Search Results for: equality intersex rights uk

Making applications is time-consuming, especially if you haven’t already got any of the bits of info lined up from a previous one.

→ Beyond the very basic questions on application forms (that I’ve seen), every question seems to require something I can’t supply yet, or require significant research or creation/digging into records.

Each one of the application requirements, I realised, was probably at least an evening of work outside my day job, or more, to understand it enough, and finding/asking people to take on roles. Some might be more like a week‘s worth of that.

→ For one bid, we needed to prove we could ring-fence funds to spend to match the bid funds. There’s a lot of volunteer time in proving [that], or proving appropriate oversight, or proving accounts are up to date, if you are small enough that you don’t have to have an accountant check your accounts.

→ Our volunteers are mostly disabled people that can give a few hours a week, myself included.

→ [A lot of organisers are] doing a 9-to-5 job, and then, you know, running the bi group in a tiny moment on the side.

Bank accounts add another layer of tedious admin:

→ The big problem for a lot of groups in terms of accepting funding is that they don’t have a bank account.

→ There’s so many steps. To get funding I’d need a bank account, to get a bank account I’d need another signatory, to get that I’d need a constitution. On paper the org doesn’t exist.

Also, bank accounts cost money to run (bank charges) and our income is very very low.

→ [Setting up the account] was hard work, and involved one of our former Trustees having to visit a branch in person more than once to speak to the right member of staff. Even once the account was opened, it took ages to add additional people as signatories to the account.

→ We still struggle without online banking or a debit card.

→ At the moment we’re in a flux situation with our bank accounts, because I can’t find the second signatory, and the bank’s insisting the second signatory signs off on the fact that I can’t find them. So I’m having a fight with the bank at the moment.

→ We don’t really need a bank account – but if we did want one now, I suspect the biggest obstacle might be finding someone who’d want to be Treasurer.

The prospect of future admin isn’t enticing, either:

→ Burden that would be placed on the organisers to demonstrate value for money and necessary governance arrangements

In our survey, the most common obstacle to getting a bank account was the group not having a constitution or formal structure. Five of the no-bank-account groups also named “No-one wanted to take on the ongoing admin”.

An application form might require you to get multiple quotes:

→ A thing that is exhausting about funding bids for small organisations is getting exact costings.

Fundamentally, being a volunteer trustee or event organiser or various other things does not make you a specialist in the costs for printing, design, training, transport costs, childminding etc.

Needing 3 quotes means I need to find and talk to three suppliers about what they can offer and how much they cost. It’s exhausting to small businesses or individuals whose time we would buy in as well.

Three organisations will tell me what they can and can’t deliver, and what their costs are – and then we need to translate that into how we can use their time best, and our reading of community need and willingness to participate in different directions.

They are such small grants and they all require the same amount of time and input.

Funders often require other information which an applicant may not yet have assembled (especially if they haven’t done it before).

One of the things I need to do when applying to grants outside (and inside) LGBT+ funds is prove need. [Funders] could help supply groups with some key studies, statistics or other proofs of need.

The same goes with proving efficacy or monitoring results. They could tell us what has been shown to be effective and easy monitoring techniques. All that planning of monitoring is volunteer time that could be spent actually monitoring, or building resilience and capacity.

If you’re not ready when it comes along, you’ll miss out:

→ You need to be on the ball to apply for it. Once you’ve seen a specific fund, you need to already have your bank account and committee and referees, because the closing date will be in like a month.

Nevertheless, some groups did invest their volunteers’ time in making applications – often unsuccessfully.

→ The fund offered no feedback at all and failed to acknowledge receiving the bid, though someone at the company acknowledged it to me privately.

→ Generic ‘thanks for your application’ email saying we’d been unsuccessful, no specific information given.

→ [We were told] that the fund was oversubscribed: £90,000 in applications for a £20,000 fund.

→ You put a lot of time into the application, then you get nothing.

The result was less enthusiasm for applying again, especially combined with the limited available time and energy.

→ We don’t have time to spend on what we felt were fruitless activities.

There were various ways in which groups and events found themselves misfitting with how funding bodies wanted to operate.

A common one was wanting the wrong amount of money, when funders want to dole out £5,000 or £50,000.

→ Feels too formal a process for the small amount needed – but it would be great to take that burden of donating off attendees.

→ And we don’t want it to be “tiny amount or huge amounts“: “we need 50 quid for leaflets” – although good luck getting leaflets for 50 quid, that’s a myth these days, 150 quid for leaflets – or “we want £5,000 for a conference”. Actually recognising that we might need something in between, and what shape that takes will depend on the project.

→ Big organisations don’t have a problem, tiny organisations don’t have a problem, but if you’re in the middle, you’re neither. You’re neither.

Dealing with middling-to-big amounts of money also means having middling-to-big amounts of time:

→ There were the odd times where we’ve said “actually, we could probably apply for big amounts of money. What would we do with that? We do not have the ability to look after that money.”

→ I’ve got big dreams that I could do if you gave me 20 grand, 50 grand, whatever. I could spend it like that. If I had the time. So it’s – the money is the big problem, but actually the time really kind of sits with that. You need person-power and money, and there’s no good having one without the other.

Funders might not be receptive to new inventions:

→ They need to be more flexible. They need to be far less “We didn’t expect you to ask for this, this is why we are not giving it to you”.

They’ll go “What?! How will you do that. No”. You’ll end up not getting funding, because it doesn’t fit the traditional ways of working.

→ When I ran the first Lit Fest, I got turned down for some funding because they looked at me and said, “I don’t think you’ll be able to do that“. I’m like, “Are you kidding? We’ll be fine!”

We didn’t get that funding, I got it somewhere else, and ran the event mostly by myself with some help from the local library. And it was a success and now the Lit Fest is a big thing.

So that was interesting to have that conversation – “We didn’t think you’d be able to pull it off”.

Funders sometimes impose geographical constraints:

→ If they’re going to be funding the bi community, we can’t be “England versus Scotland versus Wales versus NI”. We are one community made up of a variety of different groups. We work together across the UK.

So “we will fund organisations, but they have to be England based and their work has to be in England” – not even “you can partner with somebody in Wales or Scotland as a way round it” – that was not a useful way of doing it.

A classic way to misfit, which affects the whole voluntary sector, is when you need running costs / core costs, whereas funders want to pay for a one-off:

→ Also many places don’t fund running costs, they like a big project to put their name on.

→ My experience has been that people really like funding projects, but running costs not so much.

→ [Talking about the idea of paying people to run BiCon:] The problem you then hit is that there are plenty of grant making trusts who will go “oh yes, we fund new stuff, and we don’t fund core costs”. This would be a core cost. That is a complete pain to find.

Funding applications can be much less flexible than real life:

→ We will spend differently depending on how much money we have, and we will change course depending on what we can deliver. What I would love is to be able to say that XYZ is our final goal but XY or YZ will get us part way there and we will scrap around for the rest.

In the case of training, which we were trying to fund, we could train core volunteers and work outward from a strong base, or offer bite size training to all [participants]. [Which method would be best would depend on which trainers were doing it.] Literally, our approach would have changed if we had different trainers available.

You will change your advertising based on which type of training is possible, and because quotes need to be up to date for funding bids, all of this becomes double work so you can slot it in quickly when writing an actual bid.

It can feel impossible to get the initial money which would help you to get going and then get more.

→ One of the things I’ve been told is that any organisation’s first paid member of staff should be a fundraiser. And… I’m not a fundraiser. And I have no access therefore to get the funding to pay a fundraiser. So that goes round in a tiny circle.

→ If we had funding, and were able to pay people, then more would get done.

→ It gets a bit chicken and egg, doesn’t it. It’s hard to get over that hump of getting the first stuff done, to get a bit of money.

This was less often talked about, but it did come up:

→ Not having the skills to apply, or the knowledge of the grants on offer is a big thing.

→ When I did a brief internship at the Fawcett Society, many, many years ago, I discovered they have a piece of software called “Raiser’s Edge”. It was a database of grant giving foundations. And so I’ve looked into that, and it’s £1,000 a year, or whatever it costs at the moment.

So there are lots and lots of smaller organisations, giving grants out, and we’re never ever gonna find out that that money’s available.

Rather than small groups trying to find out where the money is, it would help if sometimes the people with the money went looking for the good work:

→ If funders watched bi projects, and reached out to ask how money could help, and offered what was needed where they saw good work happening (skills, money), that would be the most conducive to supporting them; a bi rep at an LGBT grant-giving body could put in some regular time to look out for projects worthy of funding.

