 It's 5 p.m. in Poland, everybody. Wow, thank you for being here. I'm gonna go ahead and get started. Hi, everybody. Thank you for being here at this special webinar. I'm so excited. I'm gonna try to calm down because I'm so excited to hear what all of our panelists has to say. Today, our topic is International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biophobia. I'm gonna turn it over to Jules in just a moment, but I wanna show you how you can engage in today's webinar. Everybody's on mute. Obviously, you know that. Please use the Q&A section to type your question or feel free to use the chat room. If you need the closed caption, please tap on the CC button and we will turn on the live transcription. My name is Aretha Simons. I'm the webinar producer here at TechSoup. I'm gonna turn it over to Jules and thank you all for being here. Hello, everybody. Good morning. My name is Jules Weiss. I use they, them, pronouns. I'm an operation specialist for TechSoup US Hardware Programs. I'm also a committee member on our AlphabetSoup affinity group who is putting on this webinar today. I'm very excited to bring these speakers to speak to everybody. So very exciting. We're gonna be hearing from Safe Place International and Prodiversity Foundation in Poland today. First off, who am I? Why am I here? AlphabetSoup is an affinity group at TechSoup an employee interest group focusing on LGBTQ plus issues. We formed in July of 2020 when everybody was working from home during the pandemic, which we still are. Most of TechSoup is remote. I'm in Portland, Oregon, Aretha's in Orlando, Florida. A lot of our coworkers are in San Francisco. Specifically, the mission of AlphabetSoup is to support diversity and inclusion of sexuality and gender within TechSoup and our greater community, meaning civil society sector globally and to spotlight intersectionality and create alliances. So I'm very happy to be here, very happy to be putting this on. And what exactly are we celebrating? May 17th is celebrated as the international day against homophobia, transphobia and biphobia. The day of recognition was created in 2004 to draw attention to violence and discrimination experienced by LGBTQ plus communities, globally, specifically May 17th is the day that the World Health Organization declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder. So very important in considering the changes in the ways that internationally and cross-culturally we think about queer identity. It's a global annual landmark to draw attention of decision makers, media, public corporations, opinion leaders, local authorities, individuals, the civil society sector, to issues faced by LGBTQ plus communities globally, particularly with discrimination and violence. So this day is now recognized and celebrated in more than 130 countries, including currently 37 where homosexuality or same sex interactions are considered illegal. So that's kind of our background today. We're gonna be hearing from three panelists. First, I'm gonna be turning it over to Yay, who is the chair of the board with the Prodiversity Foundation in Poland, welcome. Hi, welcome, nice to see you and nice to be here. So yeah, first let me just tell you, thank you for inviting me and for letting me be here today that's a pleasure and honor to be here. A few words about me, I'm a non-binary trans person living in Poland, born and raised here in Poland and I've been doing LGBT activism for over, well, I don't know, maybe like 12 years right now. I've started with the University of Warsaw where we created first queer student society in Poland which is called Queer UW at the University of Warsaw. Then I was also a creator of Warsaw Pride, Warsaw Pride Parade as well. So I did that for like six years. And after that, I've switched to what I'm doing right now. So working with organizations and working with businesses because that's the main idea and the main thing that we do here at Prodiversity prior known also as LGBT Business Forum Foundation but that's a longer story. Yeah, so first of all I wanted to start a presentation to tell you a bit about what are we talking about? Of course, we use the acronym LGBT which everyone hopefully everybody understands right now but what we do, can I switch to another slide? We actually, the acronym is getting longer and longer. So probably you've heard about LGBTQIA, LGBTQQIA, LGBTQ plus, some people are also adding a number two in honor of two-spirited people from communities in North America. So I'll be using the LGBT acronym but I want you to make sure that what I understand is all those other letters too but just to make it easier and faster to pronounce them all, I'll just use LGBT. What's really important for us and I want you also to understand that is that we're a bit specific organization and probably the only one of this kind in Poland because we are not using something called human rights approach because over 99% probably organizations all over the world, LGBTQ organizations are using the human rights approach. So they are trying to influence society, influence business, influence governments, et cetera, et cetera using this idea that being an LGBTQ person is your right, is a human right to be and express yourself and to be whoever you want to be. We're using a different approach, we're using a business case approach. So what we do is we actually try to convince organizations to be LGBTQ inclusive because it pays. The idea behind that is that companies are not here to make our life easier and better, they're here to make money. So what we do is we try to convince them that those two things being LGBT inclusive and making money is something that works together and yeah, let me just tell you a bit of all that within the next slide. Diversity management is something that started around, I would say 80s and it's not something very new, it's something that evolved from different higher ideas of how to work with our employees in our workplace. So first we had