A Growing Legacy

In 2023, Belong To, the organisation supporting LGBTQ+ youth, leaves its teen years and turns 20. Iarfhlaith O’Connell celebrates the impact it has had on Irish society and shares their own experience with an iconic and beloved institution.

Belong To Youth Services is self described as “The national organisation supporting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI+) young people in Ireland. Since 2003, we have worked with LGBTI+ young people, between 14 and 23 years, to create a world where they are equal, safe, and valued in the diversity of their identities and experiences. We also advocate and campaign on behalf of young LGBTI+ people, and offer a specialised LGBTI+ youth service with a focus on mental and sexual health, alongside drug and alcohol support. We respond to the needs of LGBTI+ young people in Ireland and we help them thrive.”

I made my Belong To debut in 2015. Like many teenagers at that time I had been emboldened by the buzz of the marriage referendum to come out, have my first relationship with a woman and to seek out community in ways that I hadn’t previously considered. I was brought to Outhouse by my first (short lived) girlfriend to a Belong To Sunday event in which all queer people involved in the organisation from ages 14-24 gathered to attend a workshop discussing anything from sex education to political history to theories on queer fandom. I was admittedly very overwhelmed by the whole thing, as someone who was not yet fully formed and who had not engaged much outside of their 300-person, mostly straight, secondary school environment. I found the scene hard to process.

The Outhouse basement vibrated with constant noise, colour, and the whispers and excitement of the drama of young queer relationships. (Not, as I have learned, that adult queer relationships are any less insane.) I don’t remember speaking to many people for the beginning months, outside of my now-just-friend who had brought me. I kept returning to the Sunday events despite my persistent awkwardness and over time, as everyone who spent time there did, began to get to know the Youth Workers that were running these events. At that time it was Seán Frayne and Ger Roe who really encouraged me to participate and follow the things that interested me both within and outside the Belong To space. By the time it got to the summer of 2016 I was attending much more frequently, including the mid-week groups, specifically Ladybirds- a group that was labeled for “Queer Gals and Non-Binary Pals”.

Ladybirds, then facilitated by Ger Roe, is where I really started to consider and explore not just my sexual and gender identities, but more generally the type of person that I wanted to grow up to be and what I wanted to invest my time and energy into. That summer in Ladybirds I met my partner, who I am now living in Oxford with, which completely altered my worldview. Having Ladybirds and other Belong To events where we could go at 16 and 17 years old and feel completely safe to be together once or twice a week was so important to us and is a privilege that has not been historically, or presently, afforded to queer couples of any age, but particularly young people. We both became Peer-Educators together and were the only queer women to take Seán Frayne’s In the Know gay men’s sex education course for the purposes of furthering our abilities as community educators. At this point I had long left behind my initial shyness and social fear, which I nearly wholly attribute to the support and spaces that Belong To staff created for me during those years.

My partner and I still frequently discuss how we have carried on so much of what we learned into our adult lives, professionally and personally. We are both currently writing theses focusing on lesbian and trans communities, specifically from an Irish perspective, and have consistently centred education and community building in every aspect of our lives to the extent that my partner is working for a social research organisation and I am working for a community organisation that advocates for people with learning disabilities where I use the skills I acquired as a Peer-Educator everyday. We often also share stories with our friends and colleagues of the more emotional experiences that stuck with us, such as the first time we saw an older lesbian couple with their own child. Regardless of whether or not that is the future you want, at that time we still so rarely saw adult queer people thriving and creating their own family structures in our day-to-day lives, and having that around us made the future feel more concrete.

The couple in question were Belong To CEO Moninne Griffith and her wife Clodagh Robinson. In her last eight years as CEO, Moninne has stood out as an incredibly strong and caring activist, advocate and role model for young queer people in Ireland, one of her most prominent traits being that she does not shy away from dealing with the tougher sides of the work that Belong To needs to do. Belong To and its staff have given me and countless others a varied education, endless support, encouragement and opportunities that many of us would never have received otherwise, which is why it’s so important that it continues to grow and that its 20 years of hard work are highly celebrated. I was delighted to get to sit down and talk to Moninne about the past, present and future of one of Ireland’s most important LGBTQ+ services.

