Rainbow Ride New Zealand: Plan B

Rainbow Ride New Zealand: Plan B

Project 2017-10-08 20:15:58 +1300

RAINBOW RIDE NEW ZEALAND
PLAN B: Look Ma, no hands!

Kia ora!

My name is Alfie and I’m from Wellington, New Zealand. I’ve created this campaign to raise money for printing copies of the brand new resource:

(Photo: Supporting Aotearoa's Rainbow People. A Practical Guide for Mental Health Professionals)

Rainbow Mental Health Resource

This practical guide is for mental health professionals, to help them support their rainbow (queer, LGBTQIA+, takatāpui, trans, nonbinary, and questioning) clients. The resource will be available for free online, and there will also be limited hard copies available for order. We will use the funds raised here to print as many resources as possible and distribute them to health services and schools around the country.

The resource is 50 pages of insight into the LGBTI+ community, specifically targeted at medical professionals working in the mental health sector in New Zealand.

To add insult to injury, before Alfie was able to have surgery, his right wrist was over stretched and injured in an attempt to protect his left hand in January 2019. 

(Photo: Alfie in the recovery room after having surgery on his left wrist in March 2019)

Ultimately this made the trip really hard to organise. This meant the ride was either going to be continually postponed or cancelled. We had already put in so many hours of work, and there was already support and funding behind the project. This fact and Alfie’s unfortunate timed injury wasn’t about to dictate the Rainbow Ride project to a halting finish.

Now I’m not sure about you, but using zero hands isn’t exactly easy. I needed an idea to use up the funding, and have the same values of the original idea, to make for a satisfying conclusion.

PLAN B:

My idea started with Gloria Fraser, who is a postgrad student at Victoria University, studying clinical psychology.

For her thesis, Gloria interviewed and surveyed almost 1600 rainbow people in Aotearoa about their experiences of accessing mental health support. Together with some great community organisations, she used the findings of this research to create a resource for mental health professionals. The resource provides information and practical tips to help mental health professionals better support their rainbow clients. It also shares the hopes and experiences of rainbow New Zealanders.

We needed:

A. Closure of the Rainbow Ride project

B. A project to support that has the same core values

C. To use the saved Rainbow Ride money on something worthwhile

Rainbow Mental Health Resource:

A. Is going to be launched in August 2019

B. Has a real need within the mental health sector

C. Needs funding!

(Photo: Excert from the Rainbow Resource Booklet) 

Costs:

Rainbow Ride New Zealand has raised just over $4000 so far, which is a really good effort! 

These funds will be used for:

• Printing hard copies of the Rainbow Resource.
• Print A3 posters promoting the Rainbow Resource
• Running the website, which will have a free PDF download of the resource.

It costs roughly $10-$12 to print one copy of this resource. However, the more we print, the cheaper it gets. (E.g. Spending $5000 on printing will make each copy around $5)

In an ideal world, every mental health professional will have a copy of this resource on their bookshelf.
Rainbow Ride NZ is going to start the ball rolling, by letting people know that the Rainbow Mental Health Resource exists.

Needs:

New Zealand has overwhelming youth suicide statistics, and The LGBTI+ population make up a large percentage of this number.

“One in five transgender students had attempted suicide in the last year.” 

– Taken from ‘Youth’12: Fact Sheet about Transgender Young People’

"To lower these statistics we need to combat stigma and discrimination so that LGBTI+ people feel included and accepted, but we also need accessible, high quality mental health care. At the moment, many mental health professionals in Aotearoa lack the knowledge and skills to provide support to rainbow people. There is an urgent need for locally developed resources that will increase rainbow cultural competency. Our resource will give mental health professionals the information they need to best support rainbow people, and will weave in the personal experiences of those in the community." - Gloria Fraser

(Photo: Rainbow Ride pins ready to be dispatched)  

End result of project

We aim to improve the quality of mental health care for rainbow New Zealanders. We will do this by:


• Launching a freely available, accessible and evidence-based resource that guides mental health professionals in their work with rainbow clients.


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