Support Rainbow Community Angels!

The rise in anti-trans hate continues to impact the programming of local community events aimed at queer and trans young people and rainbow families across Victoria, and nationally.

We need your help to raise $6000 to make more wings like the gorgeous ones you can see above and to provide our trained Angels with a special t-shirts and sparkles at every event we attend!

Last weekend Angels shielded and protected over 1000 young people attending the Minus 18 Queer Formal at the National Gallery of Victoria. The event had been threatened online and did receive some hate from hecklers on the night. We had 32 amazing Rainbow Community Angels attending with many wearing our wonderful new wings* that can be seen in the picture above complete with fairy lights!

*with many thanks to the fabulous creativity of Ed at @ed_makes_things

Parents, carers and the young people themselves gave some beautiful feedback including:

"Thank you for keeping our kids safe, and for forming what mine called a "wall of awesome"

"I’m so grateful to you all. You helped ensure our young people were safe and loved. Quite an overwhelming & emotional moment for me"

"Thank you so much. I cannot tell you how much it means to bring my 15yo to this event and see you all protecting the space, but I suspect you know"

"Fantastic ❤️ my kids were at the formal and they told me how safe you make them feel. Thank you."

We need your help to continue to grow and offer this support around Victoria. This fundraiser aims to raise $6000 to cover the cost of providing every new trained Angels with a free TSHIRT and the cost of developing and delivering ten ANGEL WING KITS for local regional and rural communities (with designs, raw materials and resources).

RAINBOW COMMUNITY ANGELS

Rainbow Community Angels have trained over 150+ volunteers around Victoria in the past 13 months with a further 143 people on our training waitlist! Angels have attended over 25 events across Victoria to welcome, shield and protect the local LGBTIQA+ communities who are organising, performing and attending these events.

Local councils, recreation centres, libraries and youth services continue to report harassment from far right extremists via social media and online, with hate and vilification aimed at event organisers, performers and venues. With local government elections coming up in Victoria in October, and the US election a few weeks later, the anti-trans, anti-LGBTIQA+ and anti-rainbow families movements will be loud and forceful.

We need your help to ensure every ANGEL look amazing in their brand new t-shirts and fabulous wings when we attend events to shield and protect attendees, performers and staff from hate!

In May 2024 Rainbow Community Angels became the very proud recipient of a LGBTIQA+ Sector Strengthening Grant from the Victorian government - auspiced by Switchboard. The grant allows us to develop a Train the Trainer model and resources for new Angels, deliver 10 regional, rural and metro training session over 12 months and attend 15 events around Victoria as well as provide risk mitigation advice and resources to event organisers such as local councils and youth services.

With our initial fundraising over 12 months ago, we raised $22,000 to get the Rainbow Community Angels of the ground - we trained over 150 Angels around Victoria and attended threatened events from Footscray to Beechworth, from Eltham to Shepparton, in Melbourne CBD to St Kilda. We commissioned anti-doxing workshops for drag performers and presented at national and state conferences and roundtables.

We worked with, and continue to work with, amazing online activities to counter the far-right extremists who use their anti-drag trojan horse to threaten and vilify the LGBTIQA+ communities and organisations who support them. We know our model works to prepare for, and prevent, hate.

The first fundraiser allowed us to ensure that we created a wing design that is both light-weight and portable as well as fabulous, pay for a graphic design artist to help us tell our story through our website, postcards and banners and to make sure everyone trained received a free T-shirt plus extra sparkles to look totally amazing at every event we attended.

We bought a huge speaker to boom out the disco tunes we use to drown out the haters and paid for refreshments for every action so our Angels and supporters were able to keep on dancing!

This time we are hoping to raise another $6000 to help us make our volunteer Angels look even more gorgeous in their own sparkly TSHIRT and to produce ANGEL WING KITS so people can make their own wings where ever and when ever they need them!

We could not do any of this without you, our supporters and donors. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

in solidarity, radical trust and queer joy

the Angels xxxx