Rainbow at the University or the InQubator civic participation project through the eyes of a participant
As part of the InQubator civic participation project, Rainbow in the East organizes a series of 5 educational programs – PRIDE Lab, KompAkt, coLAB, New Media Against Hate and Fundamentals of Advocacy and Civic Participation – which are designed for (not only) young LGBT+ people who are interested in getting involved in NGOs and various initiatives and are interested in public affairs, but lack theoretical knowledge and practical experience. The ambition of the project is to promote civic participation. The ambition of the project is also to train them to be able to participate fully in the above-mentioned activities, which will directly contribute to the strengthening of civic participation in Slovakia, especially in the selected region. The project also aims to contribute to strengthening the capacity of the Slovak LGBT+ movement, which has long been undersized.
For the blog section Those who left a mark, the text was provided directly by a young participant of the KompAkt programme, Adam. This programme consists of 8 workshops on the following topics: history lessons from the LGBT+ movement, project management, teamwork, basic advocacy, campaigning and one-to-one mentoring. Participants will receive project support in the form of 300€ to prepare and implement their own small project of their choice (organizing an event, fundraising, etc.).
I am Adam and I study psychology at the University of Trnava. I am a participant of the KompAkt program, which is implemented within the InQubator civic participation project. I come from a Yugoslav village in the Lučenec district, Ružina. While growing up, I felt a deficit of information and people in my neighbourhood who belonged to the LGBTIQ+ community and who would talk publicly about their identity. That’s why I decided to found the Rainbow Society in Trnava, the purpose of which is community meetings.
A few months ago, I organized and started the Rainbow Society in Trnava, whose purpose is community gatherings of LGBTIQ+ people, especially students, but it is also open to people outside of academia. Within these meetings we have created an organizing team that is involved in the running of the society and the agenda of the meetings.
Subsequently, I was offered the opportunity to join KompAkt training. I saw it as an opportunity to raise the profile of LGBT+ life in Trnava. I also involved the organizing team from the aforementioned association in my project. At the beginning we planned a bigger event in public spaces or clubs in Trnava. Eventually, we reconsidered our decision and held the event at the University of Trnava (hereafter referred to as the University of Trnava), where we study. And for several reasons. The first was the people from the association we are organizing. The vast majority of them study at the University of Trnava. From sharing at community meetings, we perceived that there was a lack of information on LGBT+ issues at the school. Apart from being absent in the classroom, there is also a lack of mainstream events that are at least peripherally related to LGBT+ issues. Another reason is our motivation to run this society in an educational way.
Our main goal was to organize the first LGBT+ event at the University of Trnava, since as I mentioned before, no other events were related to this topic. Before we implemented this event, we surveyed the interest of the student body of the University of Trnava, which in the end was quite high. Out of 99 responses, 70 people were interested in the event. This survey was one of the factors that helped us organize the event and served as proof that there is interest in the topic at our university. I have to say that our university is not the most open to this topic.
But we can be grateful to the management of the faculty, which, on the contrary, is open to the LGBT+ topic and allowed us to organize the event. We also received support from the student council.
Another goal was to educate and also invite participation in the aforementioned association.
As it was mentioned above, we first thought about an event in a public space. I think our reconsideration was correct, because we brought the rainbow to our university as well. An event like this would also have been more complicated to organize and we had a space at the university, it was for the students of the university and it was educational. Another s important step was the communication between the organizing team, which is a very important element, in my opinion, everywhere. So the event programme consisted of three parts. The first was a panel discussion with Dr. Mgr. Jana Fúsková, PhD, who is researching rainbow families and is based at our university.
The discussion covered LGBT+ basics such as terminology, diversity of identities, situations of LGBT+ people in the Slovak Republic, as well as rainbow families.
During the moderation, the participants and attendees were engaged and some concepts were discussed in more depth. Afterwards, a small break was taken where the participants were able to refresh themselves. After such a break of about 10 minutes, we continued with the Living Library, which was the main program of the whole event. Living Library is a concept where people, especially from marginalized groups and communities tell their life story for 15-20mins. This is to reduce and remove prejudice against minority society. After the presentation of the story there is space for questions from the audience, the booklet may or may not answer. The story mainly touches on situations related to a person’s minority identity. We had three such stories at the event. One was the story of a person from our university.
The other two were stories of books, and therefore persons, from the LIGHT* association from Comenius University in Bratislava. We keep in touch with the members of the LIGHT* society and that is why we invited them and we were very grateful for their welcome. After the Living Library, the attendees were invited to a local bar for an informal gathering to establish and deepen relationships. We had no set agenda for this meeting and it was very spontaneous. We had a round of introductions and there was a nice conversation about a variety of topics. After a time of sitting and bonding, we moved on to the pizza place where we ate, spent time, deepened our relationships more and slowly said our goodbyes.”