Part of the big picture is that the wider culture of prejudice against bi people also runs through charities and funding bodies at the management level. The B continues to be erased and neglected in those contexts too.

→ [Organisation] got a very substantial grant to do a ‘what’s available’ guide to one city. It says it has “hundreds of LGBTQ+ services” listed. Click on “Bi” and the single thing that appears on the map is labelled “Gay men’s walk-in clinic”.

→ “tum-ti-tum bank LGBT rainbow alliance network gay and straight together – who? Who’ve we forgotten?”

→ LGBT organisations use statistics about bi trauma to get funding and donations for primarily LG or LGT social and health projects. They combine LG&B stats to prove that LGB people have worse mental health, are more likely to live in poverty, etc. therefore need targeted help – but they don’t mention that the group most affected is the bi community, and it certainly isn’t reflected in the services provided. They only include ‘bi’ in the name or with other insignificant token gestures.

I worked for a big LGBT charity for many years so I know exactly how much the needs of the bi community are dismissed.

LGBT domestic and sexual violence projects don’t provide bi specific services, despite bi people experiencing a huge amount more violence of this kind than LG people and becoming socially isolated as a result. In their current form, LGBT social and health services further isolate survivors of violence like me – they’re LGBT in name alone.

This particular LGBT charity told multiple bi activists that they only added the B to their name because they intended to add the T and provide trans services: the implication being that if they’d changed it from LG to LGT, their biphobia would’ve been too overt from the outside.

Sometimes it’s more a kind of casual unawareness or lack of prioritisation than any overt anti-bi feeling, but the result is still that bi people are ignored and un-reached:

→ If you want to actually reach bisexual people in, say, London, advertise on the tube / Metro / Evening Standard, not Boyz / QX / GT / Diva etc etc.

Don’t just advertise events / spaces / projects in the ‘gay’ / ‘lesbian and gay’ / ‘LGBT’ media or scene. We know from research done on gay & bisexual men’s health that far fewer non-gay identified men look at those vs gay identified men.

The reality is that a very large chunk of people who engage in same-sex behaviour or who have same-sex attractions do not, and will not, have a LGB+ identity. In many cases, they do not have ANY sexual identity in the way that virtually all LGBT activists do.

So it is crucial for spaces / projects to be aware of who it is they are aiming at: people with bisexual attraction, bi+ identity, and/or bisexual behaviour. There are far fewer of the middle one than the first and last, but all are under the ‘bi+ umbrella’.

A very common solution to the funding obstacles has been to keep things small and dip into our own pockets.

Sometimes this was a typical ticketed event, albeit with no-one getting paid for organising.

→ London BiFest is funded by an ongoing £1,000 loan from BiCon Continuity, and I currently have £1,200 in the bank as we made a profit last time. Mostly we break even – the majority of the cost is venue (as always) and the rest is stationery, snacks, flyers and random bits and pieces. Nobody gets paid for anything and costs are covered by entry fees, which are between zero and £10. It’s a very simple model and works well.

Sometimes it’s “pass the hat on the day” – though this can be financially risky for the organiser.

→ [Event] relied on a few individuals making larger donations, because not everyone can donate a lot. But what happens if they can’t one year? I have to pay out of my own pocket.

Sometimes it’s organisers who can afford to keep their lives simple by paying the group’s expenses from their own money. Two-thirds of organisers in our survey had resorted to this.

→ The actual subscription costs for the MeetUp group, I pay for that personally. I don’t charge any fees to attend the group. It’s just free attendance, and bring drinks and snacks if you elect to. And so, I self-fund the actual yearly subscription to MeetUp.com.

→ It was the beginning of last year, just before the pandemic, that my partner and I who co-run the group went all over [town], leafleting anywhere we thought LGBT people might hang out – cafes, shops, anywhere we thought had the vibe that might attract queer people. [It was] in the hope that people who aren’t that Internet focused would find the group, rather than just relying on social media and websites where we’re named. That came out of our own pocket.

→ I learned of all the barriers, and that my group hadn’t even begun to approach being ready to apply [for funding], and that it would be hard work and low chance of success if I did go through all that work (which would probably take months). I decided it was easier not to try, and therefore just to fund stuff myself and keep any expenses within reach of that / maybe the odd (spontaneous) donation from a member that helped.

Sometimes it’s classic crowdfunding, where the enterprise doesn’t go ahead unless it’s sufficiently funded beforehand.

More recently (2010+ but really since 2015), crowdfunding became a practical thing to do after enough platforms like Kickstarter became mature enough. [Bi book] Purple Prose’s success demonstrated that in our community.

After “From organisers’ own pocket”, the next most common survey result was “From the community: donations, subs, crowdfunding, pay what you want events”.

Aside from whether relying on the community can work – which to an extent it clearly can – several organisers expressed unease at the ethical implications.

→ When you see jobs advertised for fundraisers, some of them are charities wanting people to organise “fun runs” for crowdfunding. I don’t think we want [to encourage that type of fundraising], because we will be feeding off ourselves and as a community we are not that well off.

→ I hate that [crowdfunding] means it’s just us funding ourselves though, whereas LGBT orgs get money from elsewhere, or rich LGBT organisations/people, or who want to look good for it. We need some of that!

→ I know that if I said on Twitter, to the people in the bi community, that we needed to raise £200 to, you know, have a stall at a Pride, then people in the bi community would contribute that money. But I don’t want to do that, because… [pause] I’m tired of the bi community funding itself, to shout into a void and no one listen. Because that’s what it feels like.

→ We’re quite poor as a community.

→ I’m sick of people asking me to do stuff for free. So I don’t wanna ask other people to do stuff for free, for me. And [for bi events] we’d try to keep cost to attend very low, as well. Which is difficult, because you don’t make money that way. But it’s important to me that we make events accessible, and pay people who are performing, so yeah.

→ [About the idea of being paid to do things] If it’s other bi people paying for it, then I feel bad.

Several of our interviewees and contributors remembered back towards the roots of the present out-bi movement, beginning to organise together as bi people in the 1980s and 1990s (rather than invisibly contributing within Gay Liberation spaces).

The habit began then of creatively “making do” with little or no money:

→ Bi groups have always run on shoe-strings. Partly because [many of the groups] come from a background of being able to use free or low-cost non-alcohol venues. “Anyone can start a bi group, all you’ve got to do is ask the local community centre, and they will say it’s going to cost about 30 quid a year to have your post go through there, and then off you go.”

The problem then comes when people say “if only we could”, I dunno, “have a float, in a Pride event. Have a book come out, that we self publish.” And everyone’s first thought is, “Well, we’ll have to make the money out from between ourselves.” So if it’s a float, we have to pay for it. If it’s a book, we have to self publish. If it’s a T-shirt, then… “Doesn’t Gary’s brother have a screenprinting machine?” Because we automatically first think, well how can we do this with what we’ve already got?

We automatically assume that we’re not going to get any funding, and we do that because we’ve never had any funding.

Whereas a larger organisation would say: Right, well, we want to have as a project this year, put a float into Pride. So we’re going to assign these people to run the project, and their first task will be to work out the budget.

We think: How can we do this amongst ourselves? And amongst ourselves, the thing we don’t have is money.

→ At the same time as the gay community was discovering that the pink pound was a powerful force, that you could get some capitalists on your side and suddenly it would be OK for you to have rainbow flags and gay bars: the bi community was going completely the opposite direction.

I think it’s gone too far, in terms of, you know, “rainbow-ising everything”, making it so commercial. And at the same time I think we’ve missed out.

A lot of the LGBT mainly gay male organisations: when HIV funding became available, they did a big bootstrap process of making themselves “funding ready” and looking good, and getting sponsorship for Pride, and generally going very corporate – which the bi community did not do. And I can totally understand why the bi community did not want to go that way, but it means that they are just streets ahead.

We’ve got a bit better now that we’ve got more older people who work for other charities and have some sense about, you know, “what’s normal in other charities“.

→ The DIY nature is a hallmark of the community, but also its downfall, basically.

→ It’s one of our greatest strengths and our greatest weaknesses.

→ [About 1990s bi organising:] I got a grant from the Health Education Authority, that was dealing with HIV, AIDS, safer sex publicity. They said “we will pay for five articles about safe sex in your newsletter”.

[Per article, the payment was] in the “hundred quid or more” line, that was more than a week’s worth of your benefits. And because most of us were on benefits – students, or just generally really hard up, people thought of this as a lot of money. And of course to the HEA, that was peanuts.

[At that time] The idea of people being paid to do something, rather than paying for supplies or what have you, was completely alien to us.

Even though the tradition of creatively working out “how we can do this anyway” is still present, people in our research discussions were very ready to talk about paid work.

→ If you want to run big events, then you really need to be paying people. There’s a big difference between rocking up for a couple of hours once a month and basically running an organisation day in day out.

→ For me it’s a no-brainer: if you’re coming to deliver services for a demographic that need those services, then it’s reasonable to be paid to deliver them.

→ I would genuinely love to have a full-time job doing equality stuff.

There was some wariness about how that could be set up well, especially in situations when some people might be paid alongside others who weren’t.

→ We were both saying: yes we thought it would be good [to pay people], and something we would aspire to in future. Asking people to give their time voluntarily doesn’t sit right with us, and we think people should be paid. But figuring out the structure how to do that might be difficult.

→ In my experience the biggest problem comes when some people are paid and some people are not, and the criteria for that are either unclear or seen as unfair.

And yet, a doubt remained about whether we could be paid:

→ I’d be very comfortable doing [paid work for the community] because I feel that I could do enough that I wouldn’t feel bad for taking money. The question is who would be paying me. It’s not realistic, but it’s a nice idea.

To wrap up this section, two comments looking to the future:

→ I just want to say that a lot of the questions you ask, I never even thought about. Like “what would I do if I had somebody to work for a day” – what? But I think you could see as I was answering more and more, that the idea for what the potential is really grows the more you actually just ask the questions. And then you can expand on your idea and see the the potential of it. And I think that’s really valuable, that exercise.

→ We’ve seen how successful we can be running shoestring events, and shoestring organisations, which have, you know, decades of life, but no money. What could [an organisation] do if it was funded from the beginning?

As we talked with different organisers about how money would be useful, outreach was an incessantly recurring theme.

Of course, any group may want to reach new members, but there are bi-specific factors too. Bi organisers are acutely aware of how erased into invisibility we are in the wider world, and how many people haven’t yet found a bi community. Many of us spent a long time not knowing any other bi people. Many of us took a long time to recognise ourselves as bi, because bi people weren’t visible as ordinary real people in our world, only as stereotypes.

In part because of the cultural invisibility, there are people who’d never think to look for a bi group – we have to show them we exist.

In our survey to organisers, we asked “If the group does things other than meeting up, say here briefly what”. Many of the responses were related in some way to educating the wider world: for example, offering training to other organisations, or responding to government consultations.

How would money help?

Almost everyone who was asked about money mentioned flyers.

→ particularly [to reach] older people who are more likely to be digitally excluded.

→ I would spend it on flyers and MeetUp fees.

Other physical resources mentioned were posters and booklets.

→ One of the things I’ve often said we’d like to do with the [Bisexual] Index is get posters into sixth forms and universities. With a simple thing along the lines of, you know, “bisexuality isn’t complicated, it’s just attraction to more than one gender” – “website address”.

→ Getting Bi [booklet often given out on stalls etc – a “pocket guide to coming out and staying out as bisexual”]²³

Having a stall at Pride usually costs money too – if not for the stall itself, sometimes for insurance.

→ £75–100 larger local Pride stall inc. insurance (when Prides happening).

When we asked what a paid worker could do to help a group, very often that too came under the heading of outreach or publicity:

→ If we did have a one day a week sessional worker, I would want them to do a proper scoping exercise about how to find older bi people who are not part of the LGBTQ community. Whether it’s worth going into day centres putting out posters trying to reach people – because we know they exist – some people really marginalised and not connected at all.

As an organisation, we know where to find older people. But we’ve never done this work of specifically reaching out to bisexual people, and we’ve tended not to go into spaces that were seen as mainstream and heterosexual. Which I think has worked against bi people.

And yes, publicity activities I think really, probably like getting on social media and spreading the word that the group exists. If we had the [hypothetical] £100 as well then flyering.

→ [If we had paid admin help] We could easily have a monthly bulletin – “It’s now four months till Bi Visibility Day and already… blah blah blah. In the summer we’ve got this. There’s news of a new group there.” That could be going out to every student union LGBT soc and every signed-up local LGBT network, or Meetup group, in the country.

→ If there was any time left over, I would have them maybe work on some other social media things, maybe start up an Instagram or something like that. Post some pictures.

Because many organisers are either disabled or working a full-time job, some were struggling for time or energy even to keep the group’s web site updated:

→ I want help with publicity as well. I’ve not updated the web page in years. I just don’t have the time. I’m mostly reliant on email and Facebook to run the group at the moment, and I’m conscious that won’t capture everyone. The web site is public-facing: everyone could find that. So I would want help with that just to keep it up to date and post stuff so it looks active.

→ I stopped paying for the website because nobody was updating them. Maybe I could pay somebody to update the website. I do have two Twitter accounts that have never seen any action. Somebody to do that stuff would be good.

Organisers are usually very aware of the needs of new people who might visit, and that shows in how we think about spreading the word.

→ When they’re new, the biggest hurdle is coming down the first time. It’s partly that you might not be out. It’s also just partly that a lot of people have anxiety about going into new groups at all. Even if it was a craft group or something.

→ People are nervous if they haven’t seen other people’s comments, or been before, and seen how it works. They think maybe it’s a sex thing. Or that they’re going to be hit on all the time. And so I try and [keep on] explicitly saying everywhere “we’re not a hook-up group, yes people may date, that’s not our focus”.

I’ve wanted to do a YouTube video for new members – “this is what it’s like, come and watch an event, just see what the atmosphere is like.”

A lot of bi people are disabled.²⁴ Some are parents or carers. Some are autistic or otherwise neurodivergent. Deaf and hard-of-hearing bi people have been central within BiCon organising.²⁵ A lot of trans people and nonbinary people consider themselves “under the bi umbrella”. And bi people are disproportionately likely to be living on low incomes.

Another factor for all LGBT+ groups is of course outness. Some people feel most comfortable in an LGBT centre or known gay-friendly pub, to minimise the risk of bother. But if there are people in your life you can’t afford to be out to, those are the most scary places to be, in case you’re seen there, or seen going in.

All of this makes access of various kinds a central issue to bi organising, both in person and online.

→ Thinking of access and how things are paid for formally or informally (such as feeling obliged to buy drinks) and also travel costs, not being on public transport [routes], childcare etc.

In our survey, when asked about venues, every local group ticked either “A pub or other licensed venue, which we get for free”, or “Another venue we get for free”. A few also used paid-for venues at times.

→ My advice for running a group: “Accessible venue“. But that’s like the Holy Grail, isn’t it.

→ For people with physical disabilities, places that are hard to reach (are they near public transport, do they require a lot of walking, do you have to go up stairs etc), does it require a lot of standing, that sort of thing.

Then for neurodivergent people, places that have a loud atmosphere or too much sensory overload. This can be very hard to handle for you when you’re already in a very stressful situation of meeting people for the very first time, when all you want to do is have a good time and meet people like you.

This might be the first time you’ve left the house or socialised in months. So it’s important that the accommodations are right, because disabled people will suffer in silence to keep up with those around them, and to be able to have the same opportunities that they’ve been looking forward to for who knows how long.

→ We always used one of the – perfectly disabled accessible, toilets, ramp, automatic doors, everything. Quiet, private room. We won’t have access to that any more [due to the host organisation losing the lease]. It’s quite unlikely we will have anything quite as perfect as that in those senses.

→ The cafe where I run the coffee meetup, it’s completely wheelchair accessible. That’s really useful. It has gender neutral toilets which is also useful.

My venue for the pub is very inaccessible, even for me. But we’ve been there for so long… The one good thing about the venue we’re in is there’s no background noise.

I’m trying to find a ground floor space that will be free, which is almost impossible. Particularly if you can’t guarantee numbers.

→ Few to no commercially run places to meet that are explicitly bi inclusive or mainly bi.

→ We’ve had people lose things in a bigger place, because it’s not all just us. Things have gone missing at the end of event. Very rarely.

→ We meet in a pub in [city] that has a long reputation of being LGBT+ safe space. So from that point of view it’s a good place to meet.

But one thing I didn’t realise till I was talking to a wheelchair user, is it’s not really wheelchair accessible. I had thought, “well it’s got step-free access, so all good”.

