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thank you everyone for joining us today for our webinar safer spaces institutional lgbtq inclusion i'm very pleased to introduce our presenter today dale boyle as the manager of the safer spaces program dale works with organizations to provide assessments professional development workshops and consultation services to create more inclusive environments for lgbtq clients and colleagues the program has worked with over 80 organizations delivering more than 200 workshops to over 5 000 service providers we're very pleased to have dale with us today so over to you dale amazing thank you valerie hi folks my name is dale boyle just doing a audio check and valerie does it seem like everything's coming through okay everything sounds great deal perfect okay well hello folks as already mentioned my name is dale and i work at an organization called the gilbert center we are located in barrie ontario the program i run is the safer spaces program which is supported in part by the ontario trillium foundation as well as a newly upcoming grant or newly received grant through the employment and social development canada through some federal funding so my position with the center is i am their safer spaces program manager and the pronouns i use are he him his just to give you a brief description even though valerie just mentioned it just to go up that again the service i run provides three main services for organizations to take advantage of including assessments workshops and consultations to improve the inclusion and equity for our lgbtq community that's including our lgbtq clients as well as our lgbtq employees so i like to call myself a professional gay man by trade that's what i do for a living and very honored and lucky to be doing this work the program has existed for the last five years now and i've been doing lgbtq inclusion work for the last eight to ten years uh as valerie already mentioned worked so far about 80 different organizations just over a couple hundred workshops to around 5 000 folks i've been very lucky to do a lot of this work in our local catchment area but i've also been incredibly fortunate to do some traveling for the work recently we've gone out to whitehorse yukon to do some work at a national conference earlier this summer and i also just came back from a three-day trip down at the in our south southern ontario catchment area for chat and kent at a local hospital in that area to give you a context of some of the industries we've worked with before it includes a variety of healthcare industries such as children with adults mental health hospitals local health units family health teams long-term care facilities retirement homes hospices and so forth we also have worked with policing services community legal clinics a lot of municipalities and recreation centers we do work with both the elementary and high school high schools through the school boards including some colleges and universities we've worked with lawyers associations yoga studios art art studios as well we've done some work with our private industry and retail industry for example the source their head office is located near us and we've had some opportunity to work with the source canada worked with some union chapters manufacturers uh youth shelters women's shelters faith-based groups and you and youth shelters for folks who are experiencing homelessness so we've had a great opportunity to work with a variety of industries what i love about working with a variety of industries is that they always challenge us to make sure our content is specifically tailored to that industry so we're able to adapt the statistics and examples to make sure that they fit the folks we're working with so our agenda for our roughly 45 minutes together our hour together today i'm hoping to start the conversation on why does this matter how could it be relevant whether we are working in private industry or we're doing some social service work as organizations why does lgbtq inclusion matter and more specifically why might it matter for us in a institutional sense beyond a staff training i want to make sure that folks have although today's content is not an lgbtq 101 it's not an introductory conversation i will make sure that we just start acknowledging some shared experiences and briefly ground ourselves in the demographic that we're talking about we'll identify our institutional barriers and how some very practical ways that we can help to address those barriers and make our organization more inclusive for our lgbtq2s plus communities and then ultimately review resources as needed valerie did mention that a question and answer can be provided more towards the end but i am also completely welcome to having people ask questions if needed throughout where you think it might be appropriate if we need to ask it at that time i do encourage you to leave that chat so valerie can see it scan it and if need be just pop on in with whatever question you may have so with that being said let's let's talk about why this matters now normally what i like to do here is i like to ask folks to share some of the reasons why you chose to be here today but due to the webinars context i'm going to give you some grounding but if you do want to share perhaps some of the reasons why you think that this is valuable i would love to have a conversation with you around why you're choosing to do this work what you would like to see happen at your institution my contact information will be made available at the end as well and i'd be more than welcome to chat with you around what's motivating you to do this work some of the reasons i had put together so when we were looking at this i wanted to get some context to what's happening for folks who are experiencing barriers to health care in our lgbtq2s communities and what are the impacts on people's health care when folks have barriers to to those services and so if we're working in any kind of institution that does adults or children's mental health or any kind of social service work in our communities i think it's super important that we are acknowledging that lgbtq2s folks are statistically less likely to have a regular medical doctor available and perhaps not surprisingly therefore more likely to have needed healthcare in the last year but actually did not receive that health care what this means and what are the impacts of folks who are not accessing health care perhaps not surprising