Switchboard Victoria is connecting
the LGBTIQA+ community
Switchboard Victoria is a community based not for profit organisation that provides a peer driven, support service for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and gender diverse, intersex, queer, asexual (LGBTIQA+) communities and their allies, friends, support workers and families.
We are connecting the LGBTIQA+ community
Rainbow Door
Rainbow Door is a free, specialist LGBTIQA+ helpline for people in Victoria. Experienced LGBTIQA+ peers provide information, referrals, and support to enable LGBTIQA+ people, their friends, and their families to connect with, navigate and access services within a safe and affirming environment. Once-off and/or short-term support is available to LGBTIQA+ people of all ages and identities. Friends, family members and allies are welcome to contact the service. Rainbow Door provides consultations with community members and other service providers working with LGBTIQA+ people and communities.
Peer to Peer Counselling - QLife
Switchboard is the Victorian partner of QLife. QLife is a national telephone and webchat peer support and referral service for LGBTIQ+ people and their loved ones. QLife is a free and anonymous service run by trained and experienced LGBTIQA+ peers for those wanting to talk about a range of issues including sexuality, identity, gender, bodies, feelings or relationships.
Training
Switchboard has been delivering LGBTIQA+ peer-driven training for over thirty years. Switchboard offers training that is applicable for the LGBTIQA+ community sector, workplaces and the broader community.
Anti-Racism
Switchboard is committed to ensuring that our work and service addresses the intersections between different forms of inequality, discrimination and disadvantage, including colonisation, racism and immigration status, and the role that these play in the oppression and discrimination of LGBTIQA+ peoples. The QTIBPoC program runs skills-sharing workshops to promote resilience, positive mental health and wellbeing within QTIBPoC communities, as well as professional development, trainings and consultations on anti-racism and racial literacy for broader communities. Our QTIBPoC program is guided by our QTIBPoC Advisory Committee and aims to build greater equity for Queer, Trans, Intersex and Bla(c)k and/or People of Colour and People of Faith.
Suicide Prevention
Switchboard is passionately involved in providing dedicated LGBTIQA+ peer-led suicide prevention programs, services and initiatives across Australia. We are the national leading organisation providing suicide prevention, intervention and postvention programs to LGBTIQA+ people with a strong emphasis on building community resilience through peer-led and lived experience activities. CHARLEE is an online suicide prevention hub designed by LGBTIQA+ lived experience of suicide.
Out and About
Switchboard runs Out and About, a free peer home-visiting service for LGBTI+ Victorians at risk of social isolation. The program provides social visits, events, and skills-sharing workshops to enhance friendship and community connections for older LGBTI+ Victorians. Out & About is a free specialist LGBTI+ service of the Federal Government’s Aged Care Volunteer Visitors Scheme (ACVVS) operating in Victoria.
Rainbow Families
Rainbow Families Switchboard connects and supports LGBTIQA+ parents, coparents, carers and their families through social events, online support groups and advocacy. Rainbow Families Switchboard offers consultation, training and support to all levels of government.
Our Purpose
We serve lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and gender diverse, intersex, queer and asexual (LGBTIQA+) people, their families, allies and communities.
Our Vision
To provide peer driven support services for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and gender diverse, intersex, queer and asexual (LGBTIQA+) people, their families, allies and communities.
We are
Informed
We listen, we reflect and we are well informed.
Active
We contribute to our community and the world around us (we lean in and reach out)
Accountable
We keep our promises to our members, to our LGBTIQA+ communities, to funders and to ourselves.
Connected
We connect and engage and mobilise communities, stakeholders and partners (we mobilise people power to empower our community).
Responsive
We respond to the diversity of community need.
Respectful
We are empathetic and meet people where they are at.
Switchboard’s statement on working with the diversity within our community when it comes to Faith.
At Switchboard we embrace and support people in and across our LGBTIQA+ communities who have various beliefs, practices, and feelings when it comes to issues of faith and religion. This is extended not only to those who use our services but into our membership, staffing, volunteers and Board members.
At Switchboard we have service users, general members, staff, volunteers, and Board members who attend places of worship, have a daily practice, observe days of religious significance and who consider themselves a person of faith. Equally we have people who have a non-defined spirituality, consider themselves agnostic, atheist or strongly opposed and also many who have been rejected and/or who reject religion. Some people have been the survivors of conversion practices and institutional abuse.
At Switchboard we strongly believe it is our role to hold space for this diversity in all its complexity and richness and to fundamentally meet people where they stand and support them to live their authentic self.
Switchboard is here to learn from, listen to and celebrate our communities. We are also here to stand up against persecution, including religious persecution and we will always believe survivors.
From time-to-time Switchboard might partner or work alongside organisations from a faith background. Our commitment to LGBTIQA+ communities is that we will only do so where we are both convinced and where they have demonstrated an ongoing commitment to inclusion for all in the LGBTIQA+ communities.