It’s got double doors, which means someone has to hold the doors open. It’s one of these things that had never occurred to me because unless you use a wheelchair, there’s nuances that aren’t always apparent. And the toilets aren’t accessible because they’re not big enough, even though they’re step-free.

I only found that out when I was by chance talking to someone who used a wheelchair last year.

And I thought “well, if one person can’t come to that venue, that’s one too many, so we need to move”. The challenge is where to move.

The cheaper venues tend to be further from the city centre – less likely to work for people coming by public transport.

→ Basically anywhere fully accessible that’s in the middle of town is like, more money to hire than a group can pay out of their own pockets. It’s one of the reasons we could do with more money.

The choice of pubs or bars, or the presence of alcohol, were mentioned a few times as access issues. The next three quotes are from our survey of people who go (or don’t go) to bi groups:

→ Groups that meet up in bars are hard for a lot of people.

→ PLEASE can we have queer spaces that aren’t centered around alcohol and aren’t loud as hell?

→ I prefer lgbt events that aren’t too big, too flashy, so like lates at museums, film festivals etc. Not everyone likes to drink/dance

→ It’s normally okay [in the pub], but occasionally we get this big group of football lads who come after a game. They make so much noise. It’s really disruptive when you’re trying to have a quiet social.

Here an organiser researching venues (this one unchosen) illustrates the classic scenario of “sort of accessible… but not really“.

→ OK, so there is technically wheelchair access, but it’s the freight lift. And you would have to go to the front door –

‘Cause my partner uses a wheelchair. Any time we would arrive for an event, we would go to the lift area, which is at the back of the building, and wait outside. And then I would have to go to the front entrance, go inside, probably go up the stairs to find someone, tell them that someone’s waiting.

It was a very fussy lift, and you had to shut the two sets of doors, difficult to use. So it would be better to have a staff member there, but then that would… You know, there was one time when we were waiting at least 20 minutes. So it’s not really accessible.

And also their bathroom… they say it’s accessible, but actually you can’t turn your wheelchair in it.

Although bi organisers are extremely good at scoping out the best compromise of a free/cheap venue, there’s no doubt that money would make a difference:

→ Our local Friends’ Meeting House, that’s absolutely gorgeous. But their rates are beyond the group’s pocket, normally. We have been there occasionally.

I think this does loop back to the, you know, “we all expect to be skint, all the time, so £3,000 seems like a lot of money”. And it actually isn’t. If you’re hiring an accessible venue once a month, that’s gone in a few years.

→ In London, a hundred pounds “doesn’t touch the sides”, does it.

→ They would have had to pay a thousand pounds to have a Changing Places toilet, to hire [for a day], outside. Because the venue didn’t have one.

Several groups were able to use a venue via their connection with another organisation.

→ Bi The Way is a group run by Opening Doors London.²⁶

→ Bi and Beyond get their room for free from LGBT Health, for instance.²⁷ And then LGBT health report to their funders to say “we are supporting the bi community in this way”.

Being connected with a charity can also get you cheaper rates sometimes:

→ We could do with at least one other UK-wide bi charity who could act as an umbrella organisation, so they could say, “we are paying for this group’s meeting at this hall, and therefore they should get the charity rate“.

What about online spaces?

As the covid pandemic pushed events online, new skills and resources were needed:

→ At the beginning of the pandemic, I wasn’t really sure how to transition to doing virtual games nights. It just didn’t feel the same. [We needed] virtual games that you could play together online as a group. [And] I’m very good at holding the space in person but virtually it was a bit different.

→ Funding for closed captioning to make the Zooms more accessible.

The virtual meetups had advantages too, for connecting people who wouldn’t have met at the in-person groups:

→ [Since covid] I have a few international attendees to my virtual meets.

→ Online meets have been great for me. Because I haven’t been able to get out. I don’t need to worry about somebody not being there to meet people.

This comment from a bi disabled poet shows several aspects of the shift to online/international, while questioning whether it’ll last:

→ A lot of activities have moved online during the pandemic, and a thriving international poetry scene of readings, open mics and festivals has developed, mostly on Zoom, but also using Facebook Live, YouTube and other platforms.

This has really opened things up for disabled people like me, who often have difficulty travelling and accessing live events locally – although there are other concerns like access to technology, and signers / subtitles / transcripts, which all require extra effort, resources and willingness to provide.

The big question is how much of this will continue. Some organisers are making strong commitments to developing hybrid events, or continuing online events alongside live events. There’s acknowledgement of the value of the connections and friendships we’ve made and the benefits of being able to hear someone read poetry from another continent, or who wouldn’t be reading at a live event.

We’ll have to see what happens.

Some access is about timing rather than place:

→ Groups that meet up at the same time every week/month will always exclude people with specific working patterns.

As so many bi people are disabled and/or on low incomes, financial access is a well-known issue. A lot of community-run events operate on a sliding scale. London BiFest gives free entry to people of colour. BiCon has the “Helping Hand fund“.²⁸

Organisers also had other ideas:

→ We’d really like to be able to fund for low income people to come to events in a shame free way. Maybe having a gift card with funds on it that people who can’t afford a meal (which we buy in return for the space) could buy food on.

→ Funding for some data, for people who don’t have unlimited data plans.

→ Travel costs. Free tickets for POC and those in extraordinary circumstances.

As with outreach, access came up when people thought about the possibilities from having a paid worker:

→ a lot of our spare funds we have now are spent on inclusion, so it would be great to continue that with someone in charge.

UK bi networks already hold an enormous amount of skill and experience – which doesn’t necessarily get transmitted around efficiently, partly because the people holding it are limited by energy or time.

Here’s Marcus Morgan, director of the Bisexual Index:²⁹

What I would love to be able to do is more mentoring, more training, and more teaching, of the things that I’ve – I’ve not been taught, but I’ve come to learn, over 30 years. Because I really wish people had been able to say to me at the beginning, “oh by the way, here’s a shortcut”, or “by the way, here’s three things which if you do them now, will save you a lot of time later”

There are things that I’ve learned: not just about bisexuality, but about how to be an activist: how to approach organisations when you need to talk to them, and how to teach people about bisexuality… that I really want to try and pass on, to future activists.

It would be great if we had activist jobs that did that.

It’s a problem familiar to self-employed people who need to earn a living:

When we talk about how much free time we have, we need to understand, we’re balancing that against paid time. I have this much free time. If you’re going to pay me to do something, I’ll do it in a different piece of time. I could use some of that work time, more productively, on bi stuff!

What we need is someone to say: We’d like to do better on bisexuality. And to do this, we don’t want us to be better, we want our sector to be better.

But more, I want someone to say: We are an organisation that mentors and trains LGBT people to support other LGBT people; we’d like to sponsor an event like that, but for bi. I want activists mentoring activists. And I want it to be funded, and I want some of the funding to pay people to be there.

In one of our research discussions for organisers, we asked about situations where they wished they could have asked for advice.

Several people mentioned emotional skills, self-care and knowing where to draw boundaries, when difficult situations come up while you’re in a hosting role.

→ When I was hosting on my own… There have been situations where people have come who have brought a lot of stress about their situations to a meeting and I’ve been on my own.

It’s not a counselling group. A situation like that, when people have come to a meeting and been in a state of distress, or it’s had a very big impact on the meetings – sometimes just knowing how to hold that, and then to process it for myself afterwards, has been difficult.

You can sometimes be very exposed to the huge level of stress and damage that there is in the community. As well as all the lovely stuff.

→ Anything that is risky legally, anything that is risky emotionally – particularly around unpaid emotional labour and safeguarding.

We have had a couple of issues… interpersonally, where we tried our best, but you know the lessons you learn don’t… Each situation is unique.

[One situation was] When you’ve got someone that is harassing people inside the group or outside the group.

I think there is a list of people that can’t attend. Trying to manage that, and balance it to confidentiality – because somebody complained about confidentiality. We brought in an external organisation who helped, and it was fine.

Most recent one [included] a suggestion that our activism has to be perfect despite being volunteers, and we are somehow responsible for rehabilitating people. No, you can’t expect that of volunteers.

→ The sticky emotional moments. It’s really difficult sometimes to separate yourself from the stories you hear, and the people in the community that are struggling, and you can’t always help. So for us, if we had finance or time to get some training or support for volunteers, that would be amazing.

And then of course there’s all the potential learning around funding, charities, constitutions, bank accounts and so on.

