September 8, 2016
LGBTQI
Day 2 and 3 Report
During Days 2 and 3 of the Conference on Ethnic Identities: Bring Everyone In, organized by IGLYO and partner organization COC Netherlands and funded by the European Youth Foundation, we continued to explore important topics and intersections. At the same time, our group stormed and normed, clashed and collaborated and progressed towards becoming the most amazingly diverse and inspired group of participants IGLYO has ever had. Of course, we say this at every event and it feels true every single time!
Conceptual sessions, such as Queer Histories and Religion and Ethnicity, blended together with watching a theater show representing an art project implemented by AanZ in schools around the Netherlands.
It was really wonderful to get to see the performance, the brilliant actors, and also to get a deep insight into how this theater project changes the attitudes of young school students by making them stop, reflect and conclude. Ideas are already emerging at this stage, participants begin to think how they can apply and adapt a similar intervention in their work. 
Then, we had the honour of meeting three Pakistani refugees who fled their country after long and hard suffering and persecution for being gay and transgender at the hands of their very families and neighbours. We listened, we cried a little, we wondered and we thought again about how our work can help to improve, at least by a little, lives of people who have to struggle so much to find their place in this world.
We went back to learning about laws and legal frameworks and using legal tools to address injustice and had a review session during which we were challenged to start looking towards the future, by starting to think in very practical terms about how our work can be improved using the things we are learning from the experts, from the facilitators and, most importantly, from each other.
