Gala
Education in Johannesburg

Visit GALA at our Administrative offices, or visit our Archives at the William Cullen Library, WITS.

In order to develop more informed and nuanced LGBTI advocacy strategies around religion, dialogues were held in Lesotho, Swaziland and South Africa. These dialogues were organized with the intention that they go beyond sensitization and dialogue, to determining ways forward in terms of future advocacy that will foster the well-being of LGBT people across the region. In 2015 student and worker protests erupted at universities across the country. The protests came as result of proposed fee increases, and for the first time in years, saw thousands of students engage in the shutdown of universities. As the protests grew in numbers, the ideological stances of many student groups came to the fore as these were seen as integral to the collective reasoning for protest. The research is concerned with documenting the experiences of the protestors while demonstrating their presence and impact during the protests. It will also detail the kinds of involvement of the participants, and the subsequent outcomes of their involvement, in order to ensure that their narratives are not erased. Making use of interviews and focus groups to capture their narratives, this project will culminate in an academic paper. GALA has undertaken this project with the generous help of the Aids Foundation South Africa (AFSA), the Norwegian Student’s and Academics’ International Assistance Fund (SAIH), and the Planet Wheeler Foundation. The objective of the project is the creation of a Diversity Training Manual (originally conceptualized as a toolkit), and the subsequent facilitation of workshops aimed at sensitizing school management teams to issues of sexual orientation and gender diversity. The principle beneficiaries of the project would therefore be learners, parents and teachers. The topics largely come from the participants in the forum, and GALA plays a role in ensuring that the discussions have a level of continuity which would ensure ongoing engagement from the participants in the space, and in the communities which they are from.