Thursday 21 January

We are delighted to be able to announce that Intercom's community helpline and advocacy service has won a grant of £442,115 from the Big Lottery Fund Reaching Communities programme, covering the three years from June 2010 to May 2013. This service has operated for nearly ten years across Cornwall, Plymouth, Devon and Torbay --- but there has always been far more work coming in than we had the capacity to handle.

In particular, we have never had enough staff to answer the phone throughout the day and deal with all the casework: last year our Community Advocate, Andy Hunt, provided support and advocacy --- often very long-term --- in 117 cases, besides answering Helpline calls whenever he was in the office.

Now things are going to improve enormously: from June 2010, when the new grant starts, Andy will have a new full-time colleague based in Redruth to share the work, and the BLF will also be funding a long-term post of Helpline Listener / Administrator. And that's not all --- we shall be able to afford a Freephone number, and make the service much better known than it is at present.

There are many tens of thousands of lesbian gay bisexual and trans people in Cornwall, Plymouth, Devon and Torbay, and all too many of us require skilled informed confidential community help, or advocacy to help us fight our corner. This is good news for all of us in Cornwall, Plymouth, Devon and Torbay. We are deeply grateful to the Big Lottery Fund. Quite rightly, they made us work very hard to demonstrate the evidence of local need, and prove that we are a good sound well-run organisation, and we are so glad that the long application process has ended happily.

Our current Helpline number for Cornwall, Plymouth, Devon and Torbay is 0845 6020 818. Calls from most landlines are charged at local rate. It may be cheaper from a mobile to call the Helpline team on their landline --- 01392 20 10 18.

Thursday 21 January 2010. Intercom is very cheered and grateful for the statement of support for our work from independent frontline LGBT groups in Cornwall, Devon, Dorset and Somerset. See www.lgbtcollective.org.uk.

As one of our contributions to LGBT History Month 2010, we've drawn up a note of Intercom's and the grassroots groups' consultations and achievements over the last four years. Have a look! Community-led, Community-responsive --- Shared Skills, Shared Achievements (1 February 2010; 313 Kb).

Intercom is a lesbian gay bisexual and trans community resource in Cornwall, Devon, Dorset and Somerset, providing help against homophobic and transphobic prejudice, crime and discrimination (including bullying, harassment, abuse, attacks, and threatening behaviour), helping to develop the LGBT communities, providing professional training and consultancy, and working in partnership with local government, the police, health, etc.

Friday 8 August 2009 was the start of Intercom's THIRTEENTH year. We have been working for fairness and human rights, supporting independent community initiatives, fighting prejudice and isolation, and bringing help to people who need it, across the peninsula. Deepest thanks to all our stakeholders, funders, Trustees, staff, volunteers and supporters over the last twelve years --- without you we would never have got this far or achieved so much.

Our annual residential conference of the grassroots groups was held at Dartington this year --- it was amazing, with over SEVENTY representatives there from 50 different independent LGBT initiatives across the peninsula. There were major keynote speeches from Mark Reedman (Chief Executive of the national LGBT Consortium of Voluntary and Community Organisations) Sahar Omar (Intercom volunteer and founder of the BME LGBT Facebook group Freedom=Huria, and a local LGBT Parenting Group), Jenny Broughton (Trustee of FFLAG), and others.

And there was a very inspiriting open meeting of the LGBT Collective, where we saw what can actually be done by local LGBT groups getting together and planning for community development needs, startegic thinking, campaigns etc. And it was a beeeeeyoootiful weekend --- sun-drenched photos will be going up on this website as soon as Paul gets back from holiday in the second week of December.

We're already planning the next one. Any ideas about what we should include, people to invite, whatever, just contact Vicky or Paul on 01392 201012 or e-mail VickyW (at) intercomtrust.org.uk.

Our current Newsletter is ready for download --- have a look at www.intercomtrust.org.uk/bulletins/dec09.pdf.

We would like to thank our immensely hard-working and dedicated web design volunteer, who worked hard to make this new website as accessible as possible. He tells us that this current version should be fully accessible to speaking software used by people with visual impairments, and to people who access it via mobile phones. It should also function correctly in all the main browsers.

If you have any problems using the website, please contact us.