Common Practice: A Guide for Organizations Serving LGBTIQ+ Communities

VERSION 1.0 | APRIL 2026

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About this Guide

This guide brings together practices, decisions, and trade-offs that shape how LGBTIQ+ service organizations operate in real-world conditions. It is grounded in practitioner experience across diverse contexts where organizations deliver services while navigating constraints related to safety, visibility, funding, and legitimacy.

Across these environments, organizations are often solving similar challenges without shared language, structured reflection, or practical tools to support decision-making. This guide is an attempt to change that.

It does not offer ideal models or universal solutions. Instead, it offers a structured way to understand and navigate the trade-offs your organization faces every day.

This guide is structured to help you understand how your organization operates, what is shaping your decisions, and how your approach can strengthen over time. At its core, it is designed to help your organization answer three questions clearly:

  • What does good look like in our context?
  • What is shaping our decisions?
  • What options do we have?

If these questions cannot be answered, the system is likely unclear or inconsistent.

How to Use This Guide

There is no single way to apply this guide. Organizations operate under different constraints, risks, and opportunities, and may adopt different approaches across areas of practice. The aim is not uniformity, it is more intentional, context-appropriate decision-making over time.

This guide is organized by common areas of practice, each reflects a specific objective that organizations are working toward, while navigating real and often competing constraints.

Each area of practice includes:

  • A Driver — the central tension or trade-off shaping decisions
  • Constraints — the external conditions limiting what is possible

Together, these explain why decisions are not straightforward, and what organizations must balance in practice.

A recommended approach for users:

You can use this guide to assess your overall approach across all areas of practice, or to focus on specific practices that are most relevant to your priorities:

  • Work through all areas of practice to build a more comprehensive view of your organization, or
  • Focus on a small number of high-priority practices where strengthening would have the greatest impact

The goal is not to necessarily apply everything at once, but to support more intentional, context-appropriate decisions over time. The following suggested steps are a good place to start.

1. Assess where you are Review the areas of practice and reflect on how your organization currently operates. This is not a judgment of quality, but an honest picture of how your systems function in practice.

2. Identify what needs strengthening Look for areas where your current approach may be limiting effectiveness, safety, or sustainability, and practices that are informal or inconsistent, trade-offs that create ongoing challenges, or systems not keeping pace with demand or risk.

3. Understand what's shaping your choices Each section includes a driver and key constraints. Use these to reflect on what trade-offs you are managing, what external factors are limiting your options, and where your decisions are driven by necessity rather than choice. This helps distinguish between what can be changed and what must be managed.

4. Strengthen your approach Use the reflective questions at the end of each section to identify realistic improvements. The goal is not to reach an advanced level in all areas at once, but to progressively strengthen practice in ways that are appropriate, feasible, and safe in your context.

About This Version

This guide is organized by five areas of practice. These areas are intentionally overlapping rather than rigidly separated. In practice, organizations navigate several at once, adapting them differently depending on context, community, size, and risk environment.

PROTECTION
How organizations design and manage safe engagement with individuals across physical, social, and virtual environments, ensuring participation does not create harm or exposure.
REPRESENTATION
How leadership, program design, and delivery reflect and are meaningfully shaped by the lived experiences and intersectional identities of the communities being served, ensuring legitimacy, trust, and contextual relevance.
AFFIRMATION
How organizations design programs using strengths-based, affirming, and often joyful approaches to engagement, meeting individuals where they are while creating pathways toward confidence, agency, and self-defined expression.
ECONOMIC INCLUSION
How programs account for and support the economic realities of queer individuals, recognizing that access to income is often limited, and that participation, delivery, and continuity of services are closely tied to livelihoods.
NAVIGATION
How organizations make strategic decisions about visibility, positioning, and engagement within their operating environments; balancing access to resources, partnerships, and legitimacy with the risks of exposure, backlash, or restriction.

