Reflecting on our collaboration with The Outside Project

Loren, from our Community Action team, reflects on a recent collaboration.

Loren from St Christopher’s reflects on the project and what the collaboration meant to them.

This partnership grew from a shared desire to create spaces for collective grief and healing in the LGBTQ+ community, particularly for trans and non-binary people who are housing insecure.

The Outside Project, which works as both a shelter and community hub, saw a need for more structured spaces to process loss, especially after the passing of community members. In response, I facilitated a monthlong workshop series, co-created by members of The Outside Project and which explored queer grief, joy, and ritual.

Together, we crafted a communal blanket, later used in celebrations like Trans Day of Visibility and Trans Pride. The sessions combined creative activities with reflective conversations, drawing inspiration from the Trans Angel statue at Crossbones Graveyard commissioned by the Outside Project—a memorial honouring all unknown trans lives that have been lost. Throughout, we centred trans joy as a form of resistance, strengthening community bonds and collectively grieving. We crafted a communal blanket, later used in celebrations like Trans Day of Visibility and Trans Pride.

Working on this project brought some poignant, subtle learnings. At Community Action, we enter community spaces with the conviction that members are experts in their own lives and that our role is to support peer-to-peer learning. This project—like others we’ve been part of— also highlighted the importance of adapting our methods for groups with a broader range of needs, whether due to language barriers, disabilities, or complex mental health challenges.

At some point in the project, our communication between participants evolved into light hearted silliness, play and gentle vulnerability. Being open to these ways of ‘queering’ professional and personal ways of working isn’t just fun—it builds genuine relationships and deepens trust. Ultimately, the deeper the trust, the deeper the work can go. In so many ways, this four-week project could be an ongoing body of work and community building, and this was only the beginning.

I plan to reconnect with The Outside Project again this year—not only to continue our work together, but also to engage as a fellow community member. I left the project reassured that a relational, power-aware approach—one that is both decolonized and participatory—fosters real connections. The methodologies used in this work, still a work in progress, continue to inform how Community Action collaborates with other groups, helping us adapt our facilitation to different accessibility needs and experiences.