something called staff administration that workforce management, human capital management and now use diversity management idea. It's a bit different because we are not talking about people per se in organizations but we treat them as diverse features that we can use and we can benefit from using them. Using them is not maybe not a nice word but I mean, we're talking about companies. So they are using those features to make company grow, to make a company earn more money because the idea behind that is when company earns more money, employees will benefit from that too. So it's not something very new, it's something that started many years ago that is right now getting more and more attention and on the next slide you can see, I've just listed some of the main diversity characteristics. Of course there are just examples because you can probably name hundreds of more of those because we are diverse in very, very different ways and we can find our differences to be enormous. But that's good, that's good. Diversity management is something that is benefiting from that and it's trying to get the organizations, get the companies to benefit from that and to use that in a proper way. The right way, okay, that's the question because there are different attitudes toward diversity in organizations and the next slide will show you four main ideas. So if some companies are blind to diversity, they say that diversity is not a problem and it's something that is not concerning them at all, they don't want to see it, that they want to acknowledge that the employees of their organizations are diverse. Some of them are very hostile towards diversity because they say, for example, it doesn't matter if they are diverse, we don't care, we want to treat everybody the same, so not equal, but the same and they say that diversity is bad because you have to manage it, you have to put some extra effort to get something out of it, so they are hostile towards it. Some of them are very naive, so they just say that diversity is great, it's fantastic and it should work by itself. Well, we know that that's true, we have to manage this diversity, we have to work it out how to do that. One of my favorite examples is if you have a problem and you will put at the table, six straight white Catholic men, they will find a solution quite easily and they will find it quite quick, but it'll be probably something very boring, but if you put six people that are very diverse, a black woman, a disabled person, a trans person, a Catholic, a Protestant, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, they will need more time probably to work out the issue, but they will find a better solution, better for everybody, so not just for a one specific group, but for everybody, probably more innovative, probably more interesting, and so diversity takes time and that naive attitude is sometimes forgets about that, so all I'd like to do is try to present and kind of integrate integration of attitudes, so diversity is not automatically positive or negative, it's something that needs to be managed and integrated together to get something out of it. Yeah, so exactly what we do as a pro-diversity foundation, so next slide we'll show you, we've started in 2016, so not a long time ago, but we come from LGBT Business Forum Foundation, which was established in 2012, which is now dissolved. Yeah, so our idea is that we raise awareness and promote benefits of LGBT diversity in the workplace for both companies and employees. We regularly organize meetings, workshops, researches, and campaigns, which I am not introducing and promoting the idea of LGBT inclusion as in business, so that's a nice sentence, of course, that's a nice description, but three main activities that we do is first of all, we support companies in different ways. Some of them are starting their presence in Poland and they don't want to create a opened and diverse workplace and diverse workforce, so they ask us what to do, how to work with that, how to manage this issue, especially in the country, which is so homophobic as Poland is, as you probably know, the new ILGA Europe Report shows that Poland is the most homophobic European Union country, so yeah, so that's the reality that they have to deal with. Some companies just need to make their workforce more diverse, so they ask us for help doing that. Some of them have some specific issues with diversity, some of them have some specific issues with LGBT diversity and inclusion, and they ask us for our support, so this is our main, I would say the activity that takes us the most time. Then we have research in the community and the consumers. What we do, and I'll show you some results of our research in a few seconds, is that we try to check how the LGBT employees are being treated in their workplaces. So how do they feel if they are being discriminated? How if they are being discriminated? And what companies, and if their companies have some specific LGBT policies and try to implement them? So one of our research topics is that. And the other one is we try to look up at the LGBT as a consumers and try to check what's their favorite, for example, beer, what's their favorite bank, what's their favorite television and what, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We use that as an advantage to invite companies to join the LGBT diversity and inclusion march that's happening all over the world. And the third thing that we do is raising awareness in the community. Some LGBT people here in Poland are still not convinced that using LGBT friendly businesses is vivid for our community. So we try to raise awareness and show why and how it helps community in general, not only them, but the community in general. So that's the last bullet point here. We've worked with so many companies. Oh, the letters are very small here, sorry for that. We've worked with so many companies. I've just listed here just a few. Some of them, of course, I cannot mention because of the