In 2024, Rainbow Railroad launched the Queer Forced Displacement Initiative (QFDI), a two-year project to establish an international multi-stakeholder network to improve access to protection and durable solutions for LGBTQI+ FDPs.
Insights from our Work: The Queer Forced Displacement Crisis at Scale - Convening a Global Network
We're sharing key insights from our work last year. Read more about the Queer Forced Displacement Initiative in our 2024 Annual Report: Understanding the State of Global LGBTQI+ Persecution
Across nearly every region of the world, movements for queer liberation are undergoing a moment of intense pressure and existential threat. For individuals caught at the intersections of LGBTQI+ identity and refugee status, these conditions are made more severe. With exponential growth in the urgency of, and need to, support queer forcibly displaced people, tackling these challenges requires both short-term, emergency interventions and a proactive strategy, aimed at sustaining existing movements through the turbulent storms ahead.
In 2024, Rainbow Railroad launched the Queer Forced Displacement Initiative (QFDI), a two-year project to establish an international multi-stakeholder network to improve access to protection and durable solutions for LGBTQI+ FDPs. The QFDI emerges from the reality that LGBTQI+ refugees are uniquely vulnerable to violence, marginalization, and discrimination on their journeys to find safety.
May 9, 2024. Photo: Justin Tang. Swathi Sekhar, Rainbow Railroad’s Director of Protection Initiatives, introduces the Queer Forced Displacement Initiative at the closing reception event for Dignity Network Canada’s roundtables in May 2024.
LGBTQI+ people experience direct persecution in countries of origin, in transit and host communities. They face systemic barriers in accessing humanitarian assistance or safe pathways, and experience exclusion and discrimination within existing protection systems. In the face of these complex conditions, LGBTQI+ people with lived experience, civil society organizations, international organizations and government actors from across the globe are generating creative strategies and solutions. And yet, to date, there exists no sustained global institutional space to capture and share this critical collective expertise to strengthen local, regional and international responses. The QFDI bridges this critical gap and serves as a long-term institutional platform for generating protection solutions for LGBTQI+ communities in forced displacement. It will also be a platform for mobilizing urgent response efforts for crises affecting LGBTQI+ communities.
Centring Lived Experiences: Global Consultations for the QFDI
Last year, we held the first global roundtable consultations in Mexico and South Africa, with additional consultations planned throughout 2025 in key transit countries in the East and Horn of Africa and Great Lakes region, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific. Preliminary findings indicate that LGBTQI+ FDPs are increasingly vulnerable to the rise of anti-LGBTQI+ and anti-refugee policies in multiple regions. Early recommendations point to the need to center the voices of individuals with lived expertise in policy-making, and for international bodies to partner with LGBTQI+ civil society organizations on solutions. As one activist at the Mexico roundtable shared, centering the voices of LGBTQI+ persons with lived or active experiences of forced displacement must be a core tenet of the QFDI:
“There are a lot of support networks, but refugee voices are not heard or listened to. The help is not actually being seen or experienced. People are facing discrimination in official government offices. It’s like a vicious cycle, we talk and talk about the issue, but people are not really getting support.”
After completing the initial roundtables, the global political landscape shifted dramatically. Long-standing networks of LGBTQI+ civil society organizations and human rights defenders were devastated by massive U.S. foreign aid funding cuts, with many forced to cut staff or close — including key QFDI partners. In this context, it is imperative to leverage the QFDI as a strategic tool to hold the global refugee protection system accountable and ensure it meaningfully includes LGBTQI+ people who have been systematically excluded.
You can read more about the Queer Forced Displacement Initiative in our 2024 Annual Report: Understanding the State of Global LGBTQI+ Persecution