Call for participants: Solidarity and Skills for Communicating through Crisis

About Get Ready!

Get Ready! is a 2-day ILGA-Europe learning event on crisis communications for LGBTI organisations in Europe and Central Asia. It will take place on 3-6 May, 2024.

By working with LGBTI movements in Europe and Central Asia, we learned that crisis communications support is a priority for many LGBTI organisations and groups in the region. We know that this year might bring new challenges for the movement. And we know that many of you are already strategising and looking into ways to stay resilient.

This learning event on crisis communications will support your organisation in preparing for specific challenges or potential disruptions related to the activities you’ve planned or foresee this year.

What you will get from the training:

• Deeper understanding on what is a communications crisis, and how your team can prepare for one.
• Experience: solidarity scenario-based exercise that will help to learn by doing.
• Deeper understanding of the challenges other organisations face and ways to deal with them.

The programme will be shared with selected participants closer to the event. Here is what you can expect it to cover:

• A chance to share the communications threats that worry you in a supportive and private environment with your peers, to be listened to, and to have supportive advice and coaching on ideas for you to implement.
• A scenario-based exercise on crisis comms that ILGA-Europe designed and piloted with a group of grantee partner organisations in 2023. In this safe, supportive scenario exercise we will roleplay together a response to a developing communications crisis based on the experiences of LGBTI activists. We will facilitate and give tips about Preparation, Monitoring, Escalation, Diagnosis, and Response, but what you choose to do is up to you. Because it is better to practise in private than be unprepared in public.
• Discussions on solidarity in crisis communications. We believe that in crisis communications solidarity and connectedness are especially important: we are often affected by each other’s communications, and peer solidarity and amplification can make our individual crisis responses more impactful.
• Signposting to further resources and the potential of more follow-up coaching after the gathering.
• Networking and mutual learning with a group of 25 LGBTI activists from across Europe and Central Asia.

At the event, we will focus on the external communications aspects of crisis situations or disruptions to our activism. Please note that working through security aspects (safety, cybersecurity, internal communications, etc) won’t be prominently featured in this event’s programme. 

Practical details

Dates: 3-6 May, 2024

• 3 May: arrival
• 4-5 May: full-day event programme, with joint dinner on 4 May
• 6 May: departure. Please note that departure in the evening of 5 May is also possible provided that you attend the whole event.

Language: English

Number of participants: 25

Location: Location will be shared with selected participants^[1]. In choosing the location, we were guided by visa regime, availability of decent travel itineraries for participants from across Europe and Central Asia, past experience of ILGA-Europe and our members in organising events there, as well as consultation with local activists.

Costs:

• ILGA-Europe will arrange accommodation in shared rooms with breakfast with arrival on 3 May and departure on 6 May for all participants;
• The programme will include joint lunches on 4-5 May, organised by ILGA-Europe, as well as a joint dinner;
• Per diem offered in cash at the event will cover the rest of the meals and subsistence on 3-6 May;
• Travel costs will be reimbursed by ILGA-Europe after the event, upon full attendance. Once your participation is confirmed, you will need to arrange your travel within the budget parameters of the event. Participants coming from organisations working without any funding and therefore unable to pre-book tickets for their delegates can be exempt from this requirement. More information will be shared with participants once the selection is made.

Accessibility:

• We aim at ensuring that this event is accessible for everyone in attendance. Please share your accessibility needs in the application form so that we can take them on board.

Trainers and facilitators

• Svetlana Zakharova, Senior Programmes Officer, ILGA-Europe

Before joining ILGA-Europe, Svetlana Zakharova worked with the Charitable Foundation Sphere and the Russian LGBT Network as a communications officer. Within ILGA-Europe, Svetlana coordinates the Strategic Communications programme.

• Sho Walker Konno, Strategic Communications Consultant for ILGA-Europe

Sho Walker-Konno is a communications coach for activists. He has coached activists in 70+ countries, for the past four years specialising in advising reproductive justice and LGBTI groups dealing with the ‘anti-gender’ opposition.  

Who is invited to apply

LGBTI organisations and groups from across Europe and Central Asia are invited to join by delegating a participant to apply for this event.

Get Ready! is meant for your organisation if:

• Your organisation/group is based and works in Europe and Central Asia^[2] and needs to build its capacity to run crisis comms in connection to specific planned activities and/ or foreseen external challenges in 2024;
• The foreseen challenge and case that you are coming to the event with is concrete and real: it can be anything from a challenging first Pride festival in a non-capital city that you or another organisation is hosting later this year, to national elections that are expected to stir anti-LGBTI sentiments;
• You can explain why your organisation expects these challenges to emerge and how new knowledge and skills can mitigate the risks;
• Your organisation and you already have some experience in or exposure to crisis communications. We do not expect any extensive expertise but rather some past experience where your organisation needed to engage in crisis comms, whether successfully or not (it can be as simple as experience of working with negative comments online);
• Your organisation has the capacity to follow up on the event and integrate new knowledge in its work; you, as the delegated participant, are supported by your organisation to dedicate time to the event, attending it in full, and to bring the knowledge back to the team.

For Get Ready! to be a truly enriching experience, we aim at bringing together a pool of diverse participating organisations and activists in terms of profiles, identities, experiences, and geography. To make sure that there is a diversity of experiences, we invite a maximum of one person from an organisation or group to apply.

How to apply

To apply, you need to complete and submit the application form to Svetlana Zakharova at svetlana@ilga-europe.org by March 10, 2024, midnight (CET). Please indicate the title of the event (Get Ready!) in the subject line.

All applicants will be informed about the outcomes of the selection process on March 20 the latest.

If you have any questions about Get Ready!, do not hesitate to reach out to Svetlana via svetlana@ilga-europe.org

^[1] If the location affects your decision to apply, please contact Svetlana Zakharova (svetlana@ilga-europe.org), and we will let you know privately the location.

^[2] For this call Europe and Central Asia is considered to include the following countries: Albania, Andorra, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Moldova, Romania, Russian Federation, San Marino, Serbia, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, United Kingdom and Uzbekistan.