By Georgy Kalakutskii | Crowdfunding Manager
During the first quarter of 2024, the ComingOut team had to find a way to figure out safe ways to continue our work in Russia without putting the community at risk, while fighting against the queerphobic laws of the Russian government. The anti-LGBT legislation includes a ban on ‘LGBT propaganda’, a Gender Transition ban, and the decision of the Supreme Court proclaiming the so-called ‘LGBT movement’ extremist,
Unfortunately, this kind of state attacks couldn’t have left us without any setbacks. However, in our case it was a rather mild one, where we had to restructure the work of our psychological support team, making sure that every therapist works from abroad. On the other side, the new legislation and specifically the decision on extremism influenced the number of requests we get from the community. Since November, 35% more people applied for psychological help and 50% more asked for legal consultations. For the first time in years, our help couldn’t reach the community within the first two days, queues took 7+ days for people to receive help from a professional.
And that is why the support of our donors was especially meaningful at the beginning of the year. In the first quarter of 2024, our team conducted 866 consultations, where 510 were psychological, 281 were legal and 84 were career help sessions. Moreover, our Monitoring and Advocacy team submitted 5 reports to International Institutes.
Due to the last legislative changes, we are not able to provide any photos of our beneficiaries right now. Linking the organization and a person from the country creates a risk of accusing them of extremism, which is not a position we want to put anyone in.
The important point is, ComingOut doesn’t stop working, please do follow us on the freshened-up English Instagram page to stay in touch with the Russian queer community,
You received this email because once supported us on GlobalGiving. Since then, GlobalGiving has merely been banned in Russia and we lost all the supporters from here. So, if you still find our work important, please do consider donating to us. At this point, as you see, we have a lot of work to do, and thus value every dollar coming from you.
Thank you for your support!
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
Support this important cause by creating a personalized fundraising page.
Start a Fundraiser