→ It’s not really about filling in a form. It’s about familiarity with a structure of how things work and what things cost.

→ People don’t think about… I already have to pay for internet at home, because my job is home-based at the moment. Great! I can pay for internet.

But this wouldn’t be free if I didn’t have a good internet package. This [i.e. being on Zoom for the discussion] would actually cost me data and money.

It’s not just about people being aware of factors like that and how much they cost.

It’s equally thinking about the other end of that: how far it can go to give someone ten pounds towards their internet costs to participate. How much difference to somebody’s life that can make.

→ One of the things that has often occurred to me is that there is a big gap between different kinds of money, so, there is the sort of 100 quid for flyers level, there’s the hundreds or couple of thousand quid for venues level… then there is paying people [i.e. paid staff].

Like we get at Continuity [the charity], people say “you’ve got so much money” – and what we’ve got is enough to pay deposits on venues for 2 years and a bit. We don’t have enough money to pay anybody.

[Or] you get people saying “oh you should definitely have BSL interpreters for your entire event”, who have no idea how much that actually is – which is lots.

→ Concepts that need to be covered. One is full cost recovery: what are your actual costs, and how they get covered. The other point is results based accountability. What do we mean by outcomes?

We’re all making a difference to communities, we’re making outcomes. But only people who are working in the sector in our day jobs would be able to write down “these are the outcomes”.

We know that people in the community can understand that and do that well – they just have never been taught.

Training has to match the stage of the problems which the group and organiser are dealing with:

→ The training I did was too far advanced [for where the group was]. Choice of charity/CIC etc is irrelevant when you don’t have a constitution or bank account. Online Consortium resources quickly get into legalese and complexity – it was targeted at groups wanting to become an incorporated charity in the longer term. That feels like forever away, if ever. I’d much rather have a version which our members can read and understand too, and not require a solicitor to edit without accidentally breaking.

→ I sit in a fundraising workshop, and I watch my attention level just tick down, every time they say things like “well, what you need to do is take along your founding articles and constitution, and your list of trustees, and…”

The assumption that those steps are easy… grates on me.

→ I’ve been on so many different training days, and I feel like whenever it’s like “ooh, learn how to do funding applications” it’s the same stuff. I’m not actually learning anything new. It’s like oh, “double check”, “read the guidance twice”. I already read the guidance, like that’s just not an issue I’m having! “Make sure you state this clearly”.

And it’s not really getting into the nitty-gritty of what I find difficult, but I don’t know what to say is what I find difficult until I have the form in front of me going “I don’t know what you want from this answer!”

But the money training must be targeted for the people who actually do need and want it:

→ Obviously [money training] is good and it should be available, but I also worry that it’s a bit like “now every bi group runner has to learn to fundraise, and then fundraise” – and they don’t have time, which is another part of the problem.

Another organiser echoed Marcus’s point about transmitting the wealth of skills we already have:

→ Giving development support to organisations and groups: we can’t just arrange all of that ourselves to pass on our knowledge, because we are too busy doing the work. But if we had support to do that, that could go a long way.

Annual gathering BiCon in particular has been an enormous time commitment for the main organisers, provoking discussion about both the ethics and the practicalities of paying people.

→ I do think people that run things like BiCon should get some sort of money, ’cause it is an awful lot of time to take out of schedules to actually run a BiCon. Or even a BiFest.

→ Not relying on unpaid labour in general would be good.

→ I don’t think you can pay someone less than [national living wage]. I don’t think that would be ethical. At that point, you might as well be a volunteer.

→ [From a BiCon organiser] When I added up the hours it involved, it got scary. You can’t pay [national living wage] if you are spending 1,000 hours, without finding £9,000 from somewhere.

→ A lot of people in the bi activism community have the luxury to volunteer because they have well paying jobs in the first place, which is not true for all of us.

→ BiCon being our main big gathering, the fact that it’s been done by volunteers is quite remarkable. But I think the future is paying someone.

Most organisers didn’t raise the idea of being paid to run their regular meetups. But some did want to be able to call on deputy hosts for when they have to miss a session.

→ Some support would be nice, the odd time I can’t manage a social, or I barely have the energy have to drag myself, because there’s no one else that can run them in my absence.

It’s a tough spot where’s there no immediate way between having lots of support and just having a little bit of support. Even just an engaged group member that has some availability would be nice sometimes.

→ [From a disabled organiser] Somebody to turn up if I can’t turn up. Virtual meetings have been good for me, because if I’ve been too ill to get out, I can still do virtual.

We heard of an example where a local LGBT organisation, which lets the group have a room for free, had also given support with facilitation:

→ There was a Bi and Beyond meeting that was facilitated by paid workers [from LGBT Health]²⁷ It helped because there was a shortage of people [available to host] at that point.

For small groups, a paid worker “on loan” for a few hours seems more feasible than hiring anyone directly.

→ When you hire somebody, you don’t just need money. You also need a structure within which they’re going to be supervised, or looked after, and get their wages paid and all that kind of stuff.

But, yeah, if you’ve already got that lined up and it’s just extra hours [for a person who’s employed in a related organisation], then it’s simpler, isn’t it.

There were other ways that a co-organiser (paid or unpaid) would be able to help:

→ I think in some ways time would be more useful to my group than money. I would be thrilled if somebody turned up and said [they would help]. I would first of all suggest that they co-host the group, which is what we’re looking for at the moment. [If they had more time after that] Finding speakers, activities, doing all the research background stuff that I’ve been doing.

A great many resources (like literature and web sites) would come under the heading of “outreach”. But there can also be practical things needed to run the actual events.

One recurring theme was technology.

→ Upgrade to Meetup Pro subscription, to integrate with other services better.

→ [For educational presentations] Hiring sound equipment. So we’re not just doing a room with people and having to talk over them. Or, you know, we want to do this in a room, and the one we’ve found doesn’t have a projector. OK, well, let’s hire a projector.

Technical expertise overlaps with technical resources:

→ Find an affordable way to integrate virtual and real life meets

→ automate/link access to Discord via Meetup

→ [When booking a venue for an event] You’ll want to know, like, “what equipment do you have, or what might we need”.

I knew we wanted to have performances. But I didn’t know about music, or sounds, or whatever. And then that person wouldn’t know, and they’d give me the email of someone else [from the venue]… it was very stressful.

As some resources wouldn’t be linked directly to one specific event, a couple of people expressed concern about overlap with personal use.

→ When it comes to buying equipment and tech… That’s when personal guilt creeps over people, myself included. I think to myself, well, if I had a little Chromebook, or something, that could just run a prepackaged PowerPoint file [to do educational presentations]. “Ooh, but then maybe I’d take it on holiday with me”.

→ The cost of Zoom, ’cause I’m paying that out of pocket. But if I then used that Zoom account for non-bi-group-related things, do I end up with issues there around governance? – you know, like using a company car for personal use. I would have to look into that. It would be a concern I would have.

Tech wasn’t the only event-related expense. A couple of people mentioned that they were currently paying for food for their meetups:

→ The thing that I was paying out of pocket for was refreshments. I could easily do a hundred pounds on crisps in a year.

→ [If we had more money:] Provide food and drink so that people wouldn’t have to bring their own.

Equality Network is a charity “working for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) equality and human rights in Scotland”. In 2020, as part of the Scottish Government’s covid emergency money, they got £30,000 for LGBTI community support, which had to be spent by the end of November 2020. Subsequently, they got another £23,500 to be spent by the end of June 2021.³⁰ In all, 64 groups received money.

Here, we describe the ins and outs of how the process worked, based on an interview with Scott Cuthbertson, Development Manager at the Equality Network, who took the lead on organising it.

For the groups, the application process was a fairly informal meeting, usually with Scott.

We had the same chat with everyone. It was usually a Zoom meeting. It would usually last between 20 minutes and half an hour. And really it was just a chat about the money, the process, how they could get the money quickly, what they wanted to do with it, and how they bookmarked it, i.e. checked the receipts and how they forwarded them on to us.

I just wanted to make sure that we had a handle on it – that they knew who we were if they had any issues, and that we could discuss what they needed the money for.

In most cases, Scott already knew the group. If not, a colleague did, or at least they were visible online.

We are a small sector in Scotland – there’s probably about 80, 90 groups. Even if I haven’t worked with all of the groups, I know who they are. Or I know someone.