How practices are summarized in the forthcoming full guide

This guide is intended to be used, tested, and refined over time. Feedback from practitioners is central to how it evolves. Detailed maturity models and adaptation guides are being developed for each practice, drawing on ongoing practitioner consultation and shared learning.

Maturity models for each practice describe three general levels of operation:

  • Foundational — approaches suited to high-risk or highly constrained environments, emphasizing safety, continuity, and trust-based systems with lower visibility and minimal formal structure
  • Developing — more structured approaches that expand reach while managing complexity, with increased consistency, coordination, and defined processes
  • Advanced — more established systems designed to sustain impact over time, with clear structures, roles, and processes and the ability to expand reach while managing risk more systematically

These levels represent a progression toward more intentional, consistent, and sustainable ways of operating. Progression is not uniform or absolute. Organizations may operate at different levels across different practices, move between levels over time, and adapt how advanced practices are applied based on context. The goal is not to reach an advanced level in all areas, but to progressively strengthen practice in ways that are appropriate, feasible, and safe within each context.

Each practice also includes adaptation guidance showing how approaches shift depending on visibility, risk, and operating conditions from lower visibility and tighter control to more open and structured models. Organizations often combine elements from different points along this range rather than applying a single model.

The first standalone tool in this series: Common Practice | Protection: Maturity and Adaptation Guide is already available in the Commons, providing detailed maturity models and adaptation guides for each Protection practice. Equivalent tools for each remaining practice area are in development and will be integrated into a single unified resource over time.

Practice Areas

01 | Protection

Protection is a continuous system of managing exposure, risk, and harm across every aspect of service delivery in hostile or uncertain environments. It refers to the intentional structuring of access, participation, and interaction within services to ensure that individuals can engage without being exposed to harm. It shapes how people enter services, how they are communicated with, how information is handled, and how interactions are organized, directly determining whether engagement is safe, conditional, or not possible. Protection should be embedded in the design and operation of services from the outset, including environments, access pathways, data practices, and interaction norms. It functions as a foundational condition of service delivery, defining the terms under which participation can occur.

Relevance for LGBTIQ+ Contexts: In many service settings, risk exists primarily outside the act of engagement. Individuals may face harm in their broader environment, but accessing services does not usually increase that risk. In LGBTIQ+ contexts, this dynamic is often a central operating condition rather than an exception. Accessing services, sharing information, or participating in group settings can reveal identity, making engagement itself a potential source of exposure to stigma, surveillance, or sanction.

DRIVER: Risk of Exposure

Protection is driven by the perceived and actual risk of exposure associated with engaging in services.

This risk determines whether individuals access services at all, how visible participation can be, what information can be shared, and how trust is built. It is continuously assessed by individuals and must be actively managed within service design.

As risk increases, systems tighten, reducing visibility, access, and data collection. As risk decreases, systems can operate more openly. Protection depends on how effectively services respond to these conditions.

CONSTRAINTS

The level and nature of exposure risk is shaped by the surrounding environment in which services operate:

  • Legal and policy environment: Criminalization, legal ambiguity, or lack of protection can increase the consequences of exposure and limit how services can be structured.
  • Social norms and stigma: Prevailing cultural attitudes toward LGBTIQ+ identities influence the likelihood of discrimination, exclusion, or violence if individuals are identified.
  • Risk of enforcement and violence: The presence and behavior of state or non-state actors, including policing practices and community-level violence, affect how exposure translates into harm.
  • Visibility and surveillance conditions: The extent to which individuals and activities can be observed, tracked, or reported, both physically and digitally, shapes how easily exposure can occur.
  • Economic and dependency dynamics: Reliance on family, employers, or community networks can increase vulnerability if identity is revealed, affecting individuals’ willingness to engage.

