LGBTQIA+ Help and Resources

Over the past 25 years, Intercom’s services have adapted to the changing social and economic climate, and throughout this time Intercom has steadily grown to meet its increasing demands. Our dedicated team continue to deliver high quality services across the South West to meet the changing needs of our LGBT+ communities.
Face to face, support and advocacy has grown, to provide people with much needed services, including therapeutic counselling and a diverse range of support groups.

We have developed well respected and CPD accredited training packages (both faces to face and online). We have also run a number of conferences on topics such as Hate Crime, Gender Identity, Mental Health, etc.

We are making significant advances in developing cross-agency working in order to reduce health inequalities and improve service delivery across the South West. For example, we have an active working partnership with the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, which has the national remit for GIDS, the Gender Identity Service, which provides clinical support for under-18s living with gender conflict and variance and their families. Similarly, we have developed an excellent working relationship with Plymouth University Clinical Psychology Department. This includes doctorate students joining us on placement as valued expert members of the Help, Support and Advocacy team. We also work with local police authorities to support victims of crime as well as with clinical commissioning groups and councils to help people with mental health and/or social care needs.

Our ground-breaking Transgender Guidance for Schools has had a positive impact within schools and many other organisations, improving educational attainment for young people and is nationally recognised by the Department of Education as best practice guidance.

We pride ourselves on being client led and providing a bespoke service to each client – one size does not fit all.

Through our years of experience, we have learnt to recognise and understand the diverse and complex range of issues that our communities are affected by, and our service has developed and evolved to reflect this.

We recognise the importance to people of having a local LGBT+ organisation that understands the unique challenges and isolation that LGBT+ people can feel when living in rural areas such as the South West.

We have over the years established an excellent working relationship with the statutory sector, social care, mental health provision, the police, probation and schools – all of whom comment on the fact that we are a highly skilled and valuable resource to them, as well as a ‘critical friend’ when need be, due to our continued professional development as an agency over the last 25 years.

We have continuously provided local LGBT+ people with a service they know they can rely on and trust, and a service that can give them a range of specialist support. We have a presence at each Pride event throughout the South West, in order to reach out to the local LGBT+ communities and make them aware of the many ways in which we can help them. We manage a Directory on our website, which lists around 100 of the LGBT+ Community Groups throughout the counties we cover, which is a valuable tool for those people that are looking to make new friends and meet new people.

Our helpline and support services are in greater demand than ever from people that are often contacting us whilst in an episode of difficulty, crisis or concern in their lives. In the last full years we worked with 1253 clients and had over 15,000 contacts. We provide a space within our premises for some LGBT+ community groups to meet – this enables groups that feel vulnerable, to meet in a safe space in which they can completely be themselves.

We have directly improved policies and procedures for many organisations, including Devon & Cornwall Police, schools, Devon & Cornwall County Councils, as well as many others. We are a member of the Equality Reference Group in Devon, giving a voice to seldom-heard communities within local government.

We have established a range of projects over the past few years we run our Gender identity Family days in PLYMOUTH, Exeter and Truro.

Our Open Project consists of two full time schools workers covering Devon and Cornwall; we have established LGBT+ safe space schools groups in 26 of the 32 secondary schools in Cornwall and have devised training for all schools.

We are also the Southwest provider for the Rainbow Flag award a national LGBT+ inclusion certification for schools.

YAY (young and yourself) is our thriving LGBTIQA+ youth group for Cornwall.

We work closely with other LGBT+ charities throughout the UK such as Stonewall, Gallop, LGBT+ consortium, LGBT foundation and many more.