Proud to celebrate our LGBT Charter achievement

We are delighted to share the news that The Yard has been awarded the LGBT Charter Bronze Award. The LGBT Charter is a programme run by LGBT Youth Scotland to support and guide organisations to ensure our services are welcoming, inclusive and safe for LGBT+ people. It involves working towards and achieving standards, which cover things from policy to promotional materials and training.

As an organisation that works with disabled children and young people, we always consider inclusivity in terms of disability; going through this process was an opportunity to expand our practice to also consider gender and sexuality. We aim for this to become just another of the many wonderful ways we continue to support our families, staff and volunteers, and most importantly, provide the creative and nurturing play environment our children need.

The LGBT Charter programme enables us to include LGBT+ people in every aspect of our work, protecting our staff and providing a high quality service to our members, families, schools and groups. It helps us be truly inclusive for staff, volunteers and service users.

Thank you to everyone who completed our survey and took part in our activities. We submitted our portfolio to LGBT Youth Scotland late last year and wanted to share our exciting news during this LGBT History Month. Several of our policies have been expanded and updated, as well as our staff being trained in how best to support our young people with LGBT+ issues. We have begun adding lots of LGBT+ titles to our library on the play floor. Please let us know if you have any book suggestions. We will also be adding LGBT+ resources to our website and creating a display notice board at each site very soon. If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please get in touch.