but there are higher depression anxiety obsessive compulsive disorders suicidality and self-harm there are increased rates of smoking roughly 36 percent of the lgbtq population compared to roughly 17 of non-lgbtq folk and then also increased rates of alcohol and substance use as coping strategies might be roughly two to four times higher hopefully this is pretty evident to why we might need to address institutional inclusion because we know that folks are not seeking and accessing the health care they need and therefore resulting in increased rates of substance use or developing some type of mental health challenge or some kind of a self-harm experience that needs to be addressed so i think those might be some good grounding resources or some good grounding context for us if we're working in that social industry that social service industry but if we're working perhaps in a business environment or if we are the hr folk or if we are just looking to improve the let's say productivity of our team and wanting to make sure everyone feels comfortable in the workplace in preparation for this project here i have gathered a variety of journal articles academic journal articles that speaks to a variety of why there is a business case for lgbtq inclusion and so the first couple of article titles here you see are speaking to what happens when workplace policies that are inclusive support lgbtq folks and how is that beneficial taking a look at recruitment strategies and recruitment statements and how that impacts a firm's attractiveness to having wanting folks apply and be an employee and join the team of your organization if you can incorporate queer and trans inclusion within recruitment and then also not just how well do employees do when we incorporate queer insurance inclusion but how well does your firm actually perform in the industry and ultimately everything i've been founding or near everything i've been finding tells us that when we do queer and trans inclusion it means business and that there is a value in placing a priority or placing a significant attention on looking at queer and trans folks as a demographic so whichever angle we're coming from social service work or business human resources or otherwise it is in our best interest to look at doing this work and so quickly a couple of that stats that if we wanted to take a look at why lgbt conclusion makes sound business sense we know that the majority of gay couples in canada live in a dual income household with generally no children and has the buying power of over hundred billion dollars we know that the combined lgbtq market is greater than any individual ethnic market in canada and just to clarify that for a second it doesn't mean that when we look at ethnic markets and folks who are lgbtq the sum of the individuals is greater than any individual part so just clarifying that of course over 75 percent or over over three-quarters of lgbtq adults including their friends family and relatives well actively switched to brands and companies that are known to be lgbtq friendly and in fact lgbt folk are incredibly brand loyal to organizations who support the community to that effect just to know though it doesn't mean we can walk away from here and just simply do a marketing strategy because only 30 percent of purchasing decisions are influenced by targeted ads where the biggest decision comes from is how over 50 percent are influenced by a company's employment practices and promotion of lgbtq friendly policies we can't just simply make a gimmicky or make a targeted ad and not follow through with it on how we actually treat our employees and how we treat our community we need to follow through on those practices and we need to follow through on those policies so i hope that that is a good context for why this might be valuable of course all of us are choosing to be here today and dedicate some time so i'm already recognizing that you're wanting to do this work as well and as mentioned before i'd be glad to have a chat with you and and have been around what's motivating you to do this work so to ground us as mentioned in some of the promotion of why is this also necessary and i want to acknowledge the human rights protection updates that we've been living within for a while we operate at the gilbert center through our safer spaces program here in barrie here in ontario and we've had protection on sexual orientation since 1986 and protection on gender identity and gender expression since 2012 as a country as a federal left institution we had protection of sexual orientation 10 years later than ontario and student gender identity gender expression five years later so please recognize though that the 2017 inclusion of gender identity and gender expression is very recent and still incorporating a lot of that when we look at our federal services and our federal programs and just us as a as a country and our social environment but what that means because i think folks might not uh we might need to take a look at that deeper so what that gender identity and gender expression piece means a direct quote from our ontario human rights code states that in section 6.3 the right to self-identify gender for all legal and social purposes a person's whose gender identity is different from their birth of science sex should be treated in accordance with their lived gender identity so hopefully once again this gives us some further grounding on why this is necessary whether it's because we need folks to access our services whether because we want our employees and our and our customers to feel included in our organization or whether it's simply because it is our human rights that everyone has as a part of living and working in canada so i can't go much further though without spending a moment of time to talk about the population that we're working with but also to encourage every single person listening and watching say to do a little bit of self self reflection with me because there are some shared human experiences and you may have had these conversations before but what i want to remind folks is that the conversation on sexual orientation and gender identity are not uniquely trans they're not uniquely gay or queer sexual orientation and gender identity are human experiences and so i would ask you to share with me a little bit of self-reflection if we can take a take a chance to look at these four areas including sex gender identity gender expression and attraction