Fighting With Pride
This LGBTQ+ Awareness Month the Fund is celebrating its partnership with Fighting with Pride, an organisation which supports dishonourably discharged military personnel with personalised, lived-experience support workers.
Sadly, following changes to military regulation concerning homosexuality, many personnel from the LGBTQ+ community have faced challenging obstacles which directly impact their service, pension, and medals.
Fighting With Pride supports the health and wellbeing of LGBTQ+ veterans, service personnel and their families – particularly those most impacted by the ban on LGBTQ+ personnel serving in the Armed Forces prior to January 2000.
Our Welfare Application Co-ordinator Aishlea Smith has used this period of awareness, to reflect on a poignant quote from author Anthony Venn Brown in his book ‘A Life of Unlearning’, which reads: “When we choose to live authentically, we chip away at other prisons of pretend and create an opportunity for them to walk out of darkness and into freedom”.
She continued: “Now the reason I chose this – is because fitting as it may be, I do think it relates to not only the LGBTQ+ focus... But a greater outlook for people in general. So many people within this community still struggle to fit in, to feel like they belong or to feel free to be themselves without judgement. Why? Because there is still so much stigma about it – and in many places – it’s not safe to be gay or of the community. I could talk for days and days about this topic, but I think the real thing is making what we do and who we are a safe place for all to feel equal, loved and themselves, regardless of whom they choose to love or whom they choose to be.”
The RAF Benevolent Fund has made a total of £34,000 in donations to the organisation over the last two years which will go towards free and easily-accessible counselling services, community programmes, and much more, for members of the RAF Family, who, as Aishlea said, face difficulties with finding a safe and accepting community to become a part of.
We encourage all members of the RAF LGBTQ+ Family to reach out to us for support or answers to further questions about our partnership with Fighting With Pride.