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Awareness Training and Consultancy

Training

LGB and Trans Intercom staff and volunteers have provided general and specialised awareness training on LGB/T community issues on countless occasions since 1997.

The content and approach of our training are founded on our community work, above all our helpline and advocacy services and our Lynx South West community-building project. Our community engagement at many levels gives us an overview of the live issues and concerns of local people, and a sound understanding of the gaps in training and how they might be filled.

If you are interested in finding out whether our training resources could be useful to you, please contact us on the main office number.

 

Training standards

We believe that community-led professional training is a vital and irreplaceable element in any programme for achieving basic professional standards in public services. Equality and diversity training provided from outside the community sector, especially when provided by people who have not themselves lived through the issues as LGB/T people, cannot be founded on a secure understanding of the issues, and cannot bring effective returns in the form of better outcomes and increased LGB/T community trust and confidence in the quality of service-delivery.

 

Some high points of our training in the past

Between 1998 and 2003 we provided two-hour core training sessions for hundreds of Devon and Cornwall police officers, concentrating on the frontline staff who actually deal with the public, which is where we believe such training must always begin.

We currently provide similar training for Devon County Council key staff on a rolling basis.

We have provided an extensive series of workshops on LGB/T employment equality across the peninsula, funded by the DTI and supported by the CIPD. For more information about our training and other resources for employers, look at our workplaces training page.

Many specialist training sessions have been provided for a wide range of agencies including Children's Services and schools, Victim Supports, training providers, Citizens' Advice, police authority members and officers, the probation service, post-graduate social work students, educational psychology post-graduate students, youth advice centres, social landlords, and Supporting People team members.

We have provided many two-day training sessions for senior Crown Prosecutors across England and Wales (in partnership with Sue Sanders of School's Out!). These sessions are to raise understanding of the community issues around homophobic and transphobic crime, Outing, invisibility, family concerns, and evidential and legal matters, within the context of the CPS's national Policy and Guidance on dealing with phobic crimes, which we helped the CPS to write.

For information about the training and other resources we can offer to schools, youth services and other organisations working with young people in the peninsula, please see our JAAHB pages ("Joint Action Against Homophobic Bullying").

 

New Goods and Services Regulations 2007

We have been delivering a series of seminars, aimed towards the needs of service-managers and policy-makers, on the implications of the new Goods and Services Regulations. These Regulations apply to the whole of the public and commercial sectors, and to all the voluntary and community sectors with some very limited exemptions. Organisations affected include (for example) all service areas of local government; all maintained, independent and other schools and colleges; the criminal justice system (with certain exemptions); the hospitality and tourism industry; primary care, hospitals and the rest of the health service (public and private), and religious organisations insofar as they either are funded to provide services to the public with public money or operate on a commercial basis.

We believe that many organisations are unaware that significant changes may be required in their operating environment. Apart from the limited exemptions, the new Regulations prohibit all discrimination, whether direct or indirect, on grounds of sexual orientation, in the provision of goods or services.

If you are interested in knowing more about the new Regulations, please e-mail events (at) intercomtrust.org.uk or contact us by phone.

 

Consultancy

We have provided specialist consultancy for many organisations, working with them to enable community consultation, improve their draft policies and strategies, and, above all, to mainstream equality and fairness for LGB/T people throughout their service-delivery systems. Key partners here include Devon County Council, Devon and Cornwall Police, the Crown Prosecution Service at national level, Sanctuary Housing, Devon Strategic Partnership, and the Devon & Cornwall Local Criminal Justice Board. We have also worked closely with Dorset and Cornwall County Councils, Carrick District Council, and many others.

The demand for this kind of partnership working is heavy, and increasing, but our capacity to deliver is very limited, and are ennormously sad that we have had to turn down a great deal of work that would have been very well worth while, but which either we were asked to undertake on an unfunded basis, or which we simply did not have the staff capacity to deliver.

For more information about our Consultancy and Training services, contact us.

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