Meet The Team

What We Do: Educational Programmes for LGBTQ+ Inclusion

ShoutOut started in 2012 with a question; “Why was school so difficult for us?” The “us” in this case were a group of LGBTQ+ friends in college, thinking back to just a few years previous and discussing how we had all experienced bullying and exclusion in secondary school. The second question was “What can we do about it?”

This is when we started our school workshops as volunteers; going into schools and talking directly with students about the LGBTQ+ community and how to be an ally. This is still the foundation of the work we do, 10 years later.

We have now developed several programmes with the aim of creating a deeper understanding of LGBTQ+ issues. We provide workshops under the following headings: – Youth Workshops – Capacity Building Workshops – Workplace Workshops – Community Workshops – Sports Workshops

The vast majority of our youth workshops take place in secondary schools, the rest taking place in other settings such as youth groups or Comhairle Na nÓg. Capacity building workshops are those that increase a service’s ability to include and support LGBTQ+ people. Workplace workshops are to create inclusive workplaces and Community workshops are open events we hold for anyone to attend. Some of our work encompasses more than one of these categories. For example, we often work with Higher Education Institutions. Here we may be advising on how the HEI can be more inclusive in the services it provides its students such as counselling and sports services. HEIs are also workplaces, so we are also trying to create a welcoming work environment for anyone who works in the HEI.

We also provide workshops to sporting associations and clubs, with the aim of making sports a more inclusive arena for LGBTQ+ people. This is more important than ever, given the high levels of homophobia and transphobia in many sports. This year, too, we’ve been lucky to work with a number of Ireland’s best-known cultural institutions and organisations, to make their work more inclusive of their LGBTQ+ visitors and employees alike.

Regardless of the purpose of our programmes, they are always built upon three key pillars: – Empathy – Education – Empowerment

These pillars are bidirectional: we wish to instil empathy by sharing our own stories, and we extend our empathy to those in our workshops who may have never heard these stories before; we wish to educate participants by exploring complex concepts, and we are educated by participants who share their perspectives with us; we want to empower participants to see the difference they can make in their own environment and we are empowered by them to continue our work.