reminding the room that our medical definition of sex speaks to our physical body which bodies do we have generally medicalized into male and female bodies but there are other types as well sex refers to our literal physical body where gender identity refers to our sense of self our sense of who we are how we navigate the world and how we identify ourselves whether that be a man woman non-binary or other expression the clothes that we wear the mannerisms that we have the haircuts that we choose to wear are all versions are all ways in which we express ourselves and then attraction to other people i would like the room if not already doing that self-reflection with me just to recognize that these are shared human experiences that each and every one of us connect to and and just to dive into that briefly a little bit further here i want to look at something that we call a spectrum map that we've developed and you may have seen similar resources and tools to this out there online but this is a simplistic way to look at this when we look at a spectrum of sex between male female an intersection between gender identity between man woman and non-binary in between or no gender perhaps as well and not connecting with the concept of the gender identity gender expression between masculine feminine neutral and fluid and then sexual orientation who were attracted to between the same another and perhaps many or multiple genders or not attracted to other folks in a sexual manner each and every single one of us can create our own spectrum map because these are shared human experiences so everyone on the phone and everyone not on the phone who's just going about their day can all make their own map and to show you how that works i'll create mine and how i choose to connect with this and as we're thinking about the demographics we're working with this might help to explain the population if uh if we haven't gone through that lgbtq 101 already and so i have the body of a male that's the body that i have that was given to me when i was born i identify my gender using the language of man but i didn't put it all the way over to the left because i don't know if i'm the epitome or definition of men and i don't know exactly what that means but that's okay i also don't think i'm the most masculine person in the world when i walk into a room i'm not known for butching it up if you would and then i'm mostly attracted to the same gender and all of these concepts are separate but they connect to make up my experience and these stars can change over time they can be at different places instead of one point they could be multiple points there's no right or wrong way to do this but every single person can in some way connect and make their own map and so if you want to explore more of these conversations i just finished three work five workshops my anthologies with a local hospital and around 150 of their staff going through a variety of lgbt 101 workshops and how we can do this work but let's move on for now let's actually start talking about why we're here and talk about identifying institutional barriers to address and create greater lgbtq inclusion and so all of these are coming from all of these best practices are coming from our in-house developed and community inspired assessment tool and best practice document and i'm not going to go through each of these bullet points here but what we use is a online assessment tool which will ask you questions on how inclusive is your organization in these six different categories between policy staff knowledge accessibility culture resources and evaluation based on your collective perceived response we provide you a one-page summarized report card which tells you how well you're doing and then we also give you our best practice document which can support you in getting to where you want to be over the next six to 12 months this can be a really helpful tool to gauge where are you right now it can also help as a tool to help gauge where does your institution view you to be and are you ready to create more steps towards inclusion and so all of the best practices we're going to be talking about today come from that best practice document that you see over there on the right hand side so starting us off there in policies and procedures these aren't and as we go through the sections they are not all of our recommendations it's just what i thought we could fit within our time together today and so some examples of policies we may want to consider is there a policy and procedure to deal with discrimination and harassment that specifically mentions lgbtq plus topics such as how to address occurrences of homophobia and transphobia does the confidential confidentiality policy you use specifically include respecting someone's perhaps family structures gender identities and sexual orientations recognizing that the pronouns we use such as he or she or the gendered language we use such as mr or mr sir is man we need to recognize those that when we use that we are identifying someone's orientation we are identifying perhaps someone's gender identity and we need to perhaps keep that confidential especially if they're a person with trans experience who was not wanting us to share that with other folks at that time or someone who is not a part of our institution and do we have a policy to support our employees who want to transition in the workplace and so what does that policy look like what is the policy to support people who want to transition in the workplace we found a great resource created acted by the transgender law center there's an american-based resource but it's a model transgender employment policy for creating those inclusive workplaces and they provide specific examples on all of these different policies that might relate to a trans person's experience how do we maintain privacy and official records that confidentiality piece names and pronouns on email signatures emails themselves on name badges for example transitioning on the job if there's some reason i sex segregate a job assignment restroom accessibility or washroom accessibility locker room accessibility the dress codes for our employees how to address discrimination and harassment and addressing health insurance benefits for example if our health insurance benefit supports people accessing hormone treatments or post recovery care for gender affirming surgeries that can be an incredible way to promote that we are trans inclusive and encourage