I think, had there been a group I couldn’t find, I would have maybe asked them for a wee bit more detail, a few questions. “I’ve not heard of you, can you talk more about your group, or where you work, how you work… Is it just you, or is it… you know, who’s involved”. But that never happened.

There were a few constraints on the funding: it had to benefit LGBT people, it had to be spent within a short time, and it couldn’t fund “duplication”.

The government told us, all the money has to be spent by this date. And we had to make sure that groups also got their money out by that date, as well.

They didn’t want to fund duplication. We didn’t want a group that was doing something to find that the other local group had got some money and they’re now doing what they do.

To be honest that never happened. There were a few occasions of “oh, there is another group doing this kind of work, but ours is different in this way” – and that’s fine.

Most groups applying for the money were LGBT groups, but a few were other kinds, who could show the benefit they would provide to LGBT people.

I need to understand, “if I give you this money, how do LGBTI people benefit from it”. If you’re not an LGBTI group, and you want to do something, what is it you’re doing that is for your LGBTI members, or an LGBTI aspect – what is it that’s LGBTI here.

In terms of admin from the groups’ end, the key thing was to provide receipts.

I never said to groups “you must fill out a report form”, but what I did need was a receipt. So if you asked to purchase something, if you were paying for artists for your event, if you were paying for staff time to deliver a specific element of the project you’re delivering around covid, then… You had to provide your receipt.

In terms of admin from the Equality Network end, Scott created a form to track the process with each group.

It explains who the groups are, what the contact is, what challenges they face during covid, and where the money is going. Quite simple – I could fill it out in minutes. And I fill that out for the group.

So I’ve got that there. And if the group ever contacts me again, or we’re chasing them for receipts, then I can just go straight into those files, I can see what they wanted the money for. Especially if they want more money – I can just say “let’s have a look at your form”, and I can remember what they’ve done.

That form was then a way for which our admin person then had a trace on where the money had gone, could set up the payments – ’cause it included their bank details and stuff like that.

We have a procedure where one of our board members or the director has to approve it from the bank account. And so they’ve got immediately on the form, they can see what that money is, they can set the approval button, and the money goes out, very quickly.

And so [the form] helped dealt with some of the internal processes, it helped deal with external processes, and… Come the 30th of this month, when I have to report on that grant, I can say, well, here’s all the groups that have got money, here’s all the various different things they’ve been doing.

Groups varied enormously in how much money they asked for.

Some groups wanted fifty pounds, some groups wanted a thousand pounds, some groups got a little bit more, depending on their need, and what they’re trying to achieve.

Working with dozens of groups, one might expect that perhaps the odd situation might not go perfectly, but in fact all the receipts did come back.

I confess that some groups needed a wee bit more chasing than others.

The government wanted to know how many people had been reached, so groups were asked to estimate that.

The only thing we said to groups to report on was how many people they felt they had reached. And that was only because that’s what the government asked us.

So when they send in their receipts, they usually send us a number. I don’t ask them to justify it. Obviously I say to them try and be realistic. Just want to know how many people you think you’ve reached. And then I’ll tally them all up.

The report back to the government also needed to include which groups had had the money, and in general terms, what for.

I have to supply a list of the groups that have got money, and I also have to give a narrative of the different things that people were asking for. So not a list of what every single group did, but maybe thematically, there were groups that did some of this, this was a big thing here… Like Zoom Pro. I think there was a fair amount of money spent on Zoom Pro. Understandably.

And the funder just stipulates to us, it does say: if we require to audit, then please have a copy of the receipts. But, you know, it keeps us good for our own accounts as well, that we’ve got traceability.

An important challenge to meet was the logistics of funding groups who’d never received funding before.

Off the top of my head, I’d say there was probably about a fifth of groups that didn’t have a group bank account, and we paid them to personal accounts.

The key element for me there was: we required a receipt. And it didn’t matter to me whether that receipt was from your own bank account or from a group bank account.

Some volunteers couldn’t risk receiving any group money into their own account, in case it caused problems with their benefits.

There’s a fair proportion of LGBTQI people who are on benefits, and who were worried that perhaps a large payment into their bank account would impact their benefits, and maybe – you know, the DWP coming in and doing an investigation or whatever, causing problems for them.

So, yeah, it was sometimes a case of asking, well do you have a partner, or a parent who has a bank account, or is there someone that you know that could potentially act as a bank account for this money. We need the receipt, and… That’s how we got round it.

For four of the groups, the only way they could find was for the group volunteers not to touch the money at all:

There was a group – We couldn’t get round this issue around the bank account. They didn’t know anyone in their group that wasn’t on Universal Credit, or had a bank account that they could access.

And so we bought [the resources the group needed], and paid for them. So we had all the receipts. And then we sent [the resources] to them. And that got round that issue.

We very much had to explore different ways of getting money out to people. And I think just given the pandemic we were happy to do that.

Working in this flexible way of course meant a higher burden of admin at the funding end compared to “normal times”.

I do wonder if in normal times, people would want to take on that extra responsibility. For six months, I’ve been working on this night and day. It became days of 12 hours in meetings, chatting to people, meeting people, arranging the Zoom meetings. Getting their money out, liaising with finance to make sure that it had all happened.

Some groups would come back to us and say “oh, we don’t want this any more, could we have this instead”, or “The pandemic’s gone on longer than we thought, can we get some more money.” “Let’s have a chat about it, what do you need, how can we help?”

At the same time, the reduced admin burden at the groups’ end meant that many groups across Scotland received funding for the first time ever, making it an enormous success by that measure.

There were lots of groups [who said] “This is our first batch of funding”.

They’ve had their first taste of funding, they’ve done some amazing things with that, they’ve acted with ingenuity, and engagement in the local communities – it has been a pleasure to work with them.

So they want more of a taste of that. And it’s sad to have to explain to them that funding is never always like that. It’s never as easy as that. It’s never as straightforward as that.

I am proud of how it worked, for sure. As a funding model going forward, I’d love for the funders to adopt it. I wish there was a pot of money I could just get my hands on and do that again, but… I don’t know that that’s going to happen.

Bisexuals Action for Sexual Health (BASH) organised a Peer Education Project in 1995-1996.

As far as we know, this was the first time anyone had been employed in the UK specifically to support a bi community project: a half-time Project Worker, funded for a year.

The project included a plan to give grants of up to £100 to grass-roots bi groups where a group member had taken part. 15 of the 21 groups did claim.

Quotes in this section come from the end-of-project report: Addressing the Need, Unravelling the Myths. A Report on Peer Education in the Bisexual Community.

BASH had already existed for several years before this project:

Bisexuals’ Action on Sexual Health (BASH), was formed after the annual bisexual conference in 1991, with funding from the Health Education Authority (HEA). Its members have included bisexual people with experience of bisexual community activism and some key figures in the HIV sector.

During that time, the idea of bi community peer education had already been discussed. When there was the chance of money to do it, the group was ready to apply:

… an ad from the Red Hot AIDS Charitable Trust (RHA) offering to fund innovative projects … a broad outline of the PEP was drawn up, based around the maximum grant of £20,000.

The total grant awarded was £19,500.

The Peer Education Project would bring bi organisers together from across the country, to learn and then to pass on their knowledge.

A paid worker would run a series of training events for the organisers of the local bisexual groups around the country, who would in turn run safer sex and other HIV prevention workshops for their groups.

As part of the project, each group could claim up to £100.

£100 would be available to each group who sent someone to the training, partly as an incentive to do so, partly to help them reach their local bisexually behaving population, eg through publicity and advertising, and partly to give them some experience in applying for funding themselves. The trainees’ travel and accommodation costs would also be paid.

There was careful discussion over the setup.

The worker would be based in an established organisation, but one local to wherever the successful applicant turned out to come from.

… it would be much harder to ‘sell’ the PEP to local groups if the worker were not bisexual, despite the community’s habit of not asking about people’s sexual identity.

In a network where lots of people know each other, it’s especially important to be careful about fairness in recruitment.

… because of the knowledge of the bisexual community required, members of the interview panel would know the majority of the applicants. So to avoid any potential bias, the recruitment process was based on equal opportunities principles, with applicants being judged solely on their ability to match the person specification

Application forms were split in two on arrival, concealing applicants’ names, education and employment histories from the short-listers.

Interviews were carried out in May 1995, where questions were asked to ascertain knowledge of the bisexual community; presentation skills; the ability to assess needs and the appropriateness of current HIV information to bisexual people; awareness of confidentiality and diversity issues; and the ability to facilitate, train, motivate and support people.