NDAs, which are the everyday thing here. But again, I hate them so much because sometimes I would like to brag about something but I cannot. So here we have a short list of some companies that we've worked with. We are very proud of that. And yeah, we keep working and keep building relations with, for example, those companies right now. I promise to show you some research results. So maybe that's the right moment to do that. This is the answer to consequences of hiding sexual orientation gender identity in one's workplace from our research. So as you can see, 51% of people say that they, I sometimes experience, no, that's not the one. The fact that I'm not out doesn't affect my work. So that's good. That means that half of the LGBT people don't actually care if they are out or not. But if you look a bit closer, for example, 40% says that if they could be themselves in the workplace or school, they would definitely be more productive. That's very important for companies to make people more productive. And from other researchers, we know that if people are able to be themselves in a workplace as an LGBT persons, they are being more productive within over 25 to 30%. So that's a lot, because it's not easy to make people work 30% more effective in general. So I won't go through all those details right now about those results. You can see them by yourselves and you will get the presentation probably later, so you will see it as well. But when it comes to discrimination in Polish workplaces, and that's the next slide, you can see that the most common thing that's of course, as always, and almost everywhere, people tell jokes about LGBT people in my presence. That's the most common answer. Some people say that it's a microaggression, but if they happen more and more often, they can be really very destructive to a person. But what we always try to look at is the 4.2% people that answer that they experience physical violence in a workplace. So pushing, hitting, punching, et cetera, et cetera. This is the most concerning, and I'm always terrified to look at this number because it's easy for most of us to imagine that we can change our workplace. If something bad is going on, go to another corporation, go to another company, but some people cannot do that, especially people from rural areas, people with lower education or specific backgrounds, some people with disabilities are not able to do that as well. So if they are experiencing physical violence in the workplace and they cannot change it, that's really horrifying and really something that is a great concern for us, well, as a community in general, for sure. Yeah, of course, we try to convince people and that's the next slide to support the LGBT-friendly brands and still people in Poland, can we go to another slide? Yeah, thanks. Only 68% of them says that it's important for them if brand is LGBT-friendly. If you ask me, what does it mean that the brand is LGBT-friendly? I have no idea, so don't. It's just a perception that people have and it's just an idea that people have and probably it varies from person to person if a specific company or specific organization is LGBT-friendly, but still, some of them are perceived as those and it's important for 68% of the LGBT community in Poland to support them or to be aware of that. And when it comes to homophobic brands, again, I don't know what that means if the brand is homophobic, it's again a perception. So on the next slide, you can see that we've asked people about what would they do if they found out that some brand, some company is homophobic. So most of them said that as a client they would stop buying the company's product services. You can't see the number over here. The slide was converted from PowerPoint to Google. So maybe that's why the numbers are so strange here. So sorry for that. 48% would tell their friends about that that the brand is homophobic. Some of them would also write a protest to the company only around 10% said that it wouldn't matter for them. So that's very good. So that means that the raising awareness thing is good. Answering the question very quickly, is the data for Poland? Yes, this is about Poland and Polish LGBT community. So thank you for that. Maybe I wasn't maybe clear about that. Yeah, so why is it important to create an LGBT-friendly workplace? That's always the question that we have. Some people say, well, you should leave your sexual orientation or gender identity behind the door. We don't care. We do not want to know about that. So the next slide points out just a few things that are important for LGBT community to be open in the workplace. First of all, employees in the closet use energy during the workday to hide their sexual orientation. This is called cost of thinking twice. So when you are at the water fountain or if you're in a kitchen or if you're somewhere talking to your colleagues, you always have to think about not outing yourself to use the proper terms, to use the proper words. And that's just simply exhausting. And you cannot maybe take a call from the person that you're in a relationship because you are afraid that someone will hear something, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The second one I told you about is 20 to 30 more efficient if they are able to be open about themselves. What's also important is the LGBT as any other group has its talents and it's a talent pool that in many countries has not been reached out to. So what we always say to companies is if you wanna get the best people from LGBT community, create an inviting environment, create an open environment and they will come to your company and they will stay there cause, and that's the last point here, the fluctuation cost of changing an employee is around one and a half times any one employee costs. So to have someone resign and to have another person take the place of that person and become as good as that person was and as embedded in your company, it takes around that much money to become