Greetings!

To start this month’s e-newsletter, I want to wish you a very happy LGBTQ+ Pride Month! We at New Beginnings are taking this time to reflect on Pride’s origins: the June 1969 Stonewall Uprising. The Uprising (led mostly by black trans and trans women of color) initiated a movement to fight for the civil rights of LGBTQ+ people in response to systemic violence and police brutality.
 
Unfortunately, these are still contributing factors to why LGBTQ+ survivors are disproportionately more likely to experience abuse from a partner. Like heterosexual perpetrators, LGBTQ+ abusers often use systemic inequities to keep a partner from seeking help. This can present itself in outing a survivor to their family or work, or reminding a survivor that dual arrests are often made for same sex couples.
 
At New Beginnings, we believe that all people should feel safe in our community and that every relationship deserves to be healthy. This extends beyond physical safety and romantic relationships: it also must include safety to express fully who someone is as a whole person, and healthy and interactions with fellow community members free from harm. While we do not exclusively serve LGBTQ+ participants, the work of ending domestic violence is inherently tied to the dismantling the same systems that enforce homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia.
 
There are so many organizations that are doing amazing work for the LGBTQ+ community in our area, but one we wanted to highlight here is the Lavender Rights Project (LRP). Serving Seattle and Tacoma, LRP's mission is to advance a more just and equitable society by proving low-cost civil legal services and community programming centered in values of social justice for trans and queer low-income people and other marginalized communities.

And this month, they are having their inaugural PRIDE convention on June 11-13! This includes sessions on financial management and resume building, personal healing from the pandemic, legal clinics, and so much more. Lavender Rights Project will also be posting on Juneteenth about several Black influencers, creatives, and business people on their Instagram and Facebook. To get additional information and event dates, you can find their website here and can donate to LRP here.

We have also listed some additional local and national resources for LGBTQ+ survivors here in case you or someone you know needs culturally-specific support. And as always, you can call us at 206-522-9472, 24 hours a day.

Resources:
1.    NW Network – a local Seattle organization that provides support groups, counseling, safety planning, and other services specifically for the LGBTQ+ community.
2.    Forge – A national organization committed to connecting trans survivors to resources and services (their blog can be found here).
3.    The Network la Red – a national, survivor-led, social justice organization that works to end partner abuse in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, SM, polyamorous, and queer communities through organizing, education, and support services.
4.    Futures Without Violence – a national organization providing programs, policies, and campaigns to end violence against women and children with a helpful page linked here about LGBTQ+ IPV.
5.    The National LGBTQ Institute on IPV – a project of the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence to identify and respond to the specific and emerging needs of LGBTQ+ survivors.


Thank you for your continued resilience, support, and engagement in our community. Look to our Instagram and Facebook pages for regular updates on all that we’re doing at New Beginnings this month!

 
With hope and optimism,
Susan Segall
Executive Director, New Beginnings
New Beginnings | Website