Pride Yarns
Pride Yarns: Development and Trial of an Intergenerational Program for Supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander LGBTQA+ Young Peoples’ Wellbeing (‘Pride Yarns’) builds from recent research by the Walkern Katatdjin (Rainbow Knowledge) project (2021, 2023), which found that Elders’ acceptance of sexuality and gender diversity promotes Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander LGBTQA+ young peoples’ social and emotional wellbeing (SEWB).
Pride Yarns have been developing and testing an Elder-led, intergenerational support program, known as Pride Yarns, which aims to improve Aboriginal LGBTQA+ youths’ feelings of acceptance within Aboriginal culture to increase their SEWB.
The project will be the first to establish an evidence-based approach for improving SEWB among Aboriginal LGBTQA+ young people, which emphasises the strength of cultural connection, and in turn, will place youth on positive health pathways for young adulthood and beyond.
The overall aim of Pride Yarns is to support a community-led program where Aboriginal LGBTQA+ young people (14-25 years) can come to local services (the Youth Pride Network, Yorgum Healing Services, and Wungening Aboriginal Corporation) to yarn about culture, sexuality and gender with their Elders and community leaders.
The project is now in its third and final phase, and Wungening are proud to be partners in this project by providing a meeting place, and staff to guide the yarning sessions.
We are so excited to see the results of this trial come out later in the year, where we will hopefully be able to take away key learnings and apply them across our organisation.
Lily Hayward, a research assistant from The Kids Institute, spoke to us about what it meant to be apart of Pride Yarns as a young Queer Aboriginal person, and how it can truly make a difference.
” As a queer black fella myself, it’s really important for me to ensure that there’s that lived experience involved in the research that is happening in our community. Growing up, there wasn’t a lot of this.”
” It’s been really meaningful. I’ve had some really meaningful yarns with young people and the elders about how important it is to have something like this. What’s great and important about this work and the partnerships is that we are creating safe spaces for queer black fellas in community spaces and community orgs, so that people like me when I was younger, get services and get the support they need”.
To Learn more about Pride Yarns head to: https://www.rainbowknowledge.org/pride-yarns