Central Florida Gender Equity Needs Assessment 2019

In order for a movement to be all-encompassing of its people, gaps need to be assessed to ensure that it's truly looking out for the community's most marginalized. The goal of this needs assessment is to be able to pin-point where exactly Central Florida's social justice and LGBTQ+ spaces are falling behind - and potentially hold unconscious biases.

 

We hope to accomplish this through an honest evaluation, where participants spoke openly about whether or not these spaces were actually involving them within the community. This assessment was made possible by funding from the Trans Justice Funding Project. Highlights from the report include:

• The general consensus between a majority of participants is that there are very few women of color in executive board positions within Central Florida’s social justice and LGBTQ+ spaces – and when there are, organizational leadership may resort to tokenism.

• Trans or nonbinary participants reported apprehension in sharing their gender identity to colleagues because many have already questioned the validity of their identities, even in LGBTQ+ spaces.

• In order to address harassment and abuse in Central Florida’s social justice movement, participants listed a handful of necessary improvements. One of which was the lack of community accountability, where organizational leaders may prolong instances of abuse by choosing to ignore them when committed by coalition partners.