From the interview process, there was a clear winner “on points”: Kath Arrowsmith.

The next step was to establish a Newcastle base, from where Kath would work.

A manager for the project was identified at Body Positive North East Ltd. (BPNE)

As BPNE is not primarily focused on health promotion, links were set up with MESMAC Tyneside, Newcastle and North Tyneside Health Promotion and the Northern HIV Trainer’s Forum.

Advertising to the bi groups was slower in those days, when most people didn’t yet have email. Methods included letters directly to groups, articles in Bifrost magazine, and informal networking at a bi women’s weekend. BiCon happened in early September that year; that was an opportunity both to gather input and to share the news, including recruiting more peer educators.

The centrepiece training weekend took place a couple of months later:

The national training and support weekend took place on 4th and 5th November 1995 at the HIV Project in London.

30 people (14 male and 16 female), representing twenty-one bisexual community groups and networks from Dundee to Exeter, attended the weekend. All workshops were co–facilitated by bisexually identified men and women.

Workshop topics included HIV transmission and safer sex, Groupwork Skills, Peer Education, Needs of Bisexuals Living with AIDS, Negotiating Safer Sex, and Community Development.

Generally people were positive about the weekend … The weekend as a whole rated higher than any single workshop.

The next phase was for the peer educators to do their workshop sessions to peers.

Ten groups organised and facilitated safer sex workshops as part of the project. Most peer educators also found themselves in informal safer sex discussions as a result of being involved in the project.

The report mentions briefly (as one reason why not all groups delivered a formal workshop session) that two new groups were catalysed somehow by the project:

Four groups have been in the process of setting up during the project (two as a result of the project)

In the February, there were three regional meetings as follow-ups: one each in Newcastle, Manchester and London.

Regional meetings were attended by 21 (9 male and 12 female) educators and were held on 11th, 17th and 24th February 1996.

If a group wanted to claim the £100 grant, they had to fill in a very brief application form, to say what they would do with the money. No-one was turned down.

15 of the 21 bisexual community groups and networks involved in the project, claimed the project grant of up to £100. In total £1457.60 was claimed.

The groups used the money in different ways:

Most peer educators who claimed money have used it to advertise, and buy resources for, their safer sex workshops and group. Some used it to fund specific events or projects. For example, the London Bisexual Group used it to advertise their 15th anniversary celebrations, Nottingham Bisexual Group for line rental for their new phone line … The representative of the London–based Bisexual Helpline used the project grant to attend the National Lesbian and Gay Phoneline Conference, in order to acquire more skills for running the Bisexual Helpline, and to raise the issue of bisexuality to other phoneline workers.

The evaluation of the project named small groups in particular.

It has probably had more impact on smaller groups than those that are more established, such as the Edinburgh and London bisexual groups who have carried out more peer education previous to the project and who have more funds.

What can we learn from those two case studies?

An elegant aspect of the BASH PEP design was the way the participation of volunteers formed a natural measure of commitment. “If you’re committed enough to give up a weekend to do the training, then we trust that you’ll do good things with the hundred pounds.”

This gives an opportunity to reduce the admin burden around writing and assessing application forms. The setup itself was attractive to people already invested in the good of their communities, a strong predictor of the money being spent well.

This structure also meant that there was no significant amount of gambling with time. Unlike with an application form which might go nowhere, the time investment from volunteers almost all happened after they’d been accepted into the project. They didn’t have to apply for the money till part way through, and by then they knew they were likely to get it.

The BASH PEP structure wouldn’t have worked if the training on offer hadn’t been considered valuable in its own right by group members. The weekend of training didn’t feel like a tedious hoop to jump through just to get the money; the people who stepped up for it wanted to learn about safer sex and workshop running, for themselves and to help them support their friends and communities.

This model could be adapted for other situations.

For example, a year’s funding for hire of an accessible venue could be unlocked by a certain level of participation in training to facilitate a group. Potentially a group could keep on unlocking further years of venue funding as and when new volunteers gained co-facilitation skills. This would encourage the group to become more sustainable, through lessening its reliance on only one or two key volunteers.

It’s clear that for the Equality Network community support funding, informal interviews worked well as a method of taking applications. This possibility came up in other discussions too.

One advantage mentioned was the shorter time compared to filling in a form.

→ You don’t have to type up, and it’s less – Like, you can just set half an hour.

But the main advantage was how much less daunting and more accessible it would be in terms of understanding what’s been asked.

→ With the application [form], you feel like you’ve got to type it perfectly, and you’re not really sure what they’re asking, and… it’s just difficult? It’s disconnected.

Obviously, because you’re talking, it’s more accessible in that way. Somebody’s asking you questions, rather than a vague prompt, or statement, that you then have to try and figure out what’s relevant, and what’s gonna get you the funding.

→ You’re talking to a person instead of talking to a blank form.

→ Application process – no bi groups in the UK have professional bid writers. Consortium could provide support in completing applications and also make elements face to face rather than in written question form. Generally a more simple and straightforward process for bidding would ensure a broader range of bi groups would be able to apply. This is also an accessibility issue.

→ In a form, it says a question, and you’re like “but what d’you need to know?” If the person’s right there, you can go “how d’you mean?”

Even if you did still have to fill in a form, it would help to have someone from the funding end to talk you through it:

→ So I think maybe some kind of consultation process, that’s probably more work than they’d be able to put in, but just being able to say if you’re struggling with this form, contact us on here and we will sit and go through with you. Like an impartial person or something like that, it’s just what you need.

A challenge well met by the Equality Network setup was how to get resources to groups who aren’t currently equipped to manage money. But in that example, there was a question mark over the sustainability of the admin burden at the funding end, due in part to the complexity of so many different situations and requests.

The resources wanted by a small bi group often fall into predictable patterns. For example, a common wish is for paper flyers with the group’s details, ideally with meeting dates for the year ahead.

A volunteer panel could agree a catalogue of resources which any bi organiser could request, such as flyer design and printing, books to lend to group members, or flags for event participation.

A worker based within an existing organisation could be funded for a certain number of hours per week to manage the admin: taking requests, posting physical resources, and managing orders (e.g. to get flyers printed).

The recipient groups would never need to account for money, since they would never touch the money themselves; however, they could be asked to report briefly on results, e.g. numbers reached.

As each small group developed a measurable track record, its successes could unlock access to the slightly higher-cost levels of the catalogue, such as venue hire, Zoom accounts or Pride stall bookings.

This kind of channel for sharing resources, where the admin burden is taken primarily at the distributor’s end, would help to multiply the efforts of the grass-roots volunteers.

The risk to the funder would be small because the financial amounts would be small; even if a volunteer occasionally dropped out of sight with a few books and flags belonging to the group, that’s a small loss compared to the potential benefits.

This type of project could be set up right now. A short-term pilot version would help to establish the demand and the likely workload.

It’s also something which could be inherited and built upon by a Virtual Bi Centre.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, that began to change. White lesbian politics became increasingly defined by the rejection of men and of “male energy”. In feminist spaces influenced by these ideas, the distinction between lesbian and bi became much more of a big deal; bi women were seen as politically unreliable due to not having renounced men.⁴³

At the same time, bi people were beginning to find each other as bi people. The London Bisexual Group began in 1981, catalysed by a bi men’s group which had in turn sprung from a Men Against Sexism conference.

We advertised all through the summer of ’81 and eventually 80 women and men turned up to the first meeting at the club ‘Heaven’ on September 1st. This was the foundation of the London Bisexual Group.⁴⁴

Bi-Monthly magazine started around 1982, as a project of the London Bisexual Group. It was to run till 1989.

The London Bisexual Group then organised the First National Conference on Bisexuality, in 1984 – the origin of what became BiCon.

For me, living in Hull and having felt very isolated, the most important thing, and the one that kept me high through most of the weekend, was the chance to talk with, to share with other bisexuals, to know I am not alone!⁴⁵

In the mid to late 1980s, AIDS was becoming common and well-known in the UK. Bi men became heavily stigmatised in mainstream culture, for their potential to transmit HIV from “sick” gay men to “pure, innocent” women; bi women experienced a similar effect to a lesser degree. Meanwhile, bi people in the US were taking up leadership roles in safer sex education.

Within most gay circles, bisexuality was seen as inferior and politically awkward. Some lesbians who were willing to share space with gay men didn’t want to share space with bi men. At one stage, around 1985, the London Lesbian and Gay Centre banned bisexual groups from meeting there.