folks to apply to our center they also include in this resource a sample transition work plan before the transition begins the day of the transition when it will be known to the team and the first day of the employee's official workplace transition moving on into staff knowledge again valerie feel free to step on it if anyone's having an immediate question but moving into staff knowledge we do recommend that we we look at some staff training and i know that our companies can be quite large in scale so some recommendations on how we can prioritize training for key groups including folks who are very public facing your first point of contact whether that be staff of volunteers hiring managers human resource departments anyone in customer service and then anyone who wants to be a key influencer of internal workplace culture who can be the champion of creating those safer spaces for our communities and the photo you see over there is actually one of our larger sessions facilitated by one of our workshop facilitators through the city of aries recreation program for their summer camp staff the recreation program had dedicated a significant amount of time and staff resources to making sure everybody is attending a workshop and knowing how to create those recreational inclusive spaces for the people accessing those services when we're looking at staff knowledge can we consider including lgbtq plus inclusive interview questions when we're doing that onboarding and when we're scanning potential recruits for our center including potentially listing possible barriers to lgbtq population if we're that social service industry and some of those barriers might be forms washrooms policies or someone's legal identification we could ask somebody to talk about a time where they recognized discrimination in the workplace and how they handled it and hoping that people actually identify that discrimination for what it is whether that be racism ableism homophobia or otherwise end up perhaps asking you simply asking the question that we at this organization wherever that may be value and respect diversity and inclusion for all staff and our clients or customers this includes working closely with our indigenous lgbtq and other demographics and simply asking the question if the candidate believes that they would be able to about if they could uphold those values during my work and making sure there's no conflict of interest in those value sets when we look at perhaps job performance value evaluation questions when someone is already a team member outer space how do we make sure that they are upholding the lgbtq and diversity within their work one question could be to discuss how someone shifted their program or service or adjusted the customer service need of that diverse demographic or perhaps just how someone experienced a barrier to service and how they can identify it to demonstrate a time how they upheld the diversity and respect or inclusion in their work and to describe the experience in delivering customer service perhaps using gender neutral language if ever needed or in general gender neutral language is incredibly needed and impactful when we're doing queer and trans inclusion work and we're going to be talking about that more in just a moment from now accessibility and inclusion so how do we promote ourselves as a accessible and inclusive environment one way is to frankly say it however i always like to remind folks that you need to be prepared to stand behind your promotions again it is not good enough and it won't have the same impact you're thinking of if you just do a targeted marketing approach you have to genuinely follow it and back that up with your policies and procedures of inclusive lgbtq practices having a sticker or a poster promoting that you're creating a safer space is incredibly valuable but don't put it up to make yourself feel good put it up when you are ready to do that work and you're wanting to make that organizational commitment also if we can have our washrooms that are gendered neutral to be promoted to that and accessible to our staff and clients and so a lot of the shift recently has been changing from a lack of there's been a shift in washing signage changing from who can access it to what are you offering when i was in white horse back in august we were at actually multiple facilities and some of them had their washrooms labeled as toilets and toilets with urinals as a second option and people could choose whether they wanted a toilet holding spot or a toilet and urinal spot and i thought it was great to see an institution being so comfortable acknowledging the service that they're offering rather than who can access it further into accessibility and inclusion when we look at our intake forms we have a document that we've created that supports organizations on how you can ask commonly asked questions to be lgbtq inclusive such as ask how do you ask for someone's name in a way that may not be so uh limiting how do you provide an opportunity for pronouns for titles or honorifics to be listed for parents or legal guardians to be asked in an inclusive way partner spouse or support people the differentiation between legal sex and someone's sex that was assigned at birth someone's gender identity orientation or behaviors if needed for let's say some sexual health practices in our in our healthcare industry and a quick example of this might be if you're asking sex for healthcare purposes and if you need to know someone's physical body you might need to know genuinely what body are you interacting with but if you're only asking someone for their sex for legal documentation purposes or for billing purposes through a medical system then really the options are just m s and x not male female other not male female unknown perhaps m f and x and prefer not to disclose if that's an option so we have that form available for institutions as well when we're looking at accessibility and inclusion and we're talking about recruitment it could be incredibly helpful for trans folks to know if you are trans inclusive at the beginning of the application process and a couple of ways to do that would be allowing a applicant to provide their pronouns as a way to signify that you're aware and supportive of this conversation as well as to indicate any other name that they may have previously been known as this can be incredibly helpful if someone has a letter of reference from a past employer under their previous name