Call for Participants: Solidarity and Skills for Communicating through Crisis

Get Ready!

• Get Ready! is a 2-day ILGA-Europe learning event on crisis communications for LGBTI organisations in Europe and Central Asia. It will take place on 3-6 May, 2024.
• By working with LGBTI movements in Europe and Central Asia, they learned that crisis communications support is a priority for many LGBTI organisations and groups in the region. They know that this year might bring new challenges for the movement. And they know that many of you are already strategising and looking into ways to stay resilient.
• This learning event on crisis communications will support your organisation in preparing for specific challenges or potential disruptions related to the activities you’ve planned or foresee this year.

What you will get from the training:

• Deeper understanding on what is a communications crisis, and how your team can prepare for one.
• Experience: solidarity scenario-based exercise that will help to learn by doing.
• Deeper understanding of the challenges other organisations face and ways to deal with them.
• The programme will be shared with selected participants closer to the event. Here is what you can expect it to cover:
  • A chance to share the communications threats that worry you in a supportive and private environment with your peers, to be listened to, and to have supportive advice and coaching on ideas for you to implement.
  • A scenario-based exercise on crisis comms that ILGA-Europe designed and piloted with a group of grantee partner organisations in 2023. In this safe, supportive scenario exercise they will roleplay together a response to a developing communications crisis based on the experiences of LGBTI activists. They will facilitate and give tips about Preparation, Monitoring, Escalation, Diagnosis, and Response, but what you choose to do is up to you. Because it is better to practise in private than be unprepared in public.
  • Discussions on solidarity in crisis communications. They believe that in crisis communications solidarity and connectedness are especially important: they are often affected by each other’s communications, and peer solidarity and amplification can make their individual crisis responses more impactful.
  • Signposting to further resources and the potential of more follow-up coaching after the gathering.
  • Networking and mutual learning with a group of 25 LGBTI activists from across Europe and Central Asia.
• At the event, they will focus on the external communications aspects of crisis situations or disruptions to their activism. Please note that working through security aspects (safety, cybersecurity, internal communications, etc) won’t be prominently featured in this event’s programme.

Eligible Countries

• For this call Europe and Central Asia is considered to include the following countries: Albania, Andorra, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Moldova, Romania, Russian Federation, San Marino, Serbia, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, United Kingdom and Uzbekistan.

Eligibility Criteria

• LGBTI organisations and groups from across Europe and Central Asia are invited to join by delegating a participant to apply for this event.
• Get Ready! is meant for your organisation if:
  • Your organisation/group is based and works in Europe and Central Asia[2] and needs to build its capacity to run crisis comms in connection to specific planned activities and/ or foreseen external challenges in 2024;
  • The foreseen challenge and case that you are coming to the event with is concrete and real: it can be anything from a challenging first Pride festival in a non-capital city that you or another organisation is hosting later this year, to national elections that are expected to stir anti-LGBTI sentiments;
  • You can explain why your organisation expects these challenges to emerge and how new knowledge and skills can mitigate the risks;
  • Your organisation and you already have some experience in or exposure to crisis communications. They do not expect any extensive expertise but rather some past experience where your organisation needed to engage in crisis comms, whether successfully or not (it can be as simple as experience of working with negative comments online);
  • Your organisation has the capacity to follow up on the event and integrate new knowledge in its work; you, as the delegated participant, are supported by your organisation to dedicate time to the event, attending it in full, and to bring the knowledge back to the team.
• For Get Ready! to be a truly enriching experience, they aim at bringing together a pool of diverse participating organisations and activists in terms of profiles, identities, experiences, and geography. To make sure that there is a diversity of experiences, they invite a maximum of one person from an organisation or group to apply.

For more information, visit ILGA-Europe.