No: 17 BelongTo

In 2001 OutYouth convened a community consultation. At this time I was an outreach worker with the Gay Men’s Health Project and worked to coordinate a cross-community group to explore supports for LGBT young people. My own drive came in part from my experience of working with some extraordinary homeless queer youth in the late 1990s. I wanted us to create something solid and sustainable and a base from which to advocate for change. We quickly set some principals that were to direct what was to become BeLonG To. We agreed that what we were establishing would:

• Be a social change organisation and would work to combat inequality as experienced both by LGBT+ youth and by other excluded peoples. There is no Equality without Equality for All.

• Be a youth empowerment organisation – we would support activism and leadership.

• Be an organisation that would present a positive image of what it meant to be LGBT+ and young – images that would inspire young people sitting in bedrooms and on buses across the country. GCN played a huge role in this!

• Set the lower age limit at 14, and not the age of consent, 17. We would not engage notions that young people needed to be older to access an LGBT+ youth support than they needed to be to access a mainstream support service.

• Be an organisation that worked to be fully inclusive of trans young people and families.

• Be an organisation that paid particular attention to supporting the most marginalised LGBT+ young people in our community – including those experiencing violence in the home, who were refugees, members of the Travelling Community, and those with disabilities.

Living out these principles and ideals meant that within months of launching we were on the front page of a Sunday newspaper – the headline: ‘Church Anger As Gay Campaign Targets Schools’. There were calls in the Dáil for the organisation to be defunded. What we stood for and the scale we were willing to engage on was deeply threatening to the status quo. But we didn’t close and quickly enough BeLonG To grew. I believe that this came about because of the organisation’s foundational radical imagination. We all dared to imagine the world and our institutions not as they were but as they should be. We all trusted that others would join us on the journey. And they did – in their tens of thousands.