Moninne shared, “I joined the team here in 2015 after having been the Director of Marriage Equality. Belong To had always been on my radar, particularly because I worked with Michael Barron (former CEO) and David and Gillian and Oisin (youth workers) and young people in the service around the Marriage Equality referendum. I was a big fan of their work and how they conducted it and I was also really impressed with the young people and their agency.

“Actually when the job came up I first, I originally said ‘No, I don’t think I have the skillset for that’ - very typical for a woman of my generation - but Michael was saying, ‘No do it! Do it! Go for it! There are good people in there who can run the youth service, you just need to be the face and bring in the money and do the comms!’ So finally I said ‘Well okay, I can do that.’ Nearly eight years later I’m here, there’s a whole new team and the work that we do with young people is still at the core of it.”

As the organisation celebrates a very special milestone this year, Moninne brought us back to the beginning and explained the roots of 20 years of supporting young people. “It came about because back then in Dublin, Dr Michael Barron was working in a homelessness service and a lot of young queer people were coming in who were experiencing homelessness. They were being sent to him because he was the known gay guy on staff, and he decided to get together with some other activists in Dublin and set up Belong To as a place for young queer people to come and be themselves and to find community and camaraderie, to make friends and just be a place they could feel safe.

“The concept of this 20 years ago was very innovative and very radical and was not well received by some factions of Irish society. There was a lot of backlash from the church and the more conservative branches of Irish society. I think it was because it was visibly working with young people that it set things off -I won’t say anything about the church being worried about young people! -Anecdotally I heard that there used to be people throwing holy water at staff and young people going into the building. They were weird times.”

Moninne explained the core of the work Belong To does - “What we do is called critical social education, so it’s about educating young queer people and young people who are exploring their sexual identity or gender identity about the world that we live in. We discuss power dynamics, the overall structure and why homophobia, transphobia, sexism, racism, and all these things impact our lives. We aim to provide them with the tools and ideas to kick start their own lives as agents of positive change. These core goals inform all our work, our values, how we do our campaigning, our comms, our advocacy. Young people’s voices must be central, everything must be rooted in their experience.

“The other part of the work that we do is around lobbying and building capacity for our communities, creating safe spaces. Still, the number one issue for LGBTQ+ young people is coming out and the fear of rejection, the consistent low hum of ‘What kind of prejudice am I going to experience today?’ Our vision is to try to empower different sectors to understand and deal with this so we work with schools, with youth services and, later on this year, we are beginning to work with family support services and social services, as well as services in the drug and alcohol sector and the homeless sector, to make sure that all the staff, from the person who answers the phone or opens the door to the CEO, know what it’s like to grow up LGBTQ+ at the moment in Ireland. We want them to understand the particular needs of individuals in our community and even if they’re not able to help immediately we want them to know where to sign post young people.”

Moninne spoke a lot about young people being at the forefront of their work but obviously who those young people are is constantly changing. With that in mind, does Belong To find that the work and the day-to-day happenings constantly change as issues differ for different age groups?

Moninne offered an emphatic “Yes!” 

“As visibility grows and people become more aware of their sexual orientation and gender identity at a much younger age, what we’re finding, though certainly not universally, particularly in rural communities, is that we deal with more young people who have a disability or a mental health problem or come from different backgrounds, ethnicities, races, that makes it even more difficult for them to be LGBTQ+. At one stage it would have been quite white, Irish, middle class or working class young people who we saw here and a lot of them once they felt accepted and got a level of support sailed off on their way. We’ve had to up-skill and learn how to make our service more inclusive, learning about universal design etc, which ultimately, all these things serve everyone better. We’ve had to become more cognisant and see how intersectionality comes into play.”

When future generations look back at our LGBTQ+ history, there is no doubt Belong To will figure heavily. Moninne shared her own thoughts on how the organisation will be remembered in the movement for positive change: “I think we have played a central role in things like the LGBT Youth Strategy, the LGBT Inclusion Strategy and we are going to be known for fundamentally changing society by making spaces safe and inclusive and welcoming for LGBTQ+ young people and for having contributed largely to people’s understanding about trans people and nonbinary people’s experiences. So many young people will have gone through Belong To who will go into positions of leadership in all sectors and that will hopefully mean our influence and our impact will be felt in lots of different ways.”

Happy birthday, Belong To, here’s to the next 20.