Aurora Meeting 17th May 2006

at 7pm in Croydon Town Hall

The meeting of May 17th followed immediately from the IDAHO ceremony

IDAHO commitments

We read the commitments made in the IDAHO ceremony, and the actions required were listed to show that the work required was within our capabilities. (We had committed to work on LGBT bullying in Schools, to increase our Black and Minority Ethnic representation, to work for gay and lesbian assylum seekers and to pursue two more transgender issues.)

Messages of support for IDAHO were read out as we had run out of time in ceremony. (The account of ceremony on this site includes them in the right place.)

Community Safety Unit (CSU) Report

There had been three incidents dealt with by the CSU.

A young man subjected to name calling that amounted to death threats, and stones had been thrown at him. So far details were too vague for the police to work on.
Verbal abuse was reported from a neighbour. The abuser is due to be moved to other Council accomodation.
Very specific, anonymous, written, death threats were being made to one young man and that had persisted. This is unresolved.

A recently published report showed a 24% drop in homophobic crime in London during the previous 12 weeks and a drop of 21% in hate crime in general. The figures looked worse than they were as there were in fact only 4 incidents and 3 of those were against the same person in Hackney. LGBT sex offences showed an increase of 300% (but the actual numbers are very low). Borough Commander Tom Morrell urged caution in interpreting the figures as different reporting standards make comparisons difficult.

General matters

The Community Chair thanked the organiser of IDAHO for his work for Aurora, He said that we all needed to 'pull our weight' and needed to build up a behind-the-scenes network. Tom Morrell was concerned about the amount of work that could be done in the limited time of a meeting. The Community Administrator told him that a great deal of work is done by e-mail between meetings. Mr. Morrell noted our success and asked about our efforts to get more members to make us more representative of the community.

How to get more members

New-comers were asked for their suggestions and why they came to Aurora. One newcomer told us that we need to network better with other groups. The Community Chair said that he will talk to Croydon's churches. A member of FtM said that he will talk to the people on its mailing list to try and get them involved with Aurora. And another new-comer said that networking in person is the most effective, and wondered if we could have a table in Lunar House to contact its clients.

The discussion moved to the topic of schools where it was said that the core curriculum includes “Health and Social Care” for non-GCSE pupils and it may be valuable to have someone talk to us about this. It was thought that we should invite no more than one speaker per meeting to inform us about different topics.

Cllr. Hall suggested that we raise our profile amongst councillors.

LGBT Surgeries

Our LGBT liaison officer said that his 3 hour surgeries had become poorly attended, and had now ceased but a personal appointment could be booked at any time. We discussed whether Aurora should have its own surgery.

Procedures Working Party

The Procedures were amended to say that the AGM would be “the main meeting on or after the 1st November”.

For immediate attetion, we noted that the Procedures state that the AGM is in November the call for nominations for Community Representative should be made at the July meeting and the period for nominations closes at the September meeting.

It was agreed that the AGM would indeed be held in November.

Transgender Working Party

The transsafety e-list (also open to TransPol-UK members) is discussing the issues that affect transpeople as distinct from other members of the public. This is being done taking the Suzy Lamplugh safety booklet as a starting point. This supports our IDAHO commitments to trans people.

The Croydon train station is being revamped, but there is no provision for disability toilets. It was agreed that the administrator would write to Network Rail as disability toilets are important to the transgender community.

Promotions Working Party

It was reported that Gay Surrey was organising an event which will raise money of which Aurora could be the beneficiary.

It was noted that there is little mention of BME issues on the website, We said that we will add more BME content.

The website will also refer to True-Vision and Broken Rainbow.

The Community Administrator agreed to determine how much money the police will allow us for publicity.

We were offered multiple translation facilities for our leaflet and foreign language pages for the website, and the use of an interpreter.

Cllr Simon suggested that other police LGBT consultation groups be contacted to publicise Aurora.

Mischa mentioned the Goverment's PIPs project which is being handled by Kairos and agreed to complete the questionnaire on the website as the meeting felt that it would be useful publicity.

Gay-to-Z letter

We agreed to write to thank the webmaster of the GaytoZ website for changes to the entry on cruising areas in Croydon, and, if possible, to suggest to that the remaining safe Croydon cruising ground be removed before trouble occurs there.

Use of Internet Working Party

The website's secure text link (so people can contact us in complete confidence) is waiting attention from our (very kind, voluntary) service provider. The website Search function should spring into action as soon as the Google crawler catches up with it.

Any Other Business

Our lgbt liaison officer circulated the procedure for applying the removal of convictions for indecency offences (that are not serious) now that they have been decriminalised and this is to be added to the web site. (Heterosexuals were never prosecuted even for very serious instances of this behaviour, even where children were involved.)

There's a refuge action conference on 10th June.

Mr. Morrell said that he was very encouraged by our group which had improved greatly since his previous visit. He stressed the benefits of a community chair. He also suggested that we seek funding for administrative support.

Future meetings will be on the 20th July and 11th September.

The meeting closed at 9.10pm