💚Organisational policies

• Comprehensive non-discrimination policies

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• Create and implement policies for the prevention of sexual exploitation and abuse, anonymous grievances processes, codes of conduct, and feedback mechanisms. Ensure that all clients are made aware of these mechanisms and how to access them.

• Safety planning for staff. Please ensure that you assess your readiness to provide such services. This includes putting in place a safety plan for staff.

Policy making tips

Some tips for ensuring policies are inclusive of LGBTIQA+ people

• Include sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, and sex characteristics (SOGIESC) as protected grounds of discrimination. Alternatively, ‘other statuses’ can also be used to protect LGBTQIA+ people from discrimination

• Ensure that the understanding of ‘gender’ is not binary. Gender often subsumes sex characteristics and sexual orientations, as in a patriarchal context, everybody is expected to exist within the binary male-female cisgender heterosexual category.

• Ensure that your policies are not endosexist, cisnormative, or heteronormative by taking into consideration the needs of LGBTQIA+ people and the socio-legal context. For example,

  • given the lack of legal gender recognition and criminalisation of LGBTQ people, it is important to ensure data protection policies treat some data related to gender identity and sexual orientation as personal sensitive data.

  • ensure policies do not restrict health or other proxies to family members and next of kin.

  • ensure non-discrimination policies affirm trans people’s access to facilities based on their gender identity

• Create new guidelines, Standard Operating Procedures (SOP), and other measures to support staff in providing LGBTQIA+ affirming responses. For example, you may need a shelter policy, telephone counseling SOP for LGBTQIA+ clients, GBV response for LGBTQIA+ children based on your organisational needs.

Remember, while it’s important to have policies in place, it is equally important to train everyone in your organization to ensure these policies can be implemented.