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The team at Prospect Community Early Education and Care Children’s Centre in Adelaide’s inner North embarked on a rainy day project one strange day in lockdown, and it evolved into a two year long, remarkable journey to more deeply and authentically embed LGBTIQA+ culture into their service. It all began when some members of the educational team had a rare moment of spare capacity and asked the question: What’s in our library? What’s our hidden curriculum? They followed this question with an audit of EVERY book in the service. Once they’d catalogued EVERY book, the classified them by the kind of people, families, abilities, capacities, ages, languages, cultures – everything you could think of – that they explored and represented. They analysed this, and realised that they have a HEAP of books that explore diversity, but most of them sit on shelves, rather than being actively read and used in the programs. It got them thinking: we promote inclusion and diversity, but it’s not visible. How can we fix this? They read through all the requirements and documents and then created a resource lists for areas that we didn’t think were visible enough: abilities, capacities and inclusion, Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander perspectives and truth telling, cultural diversity, language diversity, religious diversity, different celebrations, gender roles, family types – the list went on! The team became particularly excited by including and celebrating family diversity in the service in a way that reflects the broader community that the service operates within. So they decided to embark upon a long project to achieve Rainbow Tick Accreditation through Rainbow Health Australia – and in March this year were announced as the first early childhood education and care service in Australia to achieve Rainbow Tick approval status through this organisation. I spoke to Kerri, the Director at Prospect Community Early Education and Care and asked about what the team did to get the service ready for Accreditation. Kerri told me that the first thing they did was create a resource list and budget line for LGBTIQA+ resources (and they didn’t stop there, they created a budget line for a large variety of diversity that reflected their particular Prospect Community Early Education and Care community, but that they felt was important in any Australian children’s service). Once they had the resources they needed, they spoke to families and found out that families wanted to feel included in the service “without exclusion or focus”. This was really interesting, families wanted to be seen and see their family represented but they also didn’t want to be seen as ‘special’ or to stand out because of their diversity status. To do this, the service made some subtle symbol and sign decisions, such as adding a rainbow door mat at the entrance to each classroom, in addition to the local Kaurna Land doormat at the entrance. They made posters for inside the staff room to celebrate diversity, and enabled features on IT systems so that staff could state their preferred pronouns and also bought pronoun, ally and LGBTIQA+ pins for staff to wear. They reviewed documentation and made sure they used inclusive language such as “family” and “parent” or “caregiver” rather than ‘Mother’ or ‘Father’. They slowly and gently removed references to children’s pronouns in observations and other documentation to read “’Rachel’ showed an act of self compassion today when finding the weighted blanket and wrapping them self up in it”, rather than ‘she’, ‘her’ etc. The idea behind this was that while children may or may not experience gender dysphoria now, they will keep these pieces of documentation and may review them as teenagers or adults and may experience gender dysphoria then – so they decided to be sensitive to these children in the future too. A number of changes they made were done with very little cost, including: •reviewing uniform policies, and made sure these allowed all team members to dress in the way they feel reflects their gender identity •creating a LGBTQIA+ risk assessment for specific risks for the community and what needed to be addressed •Target of 80% (required) and 100% (desired) training on LGBTQIA+ inclusion and •Diversity and inclusion statement for LGBTQIA+ •LGBTQIA+ staffing Policy •LGBTQIA+ inclusion Policy If you’re interested in how your service can promote LGBTIQA+ inclusion, follow us on Instagram @ethical_interactions, visit www.rainbowfamilies.com.au and keep your eye on the ECA social media and website for a new and free training program that’s coming out to support LGBTIQA+ inclusion.