Until very recently, we also facilitated a feeding program that was suspended because of difficulties coordinating it without a main office in addition to funding constraints that we hope to resolve soon. J-FLAG expanded its programming for the homeless community and we have had up to three members of our staff working almost exclusively to support this group.įor over a year, J-FLAG sought a residential location for a safe house program. While we believe a collaborative effort that involves all stakeholders would be more successful, we recognize and take ownership of the responsibility that we have to respond to the needs of this segment of our community. Despite efforts to collaborate with other NGO's and government institutions the task to launch a comprehensive project to house and rehabilitate these vulnerable individuals has fallen squarely on J-FLAG's lap. Both J-FLAG and Jamaica AIDS Support for Life (JASL) have participated in and facilitated numerous consultations with the subset of homeless in the Golden Triangle area in closed sessions as well as meetings with the New Kingston police, the Member of Parliament for the area, representatives of the business community, the mayor and the councillor. J-FLAG interfaces with homeless LGBT group through its Crisis Intervention Programme. We are now thinking about the best way to share the recording without jeopardizing the safety or violating the trust of the speakers and the attendants of the symposium. Recognizing the importance of documenting our programs for online audiences and for posterity, the event was live streamed and was recorded. Representatives from the media were invited and we also hired a photographer to cover the event. The Larry Chang Human Rights symposium was a public event open to our partners, members of the community and the public. This is a concern we must wrestle with as J-FLAG seeks to move out of the shadows and increase the visibility of our work. Speakers were sought locally as well, but we were unable to find anyone who was willing to come out publicly. We know this because we reached out to individuals who we felt were at the place in their journeys where they would be comfortable speaking to a public audience about intensely personal and painful experiences. Some of the most vocal individuals who have experienced high levels of displacement now live in the Diaspora and while many of them would be willing to return to Jamaica to speak about their experiences, they were unable to travel to Jamaica because of the conditions of their resident status in their adopted countries. Most were able to find a home in other communities, some sought asylum and now live abroad as refugees, while a few others remain homeless.
During its operation, J-FLAG has supported many homeless individuals who turned to the organization soon after they were evicted from their homes and communities. Knowing fully well that the absence of homeless individuals from the panel would raise eyebrows, the organization made a principled decision that we stand by.Īt the same time, even if it would be unethical to invite a homeless person to speak at the symposium, the coordinators of the program believed that including the perspectives of formerly homeless members of our community would help to shed some light on the homeless experience.
In human and social development work, there is much criticism of groups who fetishize the suffering of vulnerable and marginalized groups-regardless of how great an organization's intentions are. Many will disagree on this point, but we felt that fêting and tokenizing any of these men before returning them to the street while the rest of us returned to our homes was problematic and difficult to justify. Ultimately, they decided against inviting some of the men who are currently homeless to speak for ethical reasons. The coordinators of the symposium agonized over the potential absence of this group’s perspective and spoke at length about the need to be inclusive. This was not a matter of oversight, as the organization agrees that the voices in the homeless community are critical if we are to find solutions to the issue of high levels of homelessness among LGBT Jamaicans. We appreciate the frustrations of all those who wonder why the voices and bodies of homeless individuals were absent from the panel at the inaugural Larry Chang Human Rights Symposium.
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