gender equality and LGBT rights on regional and European level- to excahnge social media formats and methodologies to widen our online counselling services for young LGBT people- to work out- to work out LGBT campaigns that can be implemented at future EU youth projects, e.g. > seminar and round table formats for political stakeholders and LGBT youth workers/ activists > EU youth summits- to train communication methodologies to be used at international LGBT youth projects- to exchange current German, Italian and European LGBT legal rights situations- to introduce young LGBT activists from Italy and Germany to each other