Educational institutions play a vital role in shaping the future of younger generation. LGBTQIA+ and gender-nonconforming students are more vulnerable to bullying and harassment than other young people. You can make your institution inclusive and safe, and ensure that everyone learns without fear.

Here are some ways in which campuses can make themselves LGBTQIA+ inclusive:

• Ensure that sexual harassment, anti-bullying and other human resource policies are aware of and responsive to the concerns of LGBTQIA+ students, faculty and staff.
• Allow students to form campus LGBTQIA+ groups (like these) and support them with space for meetings, holding film-screenings, etc.
• Ensure that campus counsellors and health-care providers have been sensitized on LGBT issues. if there are counseling hotlines or suicide hotlines on campus or in the town/city, ensure those are sensitive too.
• Institute transgender-inclusive or unisex restrooms.
• Develop an LGBTQIA+ resource center, or augment your existing libraries with books and audio–visual materials on sexuality and gender issues.
• Enable campus groups to organize LGBTQIA+ sessions as part of orientation for incoming batches of students, and hold periodic sensitization events (at least once a semester) on campus.

You are welcome to Contact Us if you have any questions, comments or suggestions. If you would like to share your experiences of discrimination or bullying on campuses, or of ways in which you have helped create safe spaces, we’d like to hear from you. If you are a Chennai-based educational institution we would be happy to organize a campus event to sensitize your students and faculty/staff.