In 1988, Section 28 of the Local Government Act banned Local Authorities from “promoting homosexuality”. Teachers in schools were scared to come out, and scared to speak out against the bullying of children picked on for seeming gay or bi. Many young people were left without support, and even without words for who they were.

The whole of my school career, therefore, was overshadowed by this silence. I can only imagine what my life would have been like if I’d heard the word ‘bisexual’ before I turned eighteen.⁴⁶

The book Bisexual Lives was published by the Off Pink Collective in 1988, having sprung from discussions at the bi conference in 1985.

In 1989, the now-annual conference shortened its name to BiCon, and first offered accommodation to participants.

In the early 1990s, HIV/AIDS activists in the USA were organising under the name Queer Nation, and some UK people were using Queer as an umbrella term for events and writing. In the UK at least, queer-named spaces tended to welcome bi people, and be generally not much concerned about the finer points of bi versus gay.

Around the UK, grass-roots bi groups were springing up.

In 1991, writers in the US produced the anthology Bi Any Other Name, which quickly became popular in UK bi circles.

Monthly magazine Bifrost began in 1991, and was to run till 1995. Bifrost briefly rented one room in the Edinburgh LGB Centre (as it then was), which functioned as a tiny volunteer-run bi centre.

Annual gathering BiCon was thriving on volunteer energy, albeit very white and rather middle-class. It was heading into a long series of residential-weekend BiCons which would be on University campuses, typically with around 200 to 300 participants. BiCon 1992, in Norwich, officially accepted trans people as their lived gender, and this was consolidated at BiCon 1993 in Nottingham.

In 1993, Sue George’s book Women and Bisexuality was published by Scarlet Press.

Many people (both lesbian/gay and straight) have told me that I am the only bisexual they have met. Of course, this is not the case, but even today, popular misconceptions mean that few people feel able to be open about their bisexuality.

… despite the prevalence of bisexual behaviours, bisexuality is relentlessly and deliberately left out of the discussion of the possible range of sexual options.

The book’s listings section is a snapshot of local bi groups at the time: London, Edinburgh, Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Nottingham and Norwich. There were bi phonelines in London and Edinburgh.

At BiCon 1993, some people were paid by the Health Education Authority to run sessions on safer sex. There was criticism around lack of transparency in who was given the work.

More bi anthologies were published in the mid-1990s in the UK, US and Canada. Plural Desires was noteworthy for being 50% written and edited by women of colour.

The mid-1990s spread of the Internet caused an escalation in bi people finding each other, for example through the Usenet discussion group soc.bi.

In 1995, there was a landmark: the first person (we know of) in the UK who had bi community organising as their paid job. This project also used an effective method of distributing money to the small bi groups. See our case study above on the Bisexuals Action for Sexual Health Peer Education Project.

At BiCon in 1995, Bi Community News magazine was set up, to be run by volunteers, and funded by subscriptions. That’s still going today.

London’s Pride Trust AGM, at the end of 1995, voted to change the name of the event to “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride”, recognising the presence of bi and trans people. In both 1996 and 1997, the London festival included a “bi tent“, organised by community members, with stalls and performers all contributing for free. (However, the Pride Trust lost money on the 1997 festival, a new group took over, and they didn’t continue the bi tent.)

Pride in London weren’t the only organisation in this era to acknowledge the presence of bi people by a name change. However, when an organisation did change name, that didn’t always mean anything else had changed, or that bi people were likely to feel welcome.

In 1997, Tony Blair’s Labour government came in. They would eventually repeal Section 28, making it more possible for teachers to come out and to challenge bullying in schools. Meanwhile, they gradually began to make the benefits system more conditional, so that it became more difficult to do creative, community-nurturing things while “on the dole”.

In 1998, BiCon formally adopted a set of guidelines to align expectations around “what a BiCon is”. It included the expectation that BiCon would be run by volunteers.

We had it so hardwired into us that it’s written in the BiCon Guidelines that we will not be taken over by professionals. ‘Cause at that time, we thought that “professional” meant “other people”. People who didn’t recognise bisexuality coming in and taking over, or wanting to dictate how we would do things. So… you know, it wasn’t that we didn’t want to be paid, it’s that we didn’t even imagine we could be paid.⁴⁷

In the 2000s, BiCon was still going strong, albeit perceived by some as becoming less political. Its costs and turnover were steadily increasing, as universities began to take seriously the money-making potential of summer conferences, and started upgrading student accommodation accordingly.

The Internet continued to make it easier for bi people to meet online, though that didn’t necessarily always translate into in-person groups thriving. LiveJournal, then Dreamwidth, became popular ways of keeping in touch in between BiCons.

In 2002, a tradition began of “bi activism weekends“, self-organised and self-funded by a small group, meeting at Leicester LGBT Centre or other venues. Any bi organiser could join the email list where the weekends were organised. The weekends ran fairly regularly up till about 2014.

In 2005, UNISON’s Lesbian and Gay section began officially admitting bi and trans people.⁴⁸

Due to funding cuts and increasingly punitive benefit “sanctions” in the name of “austerity“, life got more difficult for many people in the 2010s, especially for disabled people. People who might once have volunteered on a bi event while living on benefits had less energy to spare.

In 2010, Bi’s of Colour was founded: a bi space centred on people of colour.

Bi’s of Colour was formed at BiCon London in 2010 – a year after a racist incident before BiCon 2009 by one of the organisers. A few of us talked that year about what it would look like to have a safer space for the minority within a minority at the longest running bisexual event in the world. Back then there were only five bisexuals of colour in attendance at BiCon in Worcester, but the following year there were many more. Twelve of us sat in a room, shared, cried and made connections. It was the start of something special.⁴⁹

Financially, the group ran on donations, using a PayPal account.

BiCon Continuity became a company in 2011 – after some years of discussion of how best to take care of BiCon’s money, and gradual acceptance that a formal structure was a wise precaution.

In 2011, a team from BiUK and Bi Community News produced a set of Guidelines for Researching and Writing on Bisexuality.⁵⁰

In 2012, some of the same people created the Bisexuality Report, a summary of the research up till then.⁵¹

[Content note: disrespect to bi women] In some feminist circles, bi women remained stigmatised as untrustworthy for not having renounced men. As late as 2012, UK feminist Julie Bindel would state:

I believed then, and I believe now, that if bisexual women had an ounce of sexual politics, they would stop sleeping with men.⁵²

In 2015, Jacq Applebee created the The Bi’s of Colour History Survey Report.⁵³

Around 2015-2020, writers from Bi’s of Colour made some sharp anti-racist critiques of BiCon and other white-dominated bi spaces, via the Bi’s of Colour blog.⁵⁴

In 2016, UK bi anthology Purple Prose came out, following a successful crowdfunding campaign in conjunction with Thorntree Press.⁵⁵

Around this time, most of the BiCon organiser veterans from the 1990s were retiring from running it; some remained involved as trustees of BiCon Continuity.

In 2018, Pride in London had a bi float for the first time, organised by a bi team, paid for by crowdfunding and other community fundraising.⁵⁶

In 2018, the Scottish Bi+ Network was formed, initially as a self-funded network of volunteers.⁵

In 2019, the recently-formed London Bi Pandas crowdfunded to run a second float at Pride in London.

In 2019, the first Bi Pride took place very successfully in London, following more than a year of outreach to other Prides around the country.

In 2020, the covid pandemic meant many bi groups had to cease normal operation. Groups discovered Zoom, and moved online except for a few walks or picnics; international and cross-UK connections increased.

The London Bi Pandas converted their 2020 Pride planning money into a fund for vulnerable LGBTQ people, raised even more, and were able to distribute it, albeit by placing a heavy load on the group’s organisers.⁵⁷

The Pandas formally disbanded in 2020. Their “goodbye” post explained the reasons, including a demographic shift towards white participants.

We have been asking ourselves why we need another predominantly white queer space? And the answer is that we don’t.⁵⁸

BiCon 2020 was held online, and offered online anti-racism training for participants. In the autumn, there was an “anti-racism review” for BiCon and its history, following a promise made in 2019.⁵⁹

In 2020, Ele of Bi Cymru began running online meetups for bi organisers, including participants from the Netherlands, Italy and the US.

Bi’s of Colour formally closed in 2021.⁴⁹

In late 2020 and early 2021, because of the Equality Network’s community support money from the Scottish government, some community groups across Scotland received funding for the first time ever: see our case study above.