Young People Health & Wellbeing 12-21

JUNCTION UPDATES:

💜 LGBT Charter Gold Award 💜

We are so proud and excited to announce that we have achieved our LGBT Charter Gold Award, in collaboration with LGBT Youth Scotland

It has been 18 months of learning and development with a renewed focus on ensuring all LGBTQ+ service users and staff feel safe, supported and included.

This is not the end of our work ensuring a safe and inclusive environment, in fact it is only the beginning! Some of our ongoing actions include:

  • Consider how we better support and include young people with other protected characteristics
  • Ensuring visible diversity in our posters/resources across protected characteristics
  • Ensuring we are robust in introducing and upholding our RESPECT guidelines in the drop-in space and respectfully calling out colleagues who fail to do so.

Thank you to all those who have engaged with us and supported us to get to this point, and we look forward to continuing our journey!

💜 LGBTQ+ Chartermark 💜

Since early 2023, The Junction has been working towards a Gold level LGBT Charter Award. The LGBT Charter, developed by LGBT Youth Scotland, supports The Junction to proactively support our staff and volunteers and to provide high quality services for LGBTQ+ young people. In 2019, we achieved a Silver Award and developed many inclusive practices which we maintained. However, we decided we were ready to push ourselves, to go the extra mile and go for Gold!

At the Junction, we hugely value inclusivity, and we work with a significant number of young people who identify under the LGBTQ+ umbrella. We feel it is vital that we ensure that our service does everything it can to welcome and include those who identify as LGBTQ+. The journey has been challenging and rewarding in equal measure. The programme expects a high standard, and rightly so – that means there has been some hard work and reflection involved.

We have appreciated the additional push to connect with partners in the sector, consult young people in more depth, put extra energy into celebrating LGBT History Month and key calendar dates, and to update our policies and guidance.

We hope that the additional inclusive practices and resources we have developed will help to ensure LGBTQ+ young people, staff and volunteers feel the Junction is a safe and welcoming place.

 

For more information about our Open Access Services click HERE

The Junction Services

What is The Junction?

The Junction is a safe, friendly, confidential centre which offers lots of health-related services, education and support for young people in Leith and North East Edinburgh aged 12-21.

We think it’s important to listen to young people and find out what they think and want. That’s why young people have been consulted from the start of the Junction and continue to be so today.

Here at the Junction, we are working to promote long-term prevention of health problems, to raise young people’s awareness and self-esteem and to enable them to make informed choices about their health and well-being. The aim is to help them help themselves which if successful will ultimately have a positive effect on the community as a whole.

Find out about our funders here: the-junction.org/get-involved/funding/

FOR UPDATES CHECK US OUT AT:

facebook.com/TheJunctionEdinburgh/

thejunctionyp on Instagram

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