"It's a chance to do right by my younger self": LGBTQ+ youth on making a change with vital school programme

During Manchester Pride over the August bank holiday weekend, Deia Penn was one of the many volunteers and ambassadors working at the booth for LGBTQ+ youth charity Just Like Us.

The 21-year-old from Manchester was asking adult attendees to help with a project where they wrote notes to their younger selves. Deia recalls that the idea, perhaps initially expected to be a straightforward ask, proved to be more tricky than imagined.

“While some gave us wonderful, thoughtful responses that inform our work, the overwhelming majority told us it was too difficult to think about their younger selves,” Deia tells the M.E.N. “For the vast majority of LGBTQ+ people, school was a torment, and graduation represents an opportunity to leave that environment, and the person we became to survive it, behind.”

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It was a stark reminder to Deia that the work she does to help navigate LGBTQ+ youth today plays a crucial role in ensuring more people don’t grow up with those same experiences. As an ambassador for Just Like Us, Deia goes into schools to deliver workshops and talks to raise awareness of the LGBTQ+ community and to help combat discrimination and bullying.

It’s something that many LGBTQ+ people, with Deia included, wish they had when they were discovering their identity whilst at school. “Straight adults failing LGBTQ+ youth is an old story," Deia explains, "but LGBTQ+ adults are failing LGBTQ+ youth too by letting our pain stop us from looking back and breaking the cycle of silence and shame.

“Being an ambassador has offered me a chance to face that pain and do right