Practices

  • Safe Spaces — Design and management of physical, social, and virtual environments where engagement occurs
  • Communication Systems — How information is shared and how exposure risk is managed across channels
  • Data Practices — How information is collected, stored, used, and protected across its full lifecycle
  • Access and Participation Controls — How entry and participation are structured and governed over time
  • Safeguarding and Risk Response — How programs anticipate, identify, and respond to risks and incidents

Reflective Questions

  1. Do individuals in your program know what information is collected about them, who can access it, and how it is protected? If not, what would it take to make that clear?
  2. How do people access your services, and does that pathway itself create exposure risk for them?
  3. When a safety concern or incident arises, is there a clear process for responding? Who is responsible, and does that person have the training and authority to act?
  4. Are your physical and digital spaces consistently safe, or does safety depend on who happens to be present that day?
  5. What would change about how you operate if the risk environment in your context suddenly increased significantly?

02 | Representation

Representation is the intentional inclusion of identity, knowledge and lived experience in the design, governance, and delivery of services. It shapes whose realities inform decisions, whose needs are prioritized, and whose risks are understood. In contexts where identity determines access, safety, and trust, representation directly influences whether services are perceived as legitimate, usable, and safe. It determines not only who participates in services, but how those services are structured, communicated, and experienced. Representation should be embedded across leadership, staffing, design processes, and partnerships, functioning as a core condition of effective and credible service delivery.

Relevance for LGBTIQ+ Contexts: Representation is important across all service settings. In LGBTQI+ contexts, however, it carries greater implications for safety and requires greater nuance to achieve effectively. In LGBTIQ+ contexts, these same dynamics apply with heightened consequences. Where representation is weak or misaligned, the risks are more severe. Poor understanding of needs or context can lead not only to reduced engagement, but to increased exposure, harm, or exclusion. At the same time, LGBTQI+ communities are highly diverse, with intersecting identities and experiences that increase the complexity of representation. No single perspective can reflect the full range of needs and risks, requiring more intentional and adaptive approaches to inclusion.

DRIVER: Legitimacy, Trust, and Relevance

Representation is driven by the need for services to be trusted, contextually accurate, and responsive to the lived realities of the communities they serve.

Where representation is strong, services are more likely to reflect real needs and risks, build trust quickly, and enable more open and sustained engagement. 

Where representation is weak or absent, services may misinterpret needs, overlook critical risks, or feel misaligned or extractive. Engagement becomes conditional or avoided, trust is slower to build, and participation may remain partial or guarded.

CONSTRAINTS

  • Proximity to dominant norms and internal hierarchies: Representation is influenced by how closely individuals align with socially accepted identities (e.g., cisgender, heterosexual-presenting, male, affluent). Those closer to these norms are often overrepresented. These same dynamics often reproduce across LGBTIQ+ identities and, in some cases, are even more pronounced.
  • Visibility and differential risk: The degree to which individuals visibly express their identity(ies) affects both their exposure to stigma and their ability to participate in leadership or service roles. Those who are more visibly identifiable face higher risks, limiting ability to occupy public or formal roles.
  • Intersectionality and diversity of experience: Overlapping identities (e.g., race, age, disability, socioeconomic status) shape both marginalization and representation. The breadth and heterogeneity of LGBTIQ+ communities make comprehensive representation inherently complex.
  • Capacity and resource limitations: Constraints in funding, training, infrastructure, or time, limit ability to fully participate in leadership, design, and decision-making roles.

Practices

  • Community Fit and Representation Scope — How clearly the intended community is defined and how representation is aligned to that group
  • Representation Across Roles and Decision-Making — How lived experience is embedded across leadership, staffing, and the processes that shape service design and delivery
  • Depth and Diversity Within the Target Community — How internal differences, intersectionality, and the needs of less visible subgroups are recognized and reflected
  • Ecosystem Alignment and Collaboration — How external partnerships extend, protect, or introduce risk to representation

Reflective Questions

  1. Who is your program actually reaching and who within your intended community is consistently not showing up? What might explain that gap?
  2. Where does lived experience most directly shape decisions in your organization and where is it absent from decision-making?
  3. Are the most marginalized or least visible people within your community reflected in how your services are designed, not just who delivers them?
  4. When you engage with funders, partners, or government, how much does that relationship shape your priorities? Are there ways external influence is pulling you away from community-informed approaches?
  5. If someone from the community you serve walked through your program with fresh eyes, would they see themselves in how it is structured and who leads it?

03 | Affirmation

Affirmation focuses on how programs engage individuals through strengths-based, identity-affirming approaches that support confidence, agency, and self-defined expression. It shapes how services are experienced, not only as safe or accessible, but as spaces where identity is recognized and valued. It shifts the focus from what individuals lack to what they bring, creating conditions for engagement grounded in dignity, pride, and possibility. Programs that effectively incorporate affirmation draw on cultural and social strengths, embedding them into how services are designed and delivered. For many individuals, a baseline level of self-acceptance and identity safety shapes whether they can meaningfully engage with or benefit from services. Affirmation therefore functions not only as an enhancement to experience, but as a condition that enables deeper engagement, resilience, psychological safety, and longer-term outcomes.

Relevance for LGBTIQ+ Contexts: Affirmation is important across all service settings, but in LGBTIQ+ contexts it carries greater significance due to both the intensity of stigma and the central role of identity in shaping wellbeing, safety, and access. LGBTIQ+ communities are frequently engaged through deficit-based narratives focused on risk or vulnerability. While often valid, over-reliance on these framings can reinforce stigma and limit agency. Affirming approaches shift this dynamic by recognizing strength, creativity, and resilience as central to engagement. Affirmation is also deeply rooted in queer history and culture. Joy, creativity, and self-expression have long functioned as mechanisms of survival, resistance, and community-building. These forms of engagement are not peripheral. They are often the primary entry points for trust, connection, and sustained participation, particularly in restrictive environments.

DRIVER: Legitimacy, Trust, and Relevance

Affirmation is driven by the need to engage individuals in ways that reinforce strengths, dignity, and positive identity, rather than focusing primarily on deficit, risk, or vulnerability.

Where affirmation is strong, services feel relevant and empowering. Individuals are more likely to engage, express themselves, and build connection. Joy, creativity, and cultural expression function as protective factors that support resilience and social capital.

Where affirmation is weak, services may unintentionally reinforce deficit-based narratives. Individuals may disengage or participate only superficially, limiting both reach and impact.

CONSTRAINTS

  • Safety and visibility of identity: The risks associated with expressing or being associated with queer identity shape how openly affirmation can be practiced. In higher-risk contexts, affirmation must often be indirect or discreet.
  • Internalized stigma and identity acceptance: Experiences of stigma, rejection, and internalized homophobia or transphobia can limit readiness to engage with affirming approaches. Identity development may be gradual, uneven, or constrained by fear.
  • Family and immediate social environment: Household dynamics and close social networks strongly influence what is safe to express. Lack of acceptance within the home can restrict both engagement and impact.
  • Social norms and cultural narratives: Dominant beliefs about gender, sexuality, and morality shape how affirmation is perceived. In highly stigmatized contexts, affirming approaches may need to be framed subtly.
  • Access to affirming spaces and expression: Opportunities for joy, creativity, and community connection may be limited, constraining how affirmation can be experienced collectively or visibly.

