Empowering young LGBTI people through access to services, motivation and focused policy change

Bulgaria is among the EU countries with the lowest acceptance - both in the family and in the public - of LGBTI people. In this context, the LGBTI community, and especially its young members, are experiencing serious psychological, health and social problems, such as depressive states, homelessness, risk behaviors, difficult adaptation.

Over the past 2 years, we have been able to provide comprehensive support services for young LGBTI people and their loved ones. Our psychological support included an online chat, a telephone line, a network of psychologists in 10 cities, a group for young LGBTI people and a group for parents. Through our online chat, our volunteers have responded to over 1000 requests and users have contacted us from over 110 settlements. Our health program reached 900 people through our #endHIVbg project, in which we sent free oral HIV tests to people in over 120 cities. During this period, legal counseling has received 12 people, and our career counseling program - VentureOUT - has helped over 30 people, 25 of whom have already found a job.

Before the creation of Single Step, there were no publicly available resources to support young LGBTI people. Therefore, the Foundation's focus is to: support, motivate and empower LGBTI youth with a bottom-up approach.

Our project aims to develop large-scale multilateral support in the form of accessible and free services, online and offline platforms for the expression, preparation, and training of professionals working with our target group and awareness of the LGBTI public with a view to systematic change.

The project aims to introduce and develop improved innovative methods to support, motivate and empower LGBTI youth across the country. We expect to:

- increase our reach and maintain the high quality of our services (daily free and confidential online chat, free telephone line, consultations with a psychologist in different cities of the country, mutual assistance groups, testing and prevention of sexually transmitted diseases);

- Provide offline and online spaces for LGBTI youth to be themselves and express themselves;

- Improve the capacity of people working with them and thus reach more vulnerable LGBTI youth across the country, especially from hard-to-reach places.

We plan to work with young LGBTI people, psychologists, social and healthcare professionals and representatives of institutions to build partnerships to change policies that specifically target LGBTI people. We believe that for a community to be healthy and vibrant, its members must feel motivated, energized and empowered by a holistic approach to information, support, opportunity to express and improve their acceptance in the environment in which they live.