Yeovil Diversity Project is about bringing people together to learn about and from each other, and to work together to benefit the wider community. We work towards this by amplifying voices of marginalised communities as well as creating safe spaces and platforms for those people to express their lived experiences, needs and hopes for the future. Our work to achieve this takes many forms; annual and monthly events, online and local campaigns, outreach programs, as well as working in collaboration with and supporting other local organisations whose aims are in line with our own.
LGBT+ Youth Activism Yeovil is one of YDP’s outreach programs, for school age LGBT+ people and their allies. It is run and overseen by Lou; someone who has a decade of experience working in a Somerset primary school and a lifetime’s experience of being LGBT+, but is bringing these two aspects of her life together for the first time. We’re opening a dialogue with young people via a monthly email newsletter. We want to learn about what is most important to them, how they feel about living in our community and what changes they want to see in the future. Initially we’ve rolled this out to schools with existing LGBT+ groups, but we would also like to encourage other schools to take part and start their own groups for their students benefit.