Working with city partners and International Funding to improve LGBT+ awareness

Our second Rainbow Connections training event

Leeds's second Rainbow Connections LGBT+ training event took our conversation outside Leeds City Council to engage with partners in the wider city.

Rainbow Connections is a project funded by the Council of Europe's Intercultural Cities Programme. It brings together Leeds and the municipality of Oeiras in Portugal, and involves the two local authorities working with their LGBT+ staff and local non-governmental organisations in a series of awareness-raising sessions bringing together LGBT+ people and the wider community.

This session was held at Leeds Beckett University’s Knowledge Exchange, and brought together participants from Leeds’s universities and higher education sector, as well as people from Leeds’s Sudanese and Hong Kong diaspora communities.

This session differed from our first. As it was seeking to engage with external organisations, we held it outside of working hours.

One of our first challenges was who and where to promote the event to, since we sought receptive audiences who would find the learning useful.

Thankfully, Leeds City Council is embedded in a range of networks to help get the message out, including:

The Leeds LGBT+ Hub

The Leeds Inclusive Anchors Network

West Yorkshire Police

The Leeds Migrant Access Project

Third sector partners including Leeds City of Sanctuary, LS14 Trust, Chapel FM, Migrant Action, and the Leeds Asylum Seekers Support Network 

We also ran the event after working hours, recognising that participants from external organisations might find it more difficult to attend during the main working day.

Numbers at this event were lower than at our internal event, and clearly, identifying ways to secure participation is an area for learning, when we try this kind of event in future.

Nevertheless, the quality of the discussion clearly benefitted from the lower numbers, with attendees commenting: “We liked how conversational it was, and the mixture of data and lived experience”, “Hearing lived experience from different people”, and welcoming the “Safe, friendly atmosphere”.

As organisers, we found the diversity of the attendees prompted serendipitous intercultural conversations about cultural heritage and gender roles, as well as how LGBT+ allies can make their allyship meaningful.

The Council of Europe's Intercultural Cities Programme supports cities and regions in reviewing and adapting their policies through an intercultural lens and developing comprehensive intercultural strategies to manage diversity as an advantage for the whole society. Leeds has been a member of Intercultural Cities since 2019.

The Council of Europe is a pan-European international organization focused on promoting human rights, democracy, and the rule of law across the continent. It's not part of the European Union, although it shares some member states. Established in 1949, it has 46 member states. The UK is a founding member.