GRIN Campaign, Global Respect in Education, is a transatlantic non-profit organisation and

advocacy group Advocacy groups, also known as lobby groups, interest groups, special interest groups, pressure groups, or public associations, use various forms of advocacy or lobbying to influence public opinion and ultimately public policy. They play an impor ...

which campaigns primarily for

lesbian A lesbian is a homosexual woman or girl. The word is also used for women in relation to their sexual identity or sexual behavior, regardless of sexual orientation, or as an adjective to characterize or associate nouns with female homosexu ...

gay ''Gay'' is a term that primarily refers to a homosexual person or the trait of being homosexual. The term originally meant 'carefree', 'cheerful', or 'bright and showy'. While scant usage referring to male homosexuality dