Toe in the water was a small exploratory piece of research to look at the circumstances and experiences of black and minority ethnic (BME) individuals who identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual (BME) and live in Wales.
The project and provided an opportunity for people to share and reflect on the positives and negative impacts around being an individual within both minority ‘communities’. The small-scale innovative project has successfully reached out to a hitherto unrecognised and ignored sub-population in Wales.
“Preliminary studies like Toe in the water are important not simply for what they illustrate and illuminate about the lived experiences of these individuals, but also in advancing knowledge about the complex inter-sections and interplay between forms of discrimination as they impact on the individual’s sense of wellbeing. As such, studies such as these provide a number of pointers for service providers and for future research.’
Charlotte Williams OBE, Professor of Social Justice, Keele University.
This is a stand-alone Welsh piece of research with its own findings from talking to people who identify themselves both as lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) and black, minority ethnic (BME) through a variety of methods. However, because of the sparsity of UK research that looks at the intersectionality of race and sexual identity issues we think it is important to view this research alongside the work of the Everyone IN, the Minority Ethnic LGBT Project (2009) project which focused predominantly at agency / organisational level.
The research was devised at the North Wales Equality Centre and delivered by the North Wales Race Equality Network in joint collaboration with Stonewall Cymru and was funded by the Wales Equality and Diversity in Health and Social Care Research and Support Service Joint Initiative Funding.
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