On the eve of Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms) Bill 2017, members fom Portland Fire Brigade attened the LGBTI Equality Regional Roadshow held at the Glenelg Shire offices.
Victoria's Gender and Sexuality Commissioner Ro Allen opened the roadshow, where we heard from her team about informative and a practical session looking at the opportunities and challenges of everyday LGBTI inclusion.
The event was targeted to hear about the Victorian Government's LGBTI equality agenda, understand more about the LGBTI experience, learn about what's working from local organisations, a workshop challenging scenarios in your everyday work role and steps toward developing a local LGBTI Inclusion Plan.
From a personal perspective, I feel think that increasing your knowledge and understanding of all groups within the community will help raise our awareness and enable our members to provide a better service to the community.
Sessions like this also make it easier to provide a more inclusive workplace by understanding the barriers and threats that faced by the LGTBI community. These barriers and threat levels have a major impact on the mentail health of members and if we can break down barriers we will have a positive effect on people's mental health.
It was explained that there are three critical moments in people's journeys: before coming out, coming out and post coming out. So we need to ensure that we provide a workplace that's inviting, safe and supportive to all members. Therefore, creating a non-judgemental environment is another critical step in the process.
Everyone should feel welcome and included.