or let's say a degree or diploma some kind of educational certificate before they had legally transitioned to their name and this could be valuable for non-trans related scenarios as well if anyone had changed their name for any other reason including simply being married and taking their partner's last name this can be helpful and also a great way to signify that you're supportive of queer and trans folk organizational culture so when we're looking at culture there's a few key areas we can do i perhaps starting by conducting a staff climate survey to consider the customer satisfaction and to gather the experiences of lgbtq communities to create an internal lgbtq plus or diversity committee of some kind to try and address and remove barriers preventing stakeholders from being out and comfortably supported in your organization but what this also means like for organizational culture could be something like what i did at the beginning of our time together today and introducing ourselves with our names and our pronouns i recognize this may sound very weird if we're not used to doing this but it is a huge and immediate signifier to say not only are you aware of these conversations but you know how to support and respect someone if they choose to do that too often it's trans folks that get asked who are you what are your pronouns how you identify but reminding everyone listening that all of us have our own identity all of us have ways in which we want to be respected by other folks simply saying something such as my name is dale and i use he him as pronouns can be an incredibly immediate and easy way to signify you're aware of folks and you're aware of these conversations examples about the pronouns include they them theirs she or hers and as mentioned he him his which is what i use and there are other pronoun options as well and we can talk about that more at another time if you're so interested when we're looking at challenging our assumptions of gender identity let's look at the best practices for those three pronouns or for any pronoun categories here we can use someone's name to substitute pronouns we can use the appropriate pronouns if you know what to use i shared my pronouns with you today which means that you can confidently and comfortably address me in the way that i'm asking you to do so and then the third trick would be to consider using gender neutral pronouns if you don't know what to use but that means you would use gender neutral pronouns for literally everybody not just those who don't not just those who look like a trans person or whatever that means anyways you would do it for everybody until you explicitly know their identity but i know that can be a very difficult tip or recommendation because i'm asking you to consider changing a lifetime's worth of how we engage with people so that being said here are some ways we can address folks if we are not sure about someone's identity on the left will be words to try and avoid on the left will be words that are unnecessarily gendered when we don't know the identity and on the right will be words that we can consider using instead because we're going to recognize that we don't actually know who we're speaking to some of these options include mom and dad we now use parents or guardians and we're used to doing that work already in a lot of our industries for brother and sister instead we could say sibling for son and daughter we could say child or children for hey guys everyone generally uses hey guys to refer to folks but we can use haiti hey friends hey folks hey people for ladies and gentlemen when we're hosting a conference we could say distinguished guests invited guests dear friends and family or whoever may be in the room teachers and students patients and colleagues and physicians whatever that may be mr mrs miss we can of course use someone's name but there is a gender-neutral honorific that you might start seeing it's pronounced mix spelt and x and for example where you might see this being used is let's say some of our folks who are non-binary who i don't identify as either man or woman may connect with mix and so when we're looking at another teacher profession my last name is boyle so you may see mr boyle miss misboil and mix boil as options for our teachers or anyone in our community now the last one here i i humorously have found that it's dangerous for me to say the word ma'am as it often signifies age so instead of saying can i help you ma'am i often just resort to how can i help you which is delivering the exact same kind respectful service is just not assuming the identity of the person that's in front of you moving on to resources we only have a couple sections left here so resources and planning what we can do about this have a list or a go-to in-house expert or knowledge base of where you can access local lgbtq plus resources an example on the right hand side of the screen is coming from egal and they've put together a variety of community resources broken down by province or throughout the throughout canada as a whole we can also do our best to incorporate lgbtq plus stakeholder input when developing any new programs or services knowing where your local in-house act knowing where your local expertise is or in-house expert is can be incredibly helpful when we're working with these demographics evaluation and improvement so in order to evaluate ourselves and improve our programs and services we need to regularly review existing services and programs and incorporate that feedback when we hear it we also need to try and partner and network with our local lgbtq organizations or local lgbtq experts to strengthen our commitment to inclusivity again it's not just making an ad campaign we need to actually create the internal culture we wish to see and that will influence our employee productivity our consumer practices or people's ability to access our services some common barriers faced by lgbtq folks and these are all barriers that have come from the document intimate partner violence in rainbow communities these spaces in blue here are barriers that lgbtq individuals may face themselves preventing people from accessing our services and so some of the and i'm not going to go through all of these right now but a lot of it may be internal based uh fear some of it may be external-based fear and looking at that last one avoidance of public spaces we're going to talk about that more in a moment but we know that streets and city buses or any public space can be a dangerous place for queer and trans folk and transphobia still is alive and well in our communities if let's say that we're working with a trans man perhaps someone who was born in a female body but is a man and wants to access our space accessing the city bus could be quite dangerous if the person's consistently being assaulted or verbally harassed we may need to reach a community where they're at and we're going to talk about that more in just a moment but i do want to focus on more so at this time is the the boxes in orange there and these are institutional barriers that we as organizations have put up for folks but not always intentionally one of the barriers for our healthcare industry is just the length and time for folks transitioning and cost for folks transitioning a lot of our services might not explicitly have lgbtq representation so after there's often there is invisibility in program promotion when speaking to folks that are at our hospital over the last few days i asked how regularly we encourage trans men to go for pap tests or trans women to go for prostate exams we know the impact of having appropriate and representative healthcare promotion strategies but often folks aren't specifically encouraging those folks to get those services use of non-inclusive options and language in our forms as already discussed earlier in a previous section refusing access to services based on legal or perceived sex i'll briefly talk about that for a moment if we're working with a trans woman let's say someone born in a male body but is a woman let's say due to the abuse of her partner in a domestic abuse scenario let's say her partner is taking away her feminine clothing is taking away her feminine hormones due to the abuse of her partner she may look like how we would perceive a man to look if she goes to a woman shelter it's possible that the service users may not recognize her as a genuine woman in need even though she is a genuine woman in need of her services and then the last one there lack of lgbtq lack of explicit lgbt positive attitudes and inclusive policies you can read more about this when looking at that intimate partner balance and mango communities document reaching a population that avoids public spaces as mentioned a moment ago here are five quick tips that we can do to reach a population that might avoid public spaces we can promote on our website the level of inclusion and the level of support we want to provide to the community we can have a line on promotional materials or recruitment posters or recruitment ads to signify that we're supportive we can promote on social media whether that's sharing articles or business stories or healthcare access or whatever that may be that relates to queer and trans folk we can participate fund or sponsor community events attend events and reach the hidden population way where they are at sometimes we might have to go to the population and not expect the population to come to us and then ultimately when you're ready when we're able to promote our organization as a safer space for the community as a review because we are getting close to roughly the 40-ish 45-minute mark and then we're going to open it up hopefully for some questions and answers review and resources so the primary service that i offer is genuinely folks are interested in a professional development workshop which i absolutely love our main services roughly a half day or three hour plus session and i do not go light on content a lot of people are sometimes surprised at how long it may take to do a session but i assure you even when we're able to do a full day workshop people requested that there was more time some of the topics we go through in our half day or full day sessions include language and terminology queer and trans history human rights social legal and physically transitioning barriers in society relationship building intake forms group activities statistics pronouns gender neutral language washrooms and change rooms a lot of the opportunities for self-reflection why inclusion matters community resources supporting our trans community challenging our assumptions microaggressions and more for as already previously mentioned so i'm not going to go through this in depth i just highlighted our workshops that we offer but we also have our online accessible assessment tool where you can go immediately following this webinar or anytime you would like check out our website complete an assessment chat with me if you would like your institution to do that as well we'll ask you questions similar to what we've been to the topics we've been going through here today and we can give you that report card on how inclusive is your organization beyond just have you simply done a training for your staff and we can make sure that our best practice document is made available for you in order to start doing this work in addressing institutional inclusion ultimately though i would like to genuinely thank you for your time as a person who is a part of the community i first off didn't think that this would be a job or an industry that would have existed when i think back about it 10 15 years ago and so i appreciate your time i appreciate you listening and engaging in this work which is incredibly beneficial i would be more than glad to spend 15-20 minutes or however long we may need answering questions and engaging in a dialogue together thank you so much dale we really appreciate that and we do have time for questions so just a quick reminder for our audience use the chat panel there and your question can come to me or ask for your phone line to be unmuted and i can do that for you as well so we do have a first question here in the chat panel um it is to everyone so people can read along too um dale it's about uh in-house experts quite interesting says there's an assumption that visibly queer folks in the workplace are or should be an expert this can be tricky both because any individual shouldn't be expected to speak on behalf of entire diverse community and because this can become an additional burden on top of the other work they already have at the same time it is valuable to involve members of the community when trying to meet their needs in that context do you have any recommendations about how to access in-house expertise without burdening or demanding from specific folks simply because of their identity yeah i think that's so great and an amazing job acknowledging