2026: Some volunteering highlights
Autumn's here, and with it a moment to capture a few highlights of my not-paid work this year.
I've increasingly found myself leaning away from Board membership and Trustee roles in recent years; my experience of those in the past is that they've rarely felt like the most effective way for causes I care about to get the best of my skills, time and energy. Maybe the truth is that I tend to enjoy (and feel like causes get more benefit from me) rolling up my sleeves and getting stuck into something practical. With that in mind, I've absolutely loved being up to my neck in these projects this year:
Porty Pride: Exhibition and archive
June 2026 marked Porty Pride's fifth anniversay (and my fourth year volunteering there). I'd begun to really notice how much had grown and changed already, and it felt really important to start to capture the stories of some of these early years for posterity. In common with many (most?) grassroots movements, so much of the organisational history feels quite fragile - held in individuals' memories, in boxes in spare bedrooms, and shared in quiet moments over a drink or between events. I kept imagining future Portobello residents in 50, 100, 200 years time - if they were to wonder whether there were queer people in Porty in 2026, what would they be able to find of us? With so many gaps already in the archive of queer history, it felt important to tell our own story.
And so, the Porty Pride archive project began - first with a collection of the materials and paperwork that folk had already saved and put aside, then with a call-out for more, and then - over Porty Pride weekend 2026, with an exhibition of our story so far, and an invitation for everyone to add their own stories, histories and memories. The next step, as we look ahead to 2027, is to formally catalogue and record all these beautiful stories (with thanks to Scottish Archives for their support), and hand them over to an archive for long-term safekeeping. You can listen to me banging on about my passion for queer archiving with the wonderful Porty.Live radio here.
More Porty Pride: Community quilt
Continuing the fifth anniversary celebrations, someone (actually, I think, about three of us, independently, at the same time) started thinking about some sort of commemorative quilt project. We were inspired by the AIDS memorial quilt, which a few of us had the opportunity to visit at Tramway this year, and got a behind-the-scenes viewing of some panels thanks to the lovely folk at the Lothian Health Services Archive. Over the summer, we've been inviting and collecting handmade quilt panels from anyone connected to Porty Pride, responding to the theme 'what does community mean to you?' The submitted panels are so varied, and interesting, and touching, and creative, and a team of us will be working away over the winter to turn them into a finished quilt. The plan - we hope - is to be ready for a big unveiling in June 2027...
Section 28 Justice Coalition
The Section 28 Justice Coalition formed in February this year to campaign for a public inquiry into the impact of Section 28 on LGBTQ+ people. I stumbled across their work on Instagram when the petition launched in March, and immediately knew I wanted to help. A couple of long train journies and a few quiet weekends gave me the perfect opportunity to absolutely dive into a word of admin for them - identifying organisations who might support their campaign or encourage others to sign their petition, prioritising those who should receive follow up letters, then researching and writing tailored approaches. It's some of the least glamorous work I've done in a while, and honestly was pretty repetititve a lot of the time, but it's a cause I care deeply about and it was massively satisfying to slowly watch the number of petition signatories creeping upwards - finally passing the magic milestone of 10,000 signatures in June 2026, and at the time of writing sitting at almost 30,000. And the opportunity to research queer-led and queer-supporting charities across the country was a pretty wonderful experience too, a moment to really appreciate the long and rich history of LGBTQ+ campaigning, and be a tiny part of connecting through that to our present and future. Sign the petition here!
