Heaps Good: Rainbow Families

By Kat Dopper

Tell us a little about Rainbow Families? 

Rainbow Families is a 100% volunteer organisation, providing a network of support to children and families within the NSW LGBTIQ community.

They were established as a not-for-profit charitable entity to provide direct support to LGBTIQ member families, to foster resiliency amongst LGBTIQ families, and to address discrimination  and other social disadvantages faced by LGBTIQ member families.

What’s most important to you & Rainbow Families right now? 

As a voice for the Rainbow Families community, we recently collected submissions from members and submitted a 103-page document to the federal inquiry into commercial surrogacy, which remains an ongoing concern for many of our families.

With the prospect of facing a costly and divisive marriage equality plebiscite if a Coalition government is reelected, we have turned our attention to equipping member families with the skills to cope if they find their families on the front line of the debate.

How are you going about achieving that?

At International Family Equality Day last weekend, we launched the Rainbow Families Plebiscite Guide, which contains some excellent advice on talking to our kids about the issue, contacting local MPs and making our voices heard, protecting ourselves and our kids online and reminding ourselves and each other that we are not defined by how other people talk about us.

What do you do on a day to day basis to accomplish your goals?

We are always looking for ways to connect, support and empower our community . Our many events include weekly playgroups for parents with young kids, annual events such as our Halloween disco, snow trip, Fair Day, Mardi Gras parade float and International Family Equality Day, and one-off events such as a special upcoming movie screening in the park in conjunction with Queer Screen.

We have a “Making Rainbow Families” full-day workshop coming up in July, where people who are looking to start a family or to grow their family can hear about the many options available such as fostering, adopting, insemination, IVF and surrogacy. The day will include a legal seminar with advice on creating our families and beyond from a legal perspective.

Resilience is a skill that can be taught and learned. We are busily planning resiliency workshops for parents and kids to help them cope not only with a potential plebiscite but with life in general. And since many of our member families live in rural locations, we’re planning to make those sessions available online.

How are things going with it? What struggles or successes have you had? 

Rainbow Families has a 14-member volunteer committee who dedicate their time to planning family events, writing support materials, advocating on behalf of the community and fundraising so that we can include as many people as possible in our activities, regardless of financial status.

We recently incorporated our association with the generous support of pro bono lawyers at Dowson Turco Lawyers and Minter Ellison and we are currently working towards charity and DGR status.

Fundraising and time are two of the biggest struggles we face, but we have some excellent grant application writers on board and a dedicated team of committee members who are passionate about helping the community.

In terms of success, our recent events have been very well attended and we receive constant positive feedback about our e-communications (newsletter, FB page, Twitter, Instagram), our events that bring families together and providing our community with a strong voice.

Where would you like to be in the short term or long term? What are the long term goals? 

In the short term, we want to ensure that our community feels supported and connected through regular social events and educational seminars and by providing them with the tools they need to cope with national debate around marriage equality. We want to continue to support smaller regional groups and playgroups and promote their activities to the wider rainbow families community.

Also in the short term, we want to attain DGR and charity status to allow Rainbow Families to fundraise in order to provide the programs and events that we are passionate about delivering to our community. And we want to strengthen our relationships with other LGBTIQ organisations.

In the long term, we would love to have a funded part-time or full-time worker and a dedicated community space for our members. We want to fundraise so that we can financially support our regional groups and playgroups. It is also our aim to continue to finance struggling families attending our events and our long term goal is to fund educational scholarships so that children of rainbow families can reach their full potential.

We also want marriage equality and a society that is embracing of diversity and offers access and equity to our children.

Can people get involved? What can people do to help? 

We cannot do it alone. We work with the broader community, businesses, schools, government, and other not for profit organisations to increase the reach and impact of our events and activities.

We are always looking for volunteers. Either full-time committee members (we meet once a month on a Thursday night and then are each responsible for one working sub-committee) or volunteers for one-off events, such as Fair Day and International Family Equality Day. If anyone is interested in signing up, please email info@rainbowfamilies.com.au

Connect with Rainbow Families in the following ways:

Facebook Page – https://www.facebook.com/rainbowfamiliesAU

Facebook Group – https://www.facebook.com/groups/rainbowfamilies.com.au/

Website: http://www.rainbowfamilies.com.au/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/RainbowFamAU