a reality. So that's a lot. Yeah, the next slide will show you just the, one of the covers of the, of the, I'll call it a book, but it's like a brochure maybe that we've translated actually from English to Polish. It's about straight allies. We're trying, this is one of our three, it was a series of three publications that we translated from a British Stonewall organization with of course their blessing and their help. So we always underline how important it is for straight allies to be straight allies in a workplace and to show their support. Even if with something very small, I'll show in a few seconds how very small it could be and how important it is for LGBT employees. And the next slide will show you cover of our well-main publication I would say, opening to diversity, opening to diversity, this is a good practices that we've gathered from companies in Poland that already are doing a great job when it comes to LGBT workplace inclusion. Because of course we have examples from all over the world, but we wanted to check what's going on in Poland, and this guidebook, this brochure is very simple, very easy and very practical, in a sense that if you're a person taking care of diversity in your workplace, you can use it, you can simply just copy some specific solution, some specific ideas and just implement them in your workplace because they work in Poland already. Yeah, and some examples that I wanted to show you about how people are supporting LGBT community here in Poland. Well, the biggest picture here is of course Google Poland's Pride Float. I've been organizing Pride, as I said before, in Warsaw for many years. So I was kind of responsible for creating that float as well. It was a fantastic thing that they did. Google Poland was one of the first companies that joined Warsaw Pride and any Pride in Poland, of course. Next to it, you can see Deutsche Bank DB Pride Ally sticker. It's a small sticker that you can take and put on your desk if you're an ally, and that shows that if you're an LGBT person and you need someone to talk to or you're not sure if you can feel safe to talking about yourself with this person, this sticker just tells it all, and that's fantastic. And lower you can see these are the sponsors of one of the conferences that we had in 2015. So there's Dexo, there is Vienna, city of Vienna, and Barefoot Wine, which unfortunately, their presence in Poland is getting smaller, so they are not that supportive anymore because they are kind of leaving the country, I think. But still, those were three, that's also a way to show your employees that you are supportive to LGBT community. Just support or sponsor a conference like that. And there's also, there are some pictures on the next slide. And these are the last pictures I'll show you and I'm almost done, so don't worry. First of all, we have a Barefoot Wine again in one of the gay clubs in Poland, actually in Polskan, where they were giving up free wine. So I mean, that's obviously a fantastic thing to do. Then you have MTV Pride logo, which was used in MTV Poland's broadcast during the Warsaw Pride. They have special programming as well for that day. They had a massive amount of hate after that, but still they are working with us and doing fantastic things. And of course, rainbow flags. Below the MTV Pride logo, you can see a pride flag at the Shell company in Kraków actually, waving at their headquarter. And the one on the window is it, I think it's in the Cisco Poland's headquarters as well. So these are small gestures. Some of them are actually almost free because I mean, to take a flag or to change a logo, it's very easy, it's a low-cost thing, but it's very important for the LGBT community. And trust me, LGBT community is specific in terms that we will find even the smallest rainbow, if you put it somewhere, and we will make sure that we will notice that for sure. Yeah, and the last slide. This is something that we do and the possibilities that organizations have in Poland to become an LGBT inclusive. First of all, we have something called Diversity Allies Program, which is the biggest thing that we do. If you want to become a member, there is an annual fee, and you have a specific set of services from us that you can use throughout the year. In terms of workplace equality in Poland, it's something that we are still working on. It's quite advanced right now, but we're working with Stonewall in UK to finish it up and to make it easier for companies to self-evaluate and to learn if they are LGBT inclusive or not. Any more for Diversity LGBT Conference? Well, pandemic, of course, stopped us from doing that. We didn't want to do it online. So for the last two years, we didn't have a conference. There will be one this year, I think in October, if I'm not wrong, because we want to make sure that each and every year we remind people that there is something called LGBT inclusion in the workplace. And the last thing that we are trying to do, which is not that easy, is to create a list of top LGBT-friendly Polish employers. It's not easy, because when we did that for the first time and we had five companies participating, three of them asked us not to reveal that they are on the list. So they were kind of not sure if that will do good for them in such a homophobic country as Poland is. So that's a tough one, but we're still working on that to make it happen. Yeah, and that's it. I'm done. I think that took a bit longer than 15 minutes, but hopefully you'll forgive me. Thank you so much. No worries at all. Thank you. That was so very interesting. Next, we're gonna hear from Nyasha and Justin with Safe Police International. And then after that, we'll have some time for Q&A. Please continue to put questions if you have any in the Q&A section in Zoom. I'll answer them if I can in text. And if not, we'll hold them for the Q&A section at the end. Thank you, Justin Nyasha. Justin, kindly unmute yourself please. This is Nyasha's way of supporting me through our