Practices

  • Strength-Based Framing — How individuals are engaged through recognition of what they bring, rather than primarily through risk or deficit
  • Affirming Experience of Identity — How individuals experience recognition and validation within services, without pressure to disclose or conform
  • Joy, Creativity, and Cultural Expression — How engagement draws on queer cultural strengths, joy, and community connection as practical tools
  • Relevance and Entry into Engagement — How services signal alignment with individuals' lived realities in language, tone, and interaction so that engagement feels natural and "for them"
  • Pathways to Confidence and Agency — How participation supports individuals to build confidence, define identity on their own terms, and develop greater agency over time

Reflective Questions

  1. How does your program primarily frame the communities you serve; through their strengths and capacities, or primarily through their risks and vulnerabilities? How does that framing show up in your communications, your intake processes, your programming?
  2. Can individuals engage with your services without disclosing their identity? What does participation ask of people and is that ask proportionate to what you offer?
  3. Where does joy, creativity, or cultural expression show up in your work and is it treated as essential or as an add-on?
  4. If someone from your community encountered your program for the first time, would they immediately recognize it as a space for them? What signals; visual, linguistic, relational, would tell them that?
  5. Over time, do people who engage with your services feel more confident and capable of navigating their lives? How do you know?

04 | Economic Inclusion & Mutual Sustainability

Economic Inclusion & Mutual Sustainability focuses on how services engage with the economic realities of the communities they serve, particularly where identity-based exclusion limits access to stable livelihoods. The ability to earn, participate economically, and maintain autonomy often determines whether individuals can engage with services at all, under what conditions, and with what degree of safety. Economic inclusion is not only about income, but about agency: the ability to make decisions about one’s life, participate in society, and shape one’s own future. It requires recognizing informal and survival economies, addressing risks of exploitation, and building models of mutual support that strengthen both individual livelihoods and collective resilience. Mutual sustainability refers to the alignment between sustaining services and sustaining the people who deliver and depend on them, ensuring that neither is achieved at the expense of the other.

Programs frequently operate within ecosystems where community members are both service users and economic actors, and where service delivery intersects directly with income generation, employment, and survival. This creates a structural dual role for many organizations, particularly LGBTIQ+-led initiatives, which operate as both service providers and economic actors. They are not only delivering services, but sustaining the livelihoods of those who deliver and rely on those services. This dual role introduces both opportunity for integrated support and risk of economic precarity being embedded within service models themselves.

Relevance for LGBTIQ+ Contexts: Economic inclusion is important across all service settings. In LGBTIQ+ contexts, however, it is often inseparable from access, safety, and sustained engagement. Because many individuals face barriers to formal employment, community-based organizations frequently become key sources of income, skills development, and economic participation. Economic stability directly influences whether individuals can access services consistently, disengage from unsafe environments, or participate without compromising their safety or identity. In contexts where income determines living conditions, social independence, and exposure to risk, economic inclusion becomes a critical enabler of engagement. It shapes not only who participates in services, but under what conditions participation is possible. This creates both opportunity and risk.

DRIVER: Survival, Agency, and Participation Trade-offs

Economic inclusion is driven by the need for individuals to sustain their livelihoods while navigating whether and how they can safely and consistently engage with services.

Where economic inclusion is strong, individuals are better able to engage consistently with services, contribute to community initiatives, and build longer-term stability. Greater economic agency expands individuals’ ability to make decisions about where and how they live, participate more openly, and shape their own futures.

Where economic inclusion is weak, individuals face direct trade-offs between participation and survival. Limited or unstable income can reinforce dependence on unsafe or non-affirming environments, reducing both access to services and the ability to engage authentically.

CONSTRAINTS

  • Employment discrimination and exclusion: Formal labor markets often exclude or marginalize LGBTIQ+ individuals, limiting access to stable and protected employment opportunities.
  • Prevalence of informal and survival economies: Many individuals rely on informal, inconsistent, or high-risk income sources, which shape availability, engagement patterns, and vulnerability to exploitation.
  • Resource and funding limitations: Programs often operate with constrained budgets, limiting their ability to provide fair compensation, stable employment, or long-term economic pathways.
  • Power dynamics and risk of exploitation: Blurred boundaries between service provision, employment, and community relationships can create risks of underpayment, over-reliance, or exploitation, particularly where individuals have limited alternatives.
  • Legal and policy environment: Regulatory barriers, lack of labor protections, or criminalization of identity or activity can restrict both formal employment opportunities and how programs structure economic engagement.
  • Economic dependence and constrained autonomy: Limited or unstable income can increase reliance on family, employers, or shared living environments where identity expression may be unsafe or restricted. This constrains not only livelihood options, but also individuals’ ability to engage with services, participate openly, or make independent decisions about their lives.

