The COVID-19crisis is generating complex challenges for the day-to-day work of LGBTI activist organisations, while it has become clear the global reaction to the virus is hitting marginalised communities disproportionally hard. ILGA-Europe’s three part plan seeks to help LGBTI organisations navigate and adapt to a constantly changing landscape, and work towards the time when the immediate crisis has passed.

The COVID-19 crisis situation is changing every day, and as an LGBTI organisation you are going to want to keep your audience updated about what specifically matters to them. ILGA-Europe’s strategic communications consultant, Sho Konno, gives his key advice for communicating at this time.

While the opponents of LGBTI equality might also be overwhelmed with COVID-19 and focus their attention less on LGBTI groups right now, the digital footprints we leave today will still be around for a long time to come, which could make us more vulnerable after the crisis is over. So, now that most of our activities have moved online, how do we stay safe and secure? Here are tools and tips from the ILGA-Europe Programmes & Policy team.

In every activist organisation, previously solid plans are up in the air as we adapt to a new and never before experienced working landscape. With more questions than answers on the table, our Programmes Director, Bjorn Van Roozendaal

Amid the global outbreak of COVID-19, the fight for the human rights of LGBTI people doesn’t take a break, but how can activists and organisations connect and do their best work from kitchen tables? ILGA-Europe member organisation, All Out, has some answers.

“Sometimes it is necessary to speak clearly from a very personal or intimate point of view,” says intersex activist Ins A Kromminga, co-founder of OII Europe and illustrator of ‘#MyIntersexStory: Personal accounts by intersex people living in Europe’. The 15 beautifully illustrated, but often harrowing stories in this groundbreaking publication speak “a clear and frank language of things that are often hard to speak about”.

Check out these top tips from our management team as they tell their personal stories of suddenly finding themselves working from home.

The surprising success of a Croatian picture book for children last year showed that there may be more allies of rainbow families in the country than headlines about burnt effigies and unsuccessful foster care applications might suggest. In the latest Voices of ILGA-Europe video, we meet an activist and father on the frontlines for same-sex family rights in his native country.

Adopted from Sri Lanka to a family in the Netherlands when she was just ten days old, Cherine Mathot survived childhood cancer which left her with a disability, and she came out as bisexual at the age of 15. In advance of International Women’s Day this coming Sunday (March 8), Cherine tells us how her experiences have informed her work for the LGBTI organisation COC Nederlands.

While joining the EU could be key to helping make gender recognition and same-sex marriage a reality in Western Balkan countries, the blocking of Albania and North Macedonia’s next steps towards membership is having the opposite effect.

ILGA-Europe’s Annual Review identifies a sharp rise in anti-LGBTI hate-speech across the European region, often carried out by public figures. To mark European Day for Victims of Crime (February 22), we report on the ways in which such rhetoric is in turn violently affecting the lives LGBTI people.

While this week Switzerland made hate speech illegal against people based on their sexual orientation, in 2019 one of the trends observed in ILGA-Europe’s Annual Review is a sharp rise in on-and-offline anti-LGBTI hate speech, often from political leaders, across Europe. As our Executive Director, Evelyne Paradis, recently shared at the Google Online Safety Summit, “LGBTI communities need to know that perpetrators of violent speech will be held responsible”.

From the high-powered offices of government, to the vanguard of the Czech Republic’s LGBTI movement, Czeslaw Walek tells his story of activism in action.

February 6 is Sámi National Day, when indigenous communities from the Sápmi region in Finland, Norway, Sweden and Russia commemorate the first Sámi congress, which was held in 1917. LGBTI Sámi activist, Anne Olli tells us what it means to be at the intersection of two minorities –and what you can do to be a Sámi ally!

Over the past few years in Europe and some other parts of the world, we have seen the rise of the ‘anti-gender’ movement, with opposition to LGBTI rights centralised around so-called “gender ideology”.

Even within the LGBTI community, intersex people continue to be overlooked, and that’s something we urgently need to change. Here are our top tips for getting on the right page and supporting the human rights of intersex people!

Watch our video interview with passionate intersex activist, Audrey Aegerter of InterAction Suisse, the first of our ILGA-Europe members from across Europe and Central Asia who talked to us about the great work they’re doing.

Are you an LGBTI activist who will be empowering your community as an organiser in 2020? Here are some key ways to make sure you get it right!

Stronger Together… what did this year’s ILGA-Europe conference theme mean to the 600 LGBTI activist participants who came to Prague in October? And if it is true that we are stronger together, how can we make it happen even more? Our conference reporter and former Executive Director of ILGA-Europe, Patricia Prendiville shares her thoughts, while alongside we share some of the wonderful images documenting this year’s gathering.

Raised in a rainbow family, 34-year-old Sanna Marin will lead a five-party coalition headed entirely by women in Finland. Her experience growing up with same-sex parents will shape her tenure as Finland’s youngest Prime Minister ever.

We put a lot of thought and work into preparing for our first gathering of D/deaf and disabled LGBTI activists in Brussels, but during the […]