whole life every day that we lead together. So great to see everybody, even though we can't see you and Nyasha and I are imagining looking in your eyes as we do with all of our dream Academy classes. And when I was on mute, I was just sending out some acknowledgement to Yay for that amazing presentation and developing the business case for LGBT empowerment. And for us, that means empowerment of the most marginalized members globally of the LGBT population. So I'll start with continuing the conversation that Yay started, which is that one of our main goals is representation. We wanna see the most marginalized members globally of the LGBT family represented in every aspect of society, academia, the NGO sector, the global employment world in government. And so how that happens is through leadership and empowerment. And what we found through our work is that that can happen very quickly and doesn't require much more than a device and this very highly interactive program that Nyasha and I and a bunch of other trainers lead. So I'm gonna back up and just give a little history to how we came to what we call the dream Academy. And then I'm gonna let Nyasha take it and really bring it home to the heart of the work that we do. So I was a freelance philanthropist really interested in marginalized LGBT communities around the world and was working on things like 377, which was the recriminalization of homosexuality in India, evolution of rights in Nepal and was basically just kind of going around as a freelance private citizen and seeding these movements with some consulting and with some financial resources. I was in Turkey during the Syrian refugee crisis and witnessed not personally, but while I was in the city a trans woman being beheaded by a mob in the street. And found out consequently that there was no place for LGBT refugees that were coming from Africa for coming to the Middle East to have a safe place. They would come into Turkey after a long journey from Syria, from Afghanistan, from Uganda and they would immediately be forced from the language barriers into areas that contain the same people that were trying to kill them back in their home countries. When that was unsafe, they would be forced into sex work, they would be hurt or killed and there would be no justice because they didn't have papers. So I funded an organization to start a shelter that organization ran off with the money and I ended up taking over that shelter in Istanbul which is the birth of Safe Place. Safe Place then grew to one shelter in Athens which then grew to 18 shelters and two community centers. We started to really learn that safety was only the first step, that it was so important to have connection, to have affinity, to have trauma healing, to have skills building, to have a whole sort of spectrum of the kind of reflection that counteracts the narrative that you're wrong, you're demonic, you're unwanted and many of our members were carrying the guilt of having their relatives murdered when they were outed or even having their family members try to murder them. So a lot to heal and what we found was the recipe was for healing was in community, was in coming together and really allowing stories to be told and owned. So as we did that work, that work was happening in Greece in community centers, we learned that there was trauma happening all along the journey. So we started to support refugee led safe houses from Uganda across Africa and even continuing in Turkey. And as we did that and started seeding those safe houses, COVID happened and all of a sudden we no longer could do our work in community centers. We had to find a way to do it in a virtual setting which was unknown territory because it was all about emotional connection and trauma healing and arts and a lot of touchy feely kind of present activities. So we brought in everyone we knew, we brought in seven different universities, we brought in all our corporate partners, we brought in Congress people, we brought in yoga teachers and meditation teachers and had a 40 session beta that Masha was a part of. And in that beta, we had a research team that was recording the inflection points and recording the feedback and looking at what was happening and analyzing what was happening and seeing how the changes were occurring. And what we discovered is that we had no idea what was possible when people came together in a virtual setting for the purpose of fully stepping into their leadership, fully owning who they are and why they came into this life. And so Masha was one of the first ones to point us out that we were way underestimating the potency of the graduates. Our aspirations were these people will be able to do an effective interview, they'll be able to have a resume and they'll be able to be confident in going after what they want and maybe in their asylum interview. What we saw is that Masha and others were actually ready to lead the course that we had just done as a co-leader and they were ready to lead DNI intensives and other kinds of panels just like this one after a 10 week course. So that was exciting news to us because what we also saw is that this community had a perspective and a passion and a resilience that is really missing from the global conversation and their voices are missing because they're isolated in camps and they're isolated in safe houses. And so this is kind of when we began to rapidly scale and take the lead from our community members. Masha came on staff along with 17 other community members and the community members took over the program at that point. Everyone in the Dream Academy came through the community members. We had country leaders, we had service projects happening in all of the countries where we operate across Africa and the program began to grow rapidly through community involvement, through community sourcing. And we also saw that we couldn't just have an online transformational leadership program. We also needed to provide that emergency assistance. So