Practices

  • Economic Participation and Compensation — How individuals engage in economically meaningful roles within services, and how those roles are structured, compensated, and sustained
  • Alignment with Livelihood Constraints — How programs account for practical constraints individuals face — limited time, competing income needs, inconsistent availability in their participation design
  • Recognition of Survival Economies — How programs understand and respond to informal, unstable, or high-risk income strategies, and how these shape engagement and decision-making
  • Fair and Transparent Engagement Practices — How roles, expectations, and compensation are clearly defined to ensure contribution is not reliant on unpaid, inconsistent, or implicit labor

Reflective Questions

  1. Does your program ask things of participants; time, travel, disclosure, emotional labor, that carry real economic cost? How do you account for that?
  2. Are people who contribute to your organization as staff, volunteers, community connectors, or peer supporters fairly and transparently compensated? Are expectations clear?
  3. Does your program design assume a level of economic stability that many in your community don't have? What would need to change if you took survival economies seriously as a design constraint?
  4. Where do economic dependencies exist within your organization between staff and leadership, between the organization and funders, between participants and the program and what risks do those dependencies create?
  5. Is your organization's economic model sustainable in a way that doesn't come at the expense of the people delivering or depending on your services?

Navigation

Navigation focuses on how organizations make strategic decisions about visibility, positioning, and engagement within their operating environments. It reflects how organizations access resources, partnerships, and legitimacy while managing the risks associated with being seen, recognized, or formalized. Navigation is both intentional and reactive. Organizations actively determine how they are positioned, framed, and embedded within broader systems, making strategic choices about whether to operate autonomously, selectively engage, or integrate more fully into formal structures. These positioning decisions directly shape both sustainability pathways and exposure to risk. As a result, navigation is not a static strategy, but an ongoing process of assessing trade-offs between access and risk.

Navigation also reflects broader system dynamics. Access to resources and legitimacy is often uneven, shaped by donor priorities, political influence, and shifting funding landscapes. Organizations may need to adapt how their work is described or framed in order to align with these dynamics, sometimes requiring strategic use of language to maintain access while managing risk. At the same time, limited coordination and fragmentation across actors can make it difficult to build collective leverage, reinforcing competition and instability within the system.

Relevance for LGBTIQ+ Contexts: Navigation is relevant across all service environments, but in LGBTIQ+ contexts it becomes a defining operational condition rather than a strategic consideration. While many organizations make decisions about positioning, visibility, and system engagement to optimize growth, scale, or influence, LGBTIQ+ organizations are often making these same decisions to enable and sustain operations at all. The nature of these trade-offs is fundamentally different. In many sectors, increased visibility, alignment with dominant systems, and clear positioning can unlock funding, partnerships, and scale. In LGBTIQ+ contexts, these same actions can increase exposure to backlash, restriction, or harm. Greater visibility may attract resources, but it may also trigger scrutiny, surveillance, or forced closure. As a result, organizations must carefully calibrate how visible or legible they are within different environments.

DRIVER: Access and Exposure Trade-offs

Navigation is driven by the need to access resources, partnerships, and legitimacy while managing the risks associated with visibility and engagement. Organizations must continuously balance the benefits of being seen, recognized, and connected against the potential for exposure, backlash, or restriction.

Where navigation is strong, organizations are able to calibrate their positioning and visibility in response to changing conditions, enabling them to access resources and partnerships while managing risk. This allows them to sustain and expand their work without compromising alignment with their mission or the safety of those they serve.

