Equality & Pride Days in Mongolia
Donation protected
In many countries, Pride is about celebration of where the queer community is, with public servants like the police, army, healthcare providers and educators joining the Pride Marches to show their commitment to equal rights for everyone. Companies pour millions of dollars into these events, all with an understanding that equality means a better society for everyone. However, that is still not the case in Mongolia: since 2013, not a single company donated 1 MNT towards Equality & Pride Days, since 2013 not a single Equality Walk happened without unlawful interference from the police and metropolitan authorities in Ulaanbaatar, neither do we have public service providers marching with us for all of us.
Meanwhile, Equality & Pride Days span a week in Ulaanbaatar and reach tens of thousands of people in Mongolia through our annual, regular events like Voices-4-Equality Concert, Equality Walk, Beyond the Blue Sky Queer Film Festival, Arts-4-Rights Exhibition, Queer community theatre, thematic public discussions and ad-hoc, year-by-year events such as Mongolian Queer Podcast, etc, all of them public and free of charge. We can proudly say the human rights-focussed programming of the Equality & Pride Days have proven to be crucial to the public discourse and gradual societal acceptance of LGBTQI+ rights, step-by-step.Mongolia's socialist past made being queer a crime and a mental disorder. Attitudes from those times are still harmfully alive and spill out in systematic discrimination against queer people in all spheres of life, with many cases of hate crimes dealt by the community on a regular basis. The LGBT Centre, the first and only LGBTQI+ human rights organisation in Mongolia, championed since 2009 for a hate crimes regulation, and got it: it is now a crime to discriminate people on the basis of their sexual orientation, gender identity, with strict hate crimes regulation effective 1 July 2017. But the mere existence of laws does not guarantee automatic removal of biases: it is only the beginning, and the public information and advocacy remains key.
Equality & Pride Days’ organizer is the LGBT Centre, a tiny, 4-staffer, very underfunded human rights organisation in a country that has only very recent notions of private property, corporate social responsibility, a complete absence of philanthropy and zero government funding for non-governmental organisations. For the past 8 years, we have relied on our community members’ donations and in-kind contributions (films, for example) from foreign cultural and diplomatic organisations.
But that is just not enough: we’re growing bigger and reaching out to many thousands of people through our public events and we need more space and equipment for different events, rental of these costs the money we simply do not have and can not raise single-handedly in Mongolia.
So here we are: The LGBT Centre is reaching out to you to make our very non-commercial Equality & Pride Days a reality: please donate to help us make Equality & Pride Days bigger, help us make it a success and help the queer community in Mongolia!
Meanwhile, Equality & Pride Days span a week in Ulaanbaatar and reach tens of thousands of people in Mongolia through our annual, regular events like Voices-4-Equality Concert, Equality Walk, Beyond the Blue Sky Queer Film Festival, Arts-4-Rights Exhibition, Queer community theatre, thematic public discussions and ad-hoc, year-by-year events such as Mongolian Queer Podcast, etc, all of them public and free of charge. We can proudly say the human rights-focussed programming of the Equality & Pride Days have proven to be crucial to the public discourse and gradual societal acceptance of LGBTQI+ rights, step-by-step.Mongolia's socialist past made being queer a crime and a mental disorder. Attitudes from those times are still harmfully alive and spill out in systematic discrimination against queer people in all spheres of life, with many cases of hate crimes dealt by the community on a regular basis. The LGBT Centre, the first and only LGBTQI+ human rights organisation in Mongolia, championed since 2009 for a hate crimes regulation, and got it: it is now a crime to discriminate people on the basis of their sexual orientation, gender identity, with strict hate crimes regulation effective 1 July 2017. But the mere existence of laws does not guarantee automatic removal of biases: it is only the beginning, and the public information and advocacy remains key.
Equality & Pride Days’ organizer is the LGBT Centre, a tiny, 4-staffer, very underfunded human rights organisation in a country that has only very recent notions of private property, corporate social responsibility, a complete absence of philanthropy and zero government funding for non-governmental organisations. For the past 8 years, we have relied on our community members’ donations and in-kind contributions (films, for example) from foreign cultural and diplomatic organisations.
But that is just not enough: we’re growing bigger and reaching out to many thousands of people through our public events and we need more space and equipment for different events, rental of these costs the money we simply do not have and can not raise single-handedly in Mongolia.
So here we are: The LGBT Centre is reaching out to you to make our very non-commercial Equality & Pride Days a reality: please donate to help us make Equality & Pride Days bigger, help us make it a success and help the queer community in Mongolia!
Organizer
THE LGBT CENTRE , Mongolia
Organizer
Walnut Creek, CA