Stowarzyszenie Grupa Stonewall

The Stonewall Group is the largest organization fighting for the rights of LGBT+ people in the Wielkopolska region. The Group has been active since 2015 in the following areas: advocacy, education, help/intervention, culture, and healthcare. The Group comprises 41 members and around 50 volunteers cooperate with us. The board comprises five members. Each of them is responsible for a few areas of activity. Our flagship activity is the Poznan Pride Week festival (we organized a few hundred events in the course of five editions of the festival), which culminated in the Equality March (13,000 people participated in 2019). We help LGBT+ people and their families. For four years now, we have been ... read more The Stonewall Group is the largest organization fighting for the rights of LGBT+ people in the Wielkopolska region. The Group has been active since 2015 in the following areas: advocacy, education, help/intervention, culture, and healthcare. The Group comprises 41 members and around 50 volunteers cooperate with us. The board comprises five members. Each of them is responsible for a few areas of activity. Our flagship activity is the Poznan Pride Week festival (we organized a few hundred events in the course of five editions of the festival), which culminated in the Equality March (13,000 people participated in 2019). We help LGBT+ people and their families. For four years now, we have been co-operating with six therapists holding psychological consultations which have been provided for around 200 individuals now. We run five support groups for: youth, transgender people, families of LGBT+ people, bisexual people, and LGBT+ people from Ukraine. We provide legal help for LGBT+ people, who are often victims of hate crimes (the legal help is also partially financed by municipal grants); since 2016 we have provided a few hundred hours of support in total, which also consisted in representing a client. We organize many cultural activities: produce concerts, theatre plays, and organize meetings with authors. We are also active in the area of healthcare - thanks to the grant from the city of Poznan, we are organizing a training project for therapists about so-called ChemSex. In 2019, we were commissioned by Panstwowy Zakad Higieny (State Institute of Hygiene) to conduct research about ChemSex. We provide free testing for HIV, syphilis, and HCV. We train companies about antidiscrimination (e.g., Allegro, Franklin Templeton). In 2019, we organized the first edition of Letnia Akademia Rownosci (Summer Equality Academy) - we visited seven cities in Poland, combating harmful stereotypes about LGBT+ people (funded by Sprite). We conduct business activity - we manage the bar Lokum Stonewall bar which has become not only a meeting place for the Poznan LGBT+ community, but also the main stage of Polish queer culture for such events like weekly drag queen performances. The bar also boosts our visibility - it is located on the main pedestrian street in the center of Poznan (facebook.com/LokumStonewall). What is more, as a part of our business activities, we run an online shop (outandproud.pl) and organize trainings for companies.