when people ran out of food during COVID, when they had medical emergencies, when someone got killed and needed money to be buried, when someone got hurt and needed or arrested, we needed to be able to be there. So we saw that for us to sort of come in as an external force would be so inefficient. And so how we were directed by Nyasha and the other community leaders is let use our existing community-based response system. We know instantly if there was trouble anywhere in the community for a hundred mile radius, let us use that just give us the resources we need to respond. So we did that and the Dream Academy as it sits right now has 220 people from nine countries and is being experienced in refugee camps where there is no plumbing and no electricity and where people live on a MiFi device holding a phone up to the sun. And those people are coming back and assisting and what we're most excited about is along the, it's a similar river to what Ye was pointing out is that there is a receptivity in the business world and the NGO world and the academic world for who our community members are. And if we can help them contact and express who they are, they are so compelling that there will be entry and there will be representation. So with that, Nyasha, I'm gonna hand it over to you because I want people to have a chance to ask questions. I think you might have two windows open, my love. Let me try. Okay, sorry, we've got large shading, so I need to make sure that I've got another device that is connected just in case to data. So if you really knew me, you'd know that my name is Nyasha Shakata. I'm originally from Zimbabwe, but I came here to South Africa as a refugee or migrant. I am a lesbian, 38 years of age and my pronouns are she, if you really knew me, you'd know that coming to South Africa, things are a bit difficult and I didn't know anyone when I came to the side. Because I was abused by my uncle and I decided enough is enough when I had to come to South Africa. I left my daughter that was three years old at that time, not knowing if she's going to be safe for my family or anyone else, but I needed to do this for me, for me to be able to become a better mom. If you really knew me, you'd know that I'm undocumented here in South Africa. And when COVID hit, I lost the job that I had as a waitress. If you really knew me, when the Dream Academy was introduced to me, I was in a verge of collapse and I had attempted suicide twice because I didn't know what I was going to have to eat or where I was going to sleep the next day. If you really knew me, you'd know that my friend that took me in is the one who introduced me to the safe place in the Dream Academy for this course. And if you really knew me, you'd know that I would sacrifice my data for me to be able to be in class. One thing that I would like to tell you about the Dream Academy and what it has done not only for me, but for a lot of people in law students is, I never thought I would heal. I never thought I was going to be in a path of healing I never thought I was going to talk to other family members in ways that I never just thought it would happen. If you really knew me before Dream Academy, I was not able to talk to people. I used to just hide in my bubble. If you really knew me, I'm not so confident. I now know that I've got the leadership skills and tools that I can use on my day-to-day life. If you really knew me, I never thought that I could go out and feed other kids. I could go out and enjoy life with other people of the LGBTI community and the Safe Place International made it happen. There's a lot of homophobia that happens here in South Africa. And of course, if you are a foreigner, xenophobia already attacks you. But I tell you there are communities that I'm not going to through the Dream Academy and the Safe Place doing acts of kindness and love. And the kids there, they actually run to us and say, uncle and someone is saying, no, it's auntie and all of that. It's all through the Dream Academy that we have been able to do that. Through the Dream Academy, I've got my daughter that is turning 18 this year. And they didn't want her to be with me because they thought being LGBTIQ is contagious. And I'll spread my being lesbian to my daughter. But I'm glad to say this Saturday is going to be my reunion with my daughter. And if it wasn't of the Dream Academy, I would never be able to talk to people, to relate and to just put myself down and put the pride down and just say, let's come to the drill table and talk. And I really mean to be with my kids. Dream Academy is like growing like a fire right here in Africa. We've got new students coming in for the next class that are coming from Mozambique. We've got students that are coming from Zambia now. We've got students that are coming from Tanzania and we just growing. If you really knew me, you would know that I really wish and pray that the problems and the struggles that we are having here in Africa, especially with the data, with the network, I spoke to Aretha now that we're going to be having some load changes. Most of the students are not being reached by the Dream Academy because of these devices, problems that we have, the data problems that we have. I was so heartbroken when we were doing recruitment for this class that just started. More than 350 students applied, but we can find out that we only have like 250 now in class and the 100 are not able to be in class because they don't have any metric, any data, or even just a safe place, especially the ones from Uganda. They can't be out and proud. They can't get out of their houses and they cannot just go into the next shelter that we have for them to have a class. If you really knew me, you'd know that we've lost more of our lesbians, gays, transgender, even bisexual, family, especially in South Africa because of homophobia, transphobia, biphobia. If you really knew me, you'd know that most of the people now are coming into, most of the people are