Quote of the week
My colleagues and I often care for patients suffering from hallucinations, prophesying, and claiming to speak with God, among other symptoms—in mental health care, it’s sometimes very difficult to tell apart religious belief from mental illness…. Our conclusions frequently stem from the behaviors we see before us. Take an example of a man who walks into an emergency department, mumbling incoherently. He says he’s hearing voices in his head, but insists there’s nothing wrong with him. He hasn’t used any drugs or alcohol. If he were to be evaluated by mental health professionals, there’s a good chance he might be diagnosed with a psychotic disorder like schizophrenia. But what if that same man were deeply religious? What if his incomprehensible language was speaking in tongues?
Scientific American
LGBTI NGO Internship offered – work from home possible!
If interested, contact Mr. Joel Bedos, Paris: joelbedos@hotmail.com
The IDAHO committee is a human rights defence organisation focusing on the fight against Homophobia and Transphobia worldwide. Its mission is to develop and promote the International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia, celebrated each May 17th by hundreds of organisations across more than 50 countries. Its annual report, providing detailed information on its objectives and strategies, can be accessed online at http://idahomophobia.org/
Within our workplan for 2009/2011, our organisation is looking for interns or students who want to engage on a longer term basis with the subjects we deal with. Mpre specifically, we are looking for intern to :
1) Develop our resource centre :
The intern will be working under the supervision of the Chair and the Global Coordinator, and will be responsible for developing the resource centre of the organisation, as one of our missions in the support to grassroots organisations is to facilitate their access to academic/research material for them to use in their advocacy and campaigns activities.
Fields covered include :
- · Universal decriminalisation of same-sex practices and gender variance
- · Criminalisation of homophobia and transphobia
- · Integration of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in the wider Sexual Rights corpus
- · Homo/Transphobia and religions
But other related issues can be considered, depending on the intern’s own expertise and research domain.
The tasks of the intern will be to :
- · Identify relevant documents on a given area
- · Identify a pool of resource people per subject and create + manage ad hoc working groups that will support the work of the intern
- · Write up synthesis documents on the above areas, that will be relevant for activists at grassroots level
- · Promote the dissemination and use of these documents as widely as possible at all levels ; set up learning and practise communities around these publications
2) Assist in our campaign on Religions and Homo/transphobia, aiming at highlighting the positive role Religions can and should play in the fight against homo/transphobia
The intern will assist in all aspects of the campaign, including :
- academic research on the issue
- analysis of policy context
- identification and mapping of key stakeholders
- alliance building
- identification of allies and targets
- lobby strategy
- media and communications strategy
The duration of the internships can be adapted to the student’s availability but we will favour internships of a minimum of 3 months. We cannot offer any allowance at the moment, but we are actively seeking to fundraise for this, so developments are possible, albeit not guaranteed. Limited amounts to cover communication/administration costs can be made available when justified.
The intern, unless located in Paris, will work from home with her/his personal equipment and with regular contacts with the management team and with other interns working on the same objective.
Working language is essentially English but written understanding of other languages is an additional asset.
