What is this?

Green with Pride is a campaign focusing on LGBTQ+ people and sustainability. We will be launching a series of events focusing on the wider LGBTQ+ community, as well as specific events for particular marginalised people, including women, QTIPOC, older people, and trans and non-binary people. The campaign is ran by the Community Programmes Team in collaboration with Hubbub, an organisation focusing on supporting people to make positive environmental change.

Why this campaign?

Climate change is an urgent crisis for all people on planet Earth, but some communities are impacted by it disproportionately. LGBTQ+ communities are one of these communities for a range of reasons, including:

• Being more likely to live in poverty, or be unemployed, and so find it difficult to afford sustainable products, especially when disposable products are made unavailable.
• Often living in or moving to cities to find community, and so experiencing respiratory and health issues associated with pollution.
• Our communities often have unstable housing, either through homelessness, being rejected from families, or difficult renting agreements. Houses can be in poor conditions, or have low energy ratings, meaning potentially being disproportionately affected by the current energy crisis. Homeless people are directly exposed to increasingly harsh weather conditions associated with climate change.
• Lower income and poor housing can lead to our communities struggling to recover effectively from environmental disasters caused by climate change, such as floods. LGBTQ+ people can also face discrimination in emergency shelters - some trans people were turned away from shelters in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, for example.

What about the responsibility of large organisations?

While this campaign primarily focuses on individual sustainability, we are keen for this to not be the end of the conversation. We will be releasing a range of articles sparking conversations about climate change and sustainability on a wider scale. Additionally, we will be addressing our own responsibility in lowering our impact on climate change, including developing a robust sustainability policy and supporting other organisations within the LGBTQ+ sector to take similar actions. We also examine all of our corporate partners to ensure that they have policies and procedures that match our ethos.

As part of our range of events, we will be bringing together LGBTQ+ and climate activists to discuss how we successfully campaign for change with intersectionality in mind. We hope that this work will empower our communities to take action, and we will continue to be here to support and uplift their voices.

So what's on?