coming into the safe place on the gym academy because of the way that is going around. Of people like me who have healed, people like me who are now able to come out and say, I can be a leader, I can talk, I can be a heart paramedic that I've always wanted to be. If you really knew me, I'm proud of myself. I'm proud of the woman that I've become. I'm proud of the tools that have been impacted to me by the gym academy. Thank you so much. Love you, Nair. So I think the conversation that we wanna be in with you today is, and we hope that you'll have questions, is really around inclusivity is not charity. And I'm a gay dad in San Francisco with two five-year-olds and my life is so changed and informed every day by my time with these communities that are living across Africa and across the world. And members of our family, our LGBTQI family that have felt isolated don't need to be isolated. And there is a way that the paralysis that we experienced in privileged positions in the Bay Area and across the West, we don't have to live in that prison. This is something that we can solve together. Inequity is all of our problems. Privilege and marginalization is all of our problems. And connection and community and heart to heart falling in love and co-creating is possible in this magic age of Zoom that COVID gave us. And so Nyasha and I wanna extend the invitation that anybody that wants to participate in Dream Academy message us and we will send you links and schedules because every time a person in a privileged position takes the time to get to know and understand the experience of this vast community around the world that's in our family, the equation shifts and a new system is created. And the possibility of seeing members of our community who are in a marginalized position as an asset that is absolutely essential to the planet's survival and to the conversation that we're all in about how can we be together in a more kind just empathetic way is intuitive and right there. It's available. So with that, I just wanna say that we would welcome you to come and be a part of the Dream Academy and to find out more about displaced LGBTQI communities around the world and certainly appreciate you being here today and being in this conversation and having interest in people that you haven't met yet. So thank you. And thank you Nyasha for sharing your heart so beautifully. Thank you for not disinterested. Thank you so much everybody. That was excellent. I just posted on request the links to the Prodiversity Foundation and Safe Plates International and the Dream Academy program in the chat. If anybody wants to take a peek at those, we're going to transition now to, we have a few minutes left. We wanna end promptly by 9 a.m. Pacific. So we have about 10 minutes left. If anybody has any questions for any of our panelists, please feel free to share those now in the chat or in the Q&A section. Yeah, I have a question from Cindy Asher from early in the presentation asking if you have any data to show the success of the business case method for LGBTQ inclusion versus the more traditional human rights method. Do you have anything to share? When it comes to data, my answer is no, we don't have data about that. It would be difficult to create a research to check that, but what we do, LGBT NGOs in Poland try to work together. We are not associated in any way, but we try to coordinate things that we do in a way, maybe not everything, but some of the things that we do. And it's like some of them are doing a litigation, some of them are doing like an everyday work with the psychological support for some people. And we try to do different things and one is more important or better from the other, but we try to attack the issue from different angles all over. So we are one of the attackers, so-called attackers when it comes to changing LGBT situation in Poland and this is the angle that we have. To be honest, personally, I am right now doing a PhD at the University of Warsaw and in two to three years I will have a data showing if the business approach in Poland and the homophobic country is actually working because I will try to get some data on that, but I still need like two or three more years to finish my PhD, but I'm curious the same as you are because obviously it works in LGBT-friendly countries but some people say it might be counterproductive in places like Poland, so that's actually a valid question. Thank you. In Jules, I would just add our board chair was the founder of Out and Equal and Out and Equal has done a ton of research in this area and I'm sure the DA works really closely with them and certainly Poland is out on the skinny branches of using and adapting the business case in a hostile environment, but certainly we experience that in Africa as well. What we see is when multinational companies bring policies that are inclusive and originating in the US like Hilton and Accor and Hyatt and IBM, when they bring those into hostile LGBT countries, the needle starts to move and it usually starts with global employers, often employers that are based in the US. So I think the work that Jay is doing is got a proven track record of being effective and it's probably why we have the level of safety in the world that we do at this point. In my personal experience, both as a qualitative researcher and anthropologist and somebody who works in the civil society sector is that a lot of times the things that we do to create data, to move the needle, to make change, then are kind of self-perpetuating. I think, especially in a business environment, if you can scrape together the data to prove that it's working, more businesses are likely to take that up because Cindy, just like you're saying in the chat, a lot of people really make data-driven decisions and it takes, I think with this kind of qualitative data, like, yes, we can take measurements where we can say how many instances of hate crime occur, but we know that we're always going to be under-reporting