Officials in Oxford County want to hear from LGBTQ people in their community.
The Oxford County Rainbow Coalition has launched an online survey of LGBTQ people who live, work, and go to school in Oxford. The survey is anonymous and asks questions about personal experiences with frienships, family members, as well as services accessed within or outside Oxford County. This survey aims to help the coaltion create potential services of interest to members of the public.
"The survey was developed in order to inform the decision making basically of our community, around services that we could provide to our LGBTQ population that would be useful to them," says Gayle Milne, Public Health Nurse with the Oxford County Board of Health. "Also, to kind of get a sense of what experiences they've had around homophobia and transphobia and with any kind of experience they might have had with their health care systems, or our mental health systems, as well and just kind of give us an idea of anything we need to do around education or awareness raising."
Up until this point, the coalition has relied on information from Ontario and Canada-wide surveys. Milne says, as a mostly rural community, Oxford County may not be helped by that kind of general information to the same degree a more localized study would.
"So this will actually help us, because we can see some similarties but it will also point out the differences so that we can tailor our services more specifically to our community," she says.
After the results are collected, they will be analyzed and could lead to new program developments.
"We have Wilfred Laurier that is actually getting the results and then analyzing those results for us and writing some reports," Milne says. "From there, we will be able to look at that and then hopefully develop some programming for our LGBTQ community, whether it's pride events or other things that they would like to see here in Oxford County. Or it could be that we are advocating to our health care workers that they need more education, or that we need some local LGBTQ support within Oxford County, because at this point there isn't anything."
Milne says they are promoting the survey through social media. Different agencies that participate are also sharing the survey by posting notices within their locations. She adds that they also hope to get some participants through word of mouth.
**This story was written by Kayley Leon, a student in the Media, Theory, and Production program at Western University. Kayley is currently performing an internship with BlackburnNews.com**
