A few years ago, I was looking for more ways to get involved in
the queer community. I’d recently come out, and was looking for
spaces to volunteer and meet new people. Switchboard appealed
to me because it was all about connection. Currently I sit on the
board and am chair of community engagement, so I’m taking a
break from the phones while I do that work.
The Switchboard phone line is operated by people who identify as
LGBTQI – you don’t have to have formal counselling qualifications
to do it. What Switchboard is about is connecting with people with
shared experiences. It may not be the exact experience that you
have – for example, we may have a trans caller and I don’t identify
as trans, but I do understand some of their experience in that they’re
a member of the LGBTQI community; they’ve experienced varied
forms of oppression; they’ve experienced discrimination; they’ve
had to come out in some way. So the idea is that you’re a peer to
the community, not that you’re necessarily a certified expert.
The training is six full days going over content you’re
likely to come across on the phone – coming out; families
and relationships; dating; sex. We’ve started to integrate
intersectionality into the training as well, because that was
something that was missing and shouldn’t have been. We do
a whole week on grief and loss and suicide.
Not all the calls we get are crisis calls – we’re not a Lifeline kind
of thing. We’ll get calls from people who are looking for resources,
like queer-friendly therapists or “Where can I go for a club night?”
or “I have feelings for a friend of mine, what do I do about that?”
Families call in, as well – it’s not just for people who identify as
queer themselves. We’ve had parents call; we’ve had siblings
call; we’ve had people who are questioning their sexual or gender
identity call in, too.
With last year’s marriage law postal survey, we had a 40 per cent
increase in phone calls. Switchboard had to put on an emergency
training course to recruit more volunteers, because we weren’t ableon the job
AMELIA ARNOLD VOLUNTEERS AT
SWITCHBOARD, HELPING PROVIDE
PHONE AND WEB COUNSELLING FOR
LGBTQI FOLK IN VICTORIA.
As told to Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
nine to five