From 19 to 25 of May FCV hosted ‘Queer Up!’ Contact Making Seminar for activists and youth workers dedicated to LGBTQ+ community rights.
The aim was to meet other dedicated individuals from across Europe, exchange good practices, perspectives, and ideas and finally, plan future projects to bring to life together.
The week was filled with knowledge, emotions, inspirations, laughter’s, dances, stories, ideas, reflections, work and sharing.
The note from this event is a direct fusion with its special thanks to Art, because Queer Up CMS was entirely and in every moment, a group work effect, where everyone contributed to what it was and how it worked out.
All days of the seminar were full of activities of great quality, thanks to everyone’s involvement and dedication as well as experience and knowledge that they were generously exchanging and enriching one another.
During the whole seminar we were getting inspired everyday by amazing guests that joined us to share their expertise.
We built strong team foundations on the music-based teambuilding workshop with Oliver, got empowered on the heart-warming and mind opening meeting with Joanaina, got introduced to Barcelona’s LGBTQ local organizations context meeting Gyiuri, learned that dance has no gender limits (even if we thought so before) with Yedani and practiced how to get our project ideas to life with Ekaterina.
The familiar and safe atmosphere, as well as high methodological standards and careful organization were a result of the dedication of Sophia and Eleni from EMANTES, Athens, who together with Zaklina and Lluc from FCV formed the facilitator’s team. Having them on the front empowered us all.
The course was carefully photographed and reported by Lara, who took care about observing and photographing everything as well as about preparing coffee breaks for all of us every day.
The seminar success and power were mostly achieved thanks to the team we became. We joined the perspectives of 9 European countries of different context and laws, 12 different organizations approaching the fight for equality in a different way and 23 individuals with different stories to tell and goals to bring to life.
Each person who participated in Queer Up brought their input and let this seminar have the value and power that was much over what we could have planned or expected.
We come back home fulfilled by beautiful souls we met and motivated to keep on giving the best of all of us. ‘There’s so much work in this world left to be done’ and we’re thrilled to keep on doing this work together.
The activity is supported by the European Commission’s Erasmus+ Programme.