Where navigation is weak or constrained, organizations may struggle to balance access and risk effectively. Limited visibility can restrict funding and partnerships, while increased visibility can expose organizations to backlash, scrutiny, or restriction. As conditions shift, organizations may be forced into reactive or inconsistent decision-making, undermining both stability and long-term impact.

CONSTRAINTS

  • Legal and policy environment: Criminalization, regulatory barriers, and political restrictions shape how organizations can formally operate, engage publicly, and access funding or partnerships.
  • Social norms and backlash risk: Cultural attitudes and community dynamics influence how visibility translates into acceptance, resistance, or harm, particularly as organizations become more visible or expand their reach.
  • Funding and donor dynamics: Access to resources is shaped by external priorities, political influence, and shifting funding landscapes. Organizations may face pressure to align with specific narratives, structures, or outcomes that do not fully reflect local realities.
  • Visibility requirements imposed by external actors: Funders, partners, and systems may require a level of visibility, formalization, or institutional legitimacy that increases exposure or risk, limiting how organizations can engage safely.
  • Fragmentation and competition within the ecosystem: Limited coordination, competition for resources, and uneven access to networks can reduce collective leverage and reinforce instability across organizations.

Practices

  • Positioning and Framing — How organizations define, describe, and adapt the presentation of their work across different audiences and contexts, including strategic decisions about language, emphasis, and identity
  • Visibility Calibration — How organizations control when, where, and to whom they are visible across communications, branding, and the visibility of staff, participants, and activities
  • Integration Strategy — How organizations engage with or remain independent from formal systems, including decisions about registration, government engagement, and institutional alignment
  • Partnership and Engagement Strategy — How organizations select, structure, and manage relationships with funders, intermediaries, coalitions, and peers, balancing access, alignment, and risk

Reflective Questions

  1. How do you describe your work differently across different audiences to your community, to funders, to government, to the public? Is that strategic adaptation intentional and consistent, or does it happen reactively?
  2. Who knows what about your organization: its leadership, its participants, its activities? Is that visibility level a deliberate choice, or has it emerged without clear intention?
  3. What would it mean for your organization to become more formally registered or institutionally integrated? What would you gain and what would you risk?
  4. Which of your current partnerships genuinely strengthen your ability to serve your community, and which ones carry risks to your visibility, your priorities, or your autonomy? Are you managing those risks actively?
  5. If conditions in your operating environment changed significantly, a new government, a shift in donor priorities, increased community backlash, how quickly could you adapt your positioning? What would you need in place to do that well?

What Comes Next

This guide will continue to develop alongside the community using it. Planned additions include:

  • Detailed maturity models for each area of practice, helping organizations assess where they are and identify realistic next steps
  • Adaptation guides showing how approaches shift across different risk environments and operating contexts
  • Standalone practice tools for each section, beginning with the Protection tool already available

Feedback from practitioners shapes how this guide evolves. If something feels off, incomplete, or missing, that matters.

This guide draws on practitioner experience gathered through consultations, convenings, informal exchanges, and ongoing collaboration across diverse regions and contexts. Contributors include practitioners, service organizations, funders, advisors, and ecosystem partners. Named contributors and affiliated organizations are included only where explicit consent has been provided, recognizing that visibility, public affiliation, or participation may carry differing levels of personal, organizational, or professional risk across contexts. Named contributors represent only a portion of the broader community whose experiences and insights have informed this work.

NAMED CONTRIBUTORS:

Akudo Oguaghamba (she/ her), Founder & Executive Director, Women's Health and Equal Rights Initiative (Nigeria) Aliganyira Brian (he/ him), Founder & Executive Director, Ark Wellness Hub (Uganda) Jono McKay, Co-founder, SameSame (South Africa, Zimbabwe, Ghana) Judah Njoroge (he/ him), Founder, Integrative Wellbeing Victor Ugo (he/ him), Independent (Denmark) Whitney Blessing (she/ her), Community Manager, Black Queer Movements

Tyler Nelson (he/ him), Convener, Waypoint Commons (Global)