About Us
Patricia Guimarães Gil
EDUCATION SPECIALIST
ABOUT THE CAMPAIGN
Christine Liu
COMMUNICATIONS SPECIALIST
Yi Zhang
COMMUNICATIONS SPECIALIST
Kate Vartuli
SOCIAL WORK SPECIALIST
OUR MISSION
Every school should be a place of caring and academic, human and civic learning. That is how we see the aim of scholar education and that is what we fight for. ‘Support Our Children’ is an advocacy organization for projects that contribute to the well-being of children and young people in all Australian schools.
Our goal is to enable projects and policies that strengthen a culture of peace, affection, comfort and excellence in schools. With this objective, our proposals are politically independent and drawn from contributions from different sectors of society, as well as from diverse ideological positions.
The main strategy used on our projects is to stimulate discussion with society representatives, in order to reach consensus regarding our educational policies and guidelines. For that, our team is multidisciplinary and counts with professionals from different sectors, such as: education, health, communication, social work, political and social sciences. This team acts on an open platform to listen to the needs of primary and secondary students, and adopt different perspectives for policies and programs.
OUR TEAM
Our campaign is motivated by a straightforward question:
What can we do to support our children and youth who suffer because of their gender identity or sexual orientation in schools?
Those students face real difficulties in school due to their gender identity or sexual orientation: 80% of them reported being harassed in schools at least once in one year and 36,6% of them don't feel safe at school. Among the LGTB students, 61% have never reported officially the harassments and other forms of bullying or violence.*
It is not easy to deal with this problem in schools. The debate on how to do so has become an impasse in Australia, especially because the polemic around the Safe Schools Coalition Program. It created a huge division in the country. The decision by the Ministry of Education was to discontinue (from 2018) the nationally funded program to train teachers to deal with the problem of gender identity in schools.
Despite ideological differences and values surrounding the Safe Schools Coalition, 'Supporting our Children' believes that it is possible to construct an alternative policy in the name of students who are still suffering in schools.
*Source: Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network and Australian Human Rights Commision
1. To develop policies based on empathy and caring, not politics.
2. To establish a policy-making process based on the mediation between traditional family values and LGBT demands. Focusing on the well-being of children and young people in schools.
3. To carry out a mediation process through a wide consultative process and through a national conference (click here to be part of it).
4. The conference agenda will be the debate on the national guidelines for a policy to support students with problems related to the acceptance of their gender identity and sexual orientation. These guidelines must overcome disagreements between political parties, loby groups and states.
5. A state policy will require that every school must have a specific plan to protect these children and youth.
6. The school plan should listen to the community and also be based on local consensus.
7. The implementation of the plan will be considered as one of the criteria for distribution of public resources to the school.