About
About us
The needs our partnership want to address have their origin in discrimination along with the failure to enjoy human rights.
- To each country of the partnership belongs a varied ranking about respect for human rights and equality: Spain (64,59%) and the Netherlands (61,1%) cover a good position and they could give the example to countries such as Italy (19,96%) and Poland (13,22%) which are placed in a not very recommendable position (ILGA-Europe, 2021).
- These psycho-social issues, according to the psychological literature, can lead to some critical concerns such as (a) depression and anxiety symptoms; a lack of social recognition, which, in turn, can bring to (b) low perceived self-esteem, self-efficacy and underestimation of LGBTQIA+ youth as human capital; hate speech (by politicians in Poland and in Italy and in social media in the Netherlands and in Spain) and violence episodes that induce people to feel (c) the need to hide their sexual orientation or gender identity (i.e. 61% of FRA survey EU respondents always or often avoids even simple displays of affection in public, such as holding hands).
- Last but not least, little or absent satisfaction with the efforts of the government of their own country live in combating effectively prejudice and intolerance against LGBTI people (66% of FRA survey respondents aren’t satisfied), combined with distrust in being able to influence the surrounding social-political context, thus (d) low community empowerment, does not contribute to the future hope of social change towards greater inclusion.
That’s why, it is urgent to go beyond talk, but rather turn these needs (a,b,c,d) into goals for action as the project aims to do.
- “Prevention psychology contributes to evidence-based interventions designed to prevent problems and to strengthen individual and community protections from personal and psychological distress” (Romano, 2015).
According to the mental health intervention spectrum, the LGBTQIA!+ project proposes interventions that are at the same time:
- universal preventive interventions, targeted to a whole population group that has not been identified on the basis of individual risk, in this particular case, youth in general, especially activists and both social workers or workers of the cultural and creative sector, and, indirectly, the greater community.
- selective preventive interventions, targeted to a subgroup of the population whose risk of developing a disorder is significantly higher than average but does not already show any manifest signs of it. With this project, the target of the selective interventions is the LGBTQIA+ community or LGBTQIA+ youth members.
Furthermore, we work inside different ecological systems (made by other target groups of the project) where the individual is inserted and contextualized (Bronfenbrenner, 1992). The individual himself, in this instance, high school students themselves; their microsystem, the volunteering staff (once the student will take part in ASLP); the mesosystem, thereby the interactions between the local volunteering organizations (associated partners) staff and the school staff and, in the end, the macrosystem (society beliefs and policies) influencing with grassroots actions.