and that those kinds of statistics are not gonna be telling the full story, that being able to share our stories, like you, Nisha, did so poetically and beautifully, that that often can help make change and further create that data that can then perpetuate more change. It's a cycle and it's so much effort and I just wanna say I really appreciate everything that y'all do every day. As a queer person based in the U.S., it's dramatic to me how much things have changed over my own lifetime and I'm so, so excited to see how things are changing in the world globally today. I have a question in the chat from Kelly. Kelly says she's in Arizona in the U.S. She's nearly 60 years old. She asks, should we be discussing how important for each of us who may feel totally inadequate is making changes that we choose to vote by our careful choices of where and with whom we spend our money? So, asking about the choices that individuals make and the impact that we can have, especially through our support or lack of support of certain corporations. Does anybody have any commentary on that? I can certainly speak personally to that. Levi's was our first partner and has enthusiastically supported us from the beginning and tracing back to Levi's history, they were the first company to provide unlimited coverage of HIV when no one knew what it was. And so, my buying habits as an individual have completely changed being inside the space and seeing how hard companies like IBM and Hilton work on diversity. And there is a huge difference, there's a huge difference and there's actually a lot going on with global corporate employers around diversity and they work with it really different. So, I know for me it definitely informs where I shop and how the loyalty I feel to those brands because if they have my back and I know that they're literally saving lives, I'm gonna have a very different consumer relationship with them. Let me just add that Levi's is actually working right now with Polish pride organizers and they've created special found for small starting pride marches. We had the, right before the pandemic, we had over 30, no, 28 marches in Poland. So that's fantastic, that's absolutely great. And I think that around eight to 10 of them were supported and was possible to happen because of the Levi's support. So that's fantastic. And yeah, I think that we should raise awareness about the consumer choices that we make and especially when it comes to privileged countries and privileged situations that some people are in. So thank you, Justin, for doing that as well. Absolutely. Thank you. One more quick question and then we'll be wrapping up. This is from Aaron Ford, one of my coworkers at TechSoup who's expressing some concern about what Nyasha was saying about different kind of data but physically being able to access the internet to participate in the Dream Academy programming. Aaron is asking if Safe Place International is doing any work on the logistics if you individually do anything or if you're working with any NGOs to approach the global web access issue or if there are any ways that we TechSoup or as individuals in the civil society sector can contribute to help with this issue. We both have a lot to say about that. So I'll just start and let Nyasha finish. We're desperate for internet devices, $150 Chromebook completely changes the life and we are beg telecoms for data. Data costs really different amounts and the telecoms that have that data are localized and we literally beg them but we're usually begging in countries that are not LGBT friendly. So it would change our ability to scale if we had a satellite provider like if Elon would give us access or and also just to have connections through TechSoup or anyone on the call with telecoms that would want to provide data to our members that would completely change things. You want to add anything that I think you kind of spoke to that, Nyasha but you want to add to that? I think you have said it all Justin. So we've been trying by all means like here in South Africa we've knocked to a lot of doors of data or mobile companies that can be able to provide with us data and we are still on a waiting list. We don't know when they're going to respond to that. So yeah. Thank you. Justin, I'm sure TechSoup will be in touch about that that it's obviously some of the work that we do about global technology access. So and I'm sure that there are other representatives from other nonprofits and NGOs on the call that are involved with similar issues that may reach out. I did earlier in the call just to call out one more reminder of that as we wrap up. I did post the links to everybody's organizations. So feel free to take a peek at that. Thank you everybody for being here. Thank you. Yay, Nyasha and Justin for presenting. Thank you for everybody who participated. The recording of this call will be distributed within about 48 hours. Oritha, do you have anything else to say as we wrap up? Great job. I'm speechless. Great, sounds like we were talking. I just want to chime in. The TechSoup does such incredible work around the world. And when I'm in the far corners of the globe, their influences is being felt. So just really, really grateful for the founders of TechSoup and the whole global team and your support of this community and all the LGBT communities around the world. Thank you so much, Justin. We're using the TechSoup support as well. So thank you very much for doing that. Thank you. Thank you for coming and for sharing the really important work that you do with the TechSoup community. Lots of thanks in the chat. I see lots of my coworkers attended. Thanks everybody at TechSoup for taking an hour out of your morning and thank you everybody globally who took an hour to participate. Again, we'll have the recording. Oritha will be posting that to people who registered within about 48 hours. And feel free to reach out to the webinar team if you have any questions. Thank you so much, everybody. Bye.