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Kia ora, I'm Tabby Besley, the Managing Director of Inside Out Koʻaro. So Inside Out, we're a national charity based here in Wellington and our vision is to support young people of minority sexualities, genders and sex characteristics to have a sense of safety and belonging in their schools and communities. So we do that through all sorts of different ways and do a lot of work particularly trying to make schools and the education space safer for rainbow young people. I think in New Zealand we're really privileged and really lucky, um, that we have had legislation passed and kind of our community has got the rights that we do have today and we're in [00:00:30] the place that we are. At the same time there is still so so much, um, to do and particularly working with our young people we see that, um, face hand that a lot of this Um, legislative stuff hasn't yet trickled down to make an impact. Um, and that some of those other things, kind of like, like resourcing and attitude changes that are what needs to happen to make our rainbow young people safer. So Inside Out has, um, lots of different projects to support rainbow young people. Uh, so a big part of our work is around supporting schools to be safer for rainbow young people. So that involves putting out, um, resources and information and [00:01:00] staff training to try and make our schools more inclusive. Um, we have a few.. So one is out on the shelves, which is about creating rainbow visibility, um, in school and public libraries and kind of providing, um, rainbow young people with the opportunity to find stories that reflect their identities and create this kind of visibility, um, in our schools by putting up a display or a public library. Um, we also, uh, run a big. Um, youth hui every year called SHIFT, which brings together, um, young people from all around New Zealand for four days to stay on marae, um, [00:01:30] yeah, connect both with our, yeah, culture of being here in Aotearoa and with our rainbow identities, uh, take part in workshops and, um, yeah, ideally kind of learn some new skills and, um, confidence and resilience to take back to their own communities, and most importantly, probably the connections and friendships with other people, and some of those will last, um, a lifetime, which is amazing. I think it's incredibly important, um, that we're supporting our rainbow young people and particularly that our, um, Parliament and Government is, is doing that and setting an example from the kind of top leadership of, um, our society, if you like. [00:02:00] Um, rainbow young people are still having such a hard time in New Zealand. We know that rainbow young people are five times more likely to attempt suicide. Um, they have really significant kind of depressive and anxiety symptoms. A lot of them are having a really hard time at home or at school or, um, even just kind of.. walking out in the world. Um, it's a really hard time to be a rainbow young person still in Aotearoa and there's a long way to go. So it's so important that our, um, leaders and our legislation and our parliament is, um, showing that it's there to support that group [00:02:30] of young people. And I think, um, we've made some really awesome steps towards that through some of the legislation that's passed. Um, it means, makes such a difference to have our rainbow MPs in our parliament that can, um, you know, Say to young people that it's okay to be who you are and that you can still be in these leadership positions, but there is so much more to do, particularly kind of resourcing the organisations in our communities that are giving support, um, to young people, and often it's still kind of that ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, um, when ideally everyone would just be [00:03:00] happy and living who they are and just dealing with normal challenges, not having to deal with homophobia, biphobia and transphobia. Super important.
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