Connect
Empower and listen to your staff and volunteers
Change happens through people. If you’re trying to make your service more accepting and safe for rainbow people, check in with the people who run your service.
Talk to people about their understanding of rainbow clients and rainbow homelessness. The people who provide your services will have insights into the issues that your clients are facing, and how you could improve your services, policies or training.
Think about how you can support your team to work on these improvements. This might be offering professional development to build their skills, providing paid time and resources to work on projects, or creating regular time to reflect together.
If people on your team have their own rainbow identity, value the knowledge they bring, while not expecting them to know everything. Read more about valuing your rainbow staff and volunteers.
“Anyone’s service can only be as good as how you support your staff and how you develop your staff because at the end of the day it’s the staff that do it. It doesn’t matter how good it looks on paper.”