for the fact that we don't want to use the person as an in-house expert that's not a part of their job or if it's emotionally draining or that's not what they're hired to do if that's not their job then we shouldn't place that expectation on folks but i think where we can place that expectation on folks is do we have an internal expert who is the hr staff trainer who is the equity and diversity person who is the person who is designed to address equity at equity and inclusion and can that individual hopefully lean on accessing some of these trainings lean on an internal diversity committee that provides consultation lean on folks where they're willing to do it and hopefully that person if not lgbtq will do a lot of listening and a lot of consulting with their local community i completely agree that just because someone is visibly queer or visibly trans does not mean that we should place the burden on those on on our queer and trans community let's place the expectation on people's who actual job responsibility is to do just that our internal diversity inclusion human resources our staff culture people i i wonder how uh we feel about that or we can talk to that more yeah great thank you and another question asked how do you have any suggestions for how to request gender or sex information from employees yeah and so i would always recommend let's first ask ourselves do we even need to do that what are we using the information for and if we have a valid reason and that's going to how that's going to help us do our job better or is going to help us have a more inclusive culture about something we ask everyone always in standard pieces then great we can do that and our internal and our the document i referenced earlier would help folks go through that process and ask those questions but it could be done during onboarding and you may have a a reasonable reason to ask that question because perhaps we need to ask for someone's legal sex marker for health insurance benefits but perhaps then we can clarify by asking a follow-up question saying that was only for our health benefits do you want to address what your gender is for the workplace and maybe it could be optional if someone wanted to check it off and indicate they could and that someone didn't want to and it didn't mean anything to them they can just go on without it so i think that some of our hr team and when we're looking at the onboarding or when we're looking at quality control for benefits could be an opportunity to bring that conversation up there absolutely thank you and do you have any suggestions regarding best practices on language to be included in dress code policies pertaining specifically to those who are transitioning i think this is a great question i think the safest way we can probably address dress code policies is to not have gender segregated sex to not have sex segregated dress code policies if our dress code policy can be one policy that every single employee can benefit from or is expected to adhere to then that would be the easiest way to address that because then whether it's the person who's transitioning or any single other person we all have to adhere to that same thing if for some reason there is a legitimate and necessary reason that we have gender segregated dress code policies the recommendation or the the best practice the expectation if you would would be that people can dress and connect with any gender association as per how they identify if someone is a woman then that's just full stop right there people are who they are it does not need to be proven by our comfort or by legal documentation or by a physical surgery or how our other employees or our customers view the person if someone is a woman than they would adhere to the dress code policy of women if they so choose and so ultimately if we do have gender segregated dress codes it is up to the individual employee on which one they would adhere to based on how they identify themselves great thank you and did you provide examples on how to use they or their pronouns when referring to a single person yeah that's that's actually a really good question which we get asked all of the time including myself i was raised in a world that said that they in their they them and their was plural referring to multiple people but i needed to challenge myself and i'll challenge anyone else who may think similarly that we actually use they them there to afford to refer to a singular person on probably a daily basis if someone was knocking on my door here i could probably say could you answer the door for them or saying them referring to a singular person if you were getting a call valerie i could ask you what did they want or why did they call you even though it's only a single person and if let's say i was telling you a story of someone sitting beside me on the city bus and i don't know what stop they got off at but they left their phone so i picked it up and try to ran after them to see who it was and who's looking for their phone i'm referring to a singular person and so all of those are examples in how we use date on there to refer to one person all of those contexts are when we don't know the individual's identity what will be asked of us when we're working with non-binary folks that even when we know who the person is is to still use they than there the concept though was incredibly simple but the implementation is quite frankly a lot of effort because we're challenging how we interact with the world we're challenging our comfort and our go-to language so it will take often a lot of effort even though the request is simple but the outcome can be huge when we don't assume someone's identity and we can validate people's identities great thank you another question asks about pronouns on business cards or email signatures and what would that format look like yeah a great question i had that asked me the other day as well actually i believe on the on the slide that everyone can see right now we format our business cards exactly on how you're seeing it so we put our name we put our title we put our pronouns our phone number and email we put all of the important information about that person we have similarly on our email signatures and on the name badge just outside my door of my office it says my name my title and my pronouns again we're including all important information about that person and then that way words can include pronouns right in there like that but i would recommend that pronouns only be included as not mandatory enforced on the team if we're not yet having those conversations we need to make sure that people know what it means we need to make sure people know how to address it if someone asks we need to make sure people are comfortable with the conversation so it's not a mandatory piece just a highly encouraged to try new things and to consider doing something to create inclusion great thank you then another question there it's in the chat panel again for everyone um would you have suggestions on how to encourage members of the lgbtq2 plus community to create or lead and participate in an employee resources group that can promote influence and link up to strategy where guidelines exist for the various diverse groups we have in our employee population i think that's an amazing question but the answer is a little bit tricky because a lot of the things we were talking about today were things that we could implement because they didn't necessarily require another person to choose to volunteer their time it was just things we could do with institutions and that we have the power and capability of we can't just draft people to our committees we can't just force people to be out in our workplaces how we do that work will be uh by we can create the level of inclusion and culture within our institution by doing all of the other areas as we look at our policies as we look at our hiring practices as we look at our onboarding and recruitment as we look at how we evaluate our programs as we look at offering staff training and and community networks and partnerships hopefully then folks will feel comfortable enough to say hold on the institution actually values me the institution actually wants my input i can see it because they're doing all of this as well perhaps then i will confidently take that courageous step and go and join the team if for example someone needs managerial support make sure there's no barriers there make sure people have the ability to access it but i think that's a difficult question because i i can't give you a direct response other than continue working on queer and trans inclusion work and then when people see that you're genuine and sincere and folks who will perhaps actually start willing to to be courageous enough and vulnerable enough to sit on those committees oh and you're welcome gary yeah i'd say someone commented mercy okay great thank you um and then the other question says do you have any advice on best practices around creating safe spaces for two-spirit people specifically within workplace ergs i'm wondering about the additional cultural context in particular yeah that is a super great question and i will acknowledge that that is not currently where our expertise exists so we have not created two spirit specific resources at this time i am though incredibly fortunate to acknowledge that that grant i alluded to earlier on that employment and social development canada grant is a five-year grant for for just over three million dollars and it will fund six different organizations it is it is ontario based at this time in in simcoe county sudbury and north bay but in each of those three geographic regions we're also funding three different indigenous serving organizations specifically designed to hire a worker who will support 2s lgbt folk and through that we're also hoping that they that the worker and institutions through our relationship building should be should we be lucky enough to be able to foster that will allow will allow that position and institution to help decolonize our workplaces to help create two-spirit specific recommendations to help create those best practices that we yet don't have that expertise in so i need to acknowledge that that's not where we currently are but i'm super thrilled about where we could be over the next five years i just don't have that answer for you right now no that's great thank you um and speaking of um the cities and stuff that you're currently working in that grant are you able to travel and work in other provinces as well yeah of course this is a very unique program of the center it's a social enterprise and it allows us to go where we need to go and that includes the blessing from our funders who helped to start it up so as a couple examples briefly mentioned i just visited chatham kent for three four days which is out of our ketchum area i just traveled to white horse yukon to do some work out in that territory and i'm hearing a little bit of possibility of going out to calgary in about a year from now so yes i am able to travel i can go wherever we need to and i would love to see this work being done and everywhere that uh there's a interest to do it absolutely so dale i do have one more question i am just going to take the presenter control back so you're still unmuted and stuff your view just going to change slightly here in a moment but we'll go back to our final slide and not allow me to open up our customer satisfaction poll so bear with me everyone i just need to click a few buttons here um so while i am doing that the final question unless something else pops up where can we get access to some of the research you referenced at the beginning of the webinar please i'm so i'm so sorry my apologies could you repeat that question yeah some of the ref some of the material that you referenced at the beginning where could they go to access more information like that of course so all of the materials that i referenced at the beginning either i can i would be more than glad to directly send you out to it there is a variety of academic journals i can email you the links or email you the direct pdfs but also we have a variety of queer and trans resources and queer and trans research that's directly on our website which you can access through either of the websites you see on your screen right now and that will bring you to some of the research mentioned today and everything else more than glad to have people email or give me a call and i'll send out everything that we've uh we've referenced that's wonderful we certainly appreciate it now everyone's customer satisfaction poll is up and running for them at the moment dale as you mentioned uh has his contact information on the final screen here so on behalf of dale and i'd like to thank everyone for joining us today and uh thank you dale so much for your time of course thank you valerie and thank you everyone for uh for having this valuable conversation