A much needed celebration of Pride

By Tilly van Eeden

Today is the final day of National Schools Pride Week 2020, a week dedicated to celebrating rainbow youth and giving schools the opportunity to become more inclusive.

This awesome event was created by our charity partner InsideOUT, who are on a mission to make schools and communities a safer place to be for rainbow young people in Aotearoa.

Tabby Besley, InsideOUT’s Managing Director, says that School Pride Week is about having a celebratory week with a range of activities to help schools foster a sense of belonging for rainbow young people, “and make them feel like their school is a place where they can be who they are”.

It follows the International Day of Silence, which aims to bring awareness to the discrimination faced by rainbow young people in schools. InsideOUT wanted to accompany this more serious day with a week of celebration and education, and so Schools Pride Week was born.

Mental health issues have been shown to disproportionately affect LGBTQI+ youth, and with the additional stress of Covid-19 lockdowns, it’s an especially important time for this community to receive some extra support.

Frances Arns, Executive Director of another of The Good Registry’s awesome charity partners, Rainbow Youth, has seen this first hand.

“The lockdown has been really challenging for a lot of rainbow young people. Many of them have been isolating in homes with families that aren’t supportive of their identity, or maybe aren’t aware of their identity. We’ve seen a huge number of referrals since the first lockdown and since Auckland has gone back into lockdown.”

Schools have been super creative with their involvement in this event, organising mufti days, bake sales, quizzes, performances, and posters– all helping to raise money or spread the world. InsideOUT has a huge range of resources on their website to make involvement in Schools Pride Week really easy.

If a school wants to foster a more inclusive and accepting environment, they don’t have to wait until next year’s Schools Pride Week! Helpful resource pages can be found on both InsideOUT and Rainbow Youth’s websites that make spreading the love super simple.

Every young person has the right to feel safe and included at school. We’re so happy to work with InsideOUT and Rainbow Youth to help make this a reality.

It’s important for our rainbow charities to receive donations so they can keep advocating for and supporting Aotearoa’s young rainbow community. If you want to be a part of this good, you could donate your next Good Gift Card or Registry to Rainbow Youth or InsideOUT.

If you want to learn more about School Pride Week, check out the website.

About The Good Registry

The Good Registry is a gift website where people gift the power to do Good.

Anyone from small kids to big businesses can show they care with donations to good causes instead of unnecessary gifts — using charitable gift cards or charitable registries:

• Create your own Good Registry for a special event and ask friends and family to donate to a charity you choose.
• Give Good Gift Cards instead of traditional gifts, to show people you are thinking about them, and enable them to donate to charities they care about.

We have 65 partner charities that our Good Sorts can choose to support. Rainbow Youth and InsideOUT are just two of them.

You can hear from good kiwis and businesses who have used Good Registries and Good Gift Cards to give more simply, sustainably and kindly, on our inspirational Giving Wall.