Our Activities

Sappho for Equality sometimes travels inbound to understand the self, sometimes its journeys becomes outbound to communicate and connect with the larger civil society and sometimes it works on forging bonds with specific groups, communities and  organizations.

The inbound activities are specifically for community people. Some of these include:

  • Creating a safe space and providing emotional support
  • Running a helpline
  • Providing subsidized counseling services to gender-sexual minority persons
  • Creating a space for peer counselling or building connections with and between peer groups to give them required support
  • Crisis intervention 
  • Providing skill-building training and creating opportunities for livelihood generation
  • Organising workshops, meetings, discussions and debates, study circles, film screenings for persons with non-normative gender-sexual orientation and  especially for those who are assigned gender female at birth


Our outbound activities are conceived with a focus on the larger society, dialoguing with non-community people to enhance communication and awareness. These include:

  • Awareness raising programs through discussion and debate forums, theater, dance, music, sporting events and other entertainment related activities
  • Awareness raising and sensitisation programs with various institutions 
  • Co-organising one of the oldest LGBTQ film festivals in India since 2007
  • Conducting the annual Sexuality Academy/ Jounotar Pathshala
  • Organising the National/Regional Conference/Seminar/Panel Discussion on gender-sexuality issues focused on contemporary gender-sexual minority livings and experiences.
  • Running the first sexuality resource center in eastern India, "Chetana Resource Center"


Networking is a very important step for us for building bridges with other organisations / groups / collectives that help take forward our cause to stop discrimination against gender-sexual minorities. These activities include

  • Engaging with feminist and queer collectives
  • Actively participating in gender-sexual minority community activities across the country and beyond
  • Alliance building with other minority and human rights causes, organisations, schools, colleges, universities and other youth and student groups to stop discrimination against gender-sexual minorities
  • Conducting awareness raising workshops on gender-sexuality issues with various institutions like educational institutions, national & multinational companies, grassroot informal collectives, cultural groups and many more
  • Communicating with the medical community through discussions around health with an attention on homosexual and transgender identities, and ensuring the wide sharing of good practice guidelines for Gender Affirmative Therapy (GAT)
  • Continuous collaboration through workshops and informal meetings or discussions with grassroot women and college/university students from villages, suburbs and cities


Besides this we also do research, publishing and film production among which some are:

  • Conducting feminist qualitative research independently and in collaboration with universities of India and overseas
  • Publishing bi-annual, bi-lingual magazine Swakanthey - In Our Own Voice
  • Creating and publishing lucid and readable materials on gender-sexuality in Bangla
  • Publishing research papers
  • Publishing IEC materials
  • Producing feature films, short films and documentaries for mass awareness raising

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