Company sponsorships help LGBT groups provide support

I am responding to the announcement regarding foreign sponsorship of Pink Dot at Speakers’ Corner (“Foreign groups warned against interfering in local politics”; June 8) and the discussion in Voices about the use of “emotive language”.

I wish to offer a perspective as a registered social worker and executive director of Oogachaga.

Since 2011, when Pink Dot started inviting local groups to provide outreach to its participants, Oogachaga has established a presence at the annual event to celebrate the freedom to love, in a family-friendly, carnival-like atmosphere.

This year, with a booth provided to us at no cost, we were able to distribute more than 2,000 marketing collaterals containing information about our counselling services, reaching out to more potential service users and family members.

From experience, in the weeks following Pink Dot, our centre would receive an increased number of enquiries and a surge in new counselling requests. This year is no different.

In addition, we have clients who report being affected by recent events: The Ministry of Home Affairs’ announcement, the censorship of a same-sex kiss in the musical Les Miserables and the horrific murders in Orlando.

As a social service organisation for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) and questioning community, we find Pink Dot to be an effective way of reaching out to those in need of our services.

For a primarily volunteer-driven organisation like ours, with a small team of full-time staff, the event is an opportunity to recruit new volunteers to continue running our programmes.

For a non-profit entity like ours, outreach of this scale is a low-cost way of promoting our services. All this is made possible by the sponsorship Pink Dot has received from various companies, which we understand are all locally registered.

International research has shown that for minority groups such as LGBTs, building a sense of community and having connections to it can generate positive health outcomes, increase resilience and promote social support.

Our team works hard to create and maintain a safe space for clients and visitors to our centre. It was with this in mind that I lodged a police report against Mr Bryan Lim, who made threatening remarks on social media against the LGBT community.

The world is changing, which may be frightening for some and exciting for others. To quote former United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, however: “Being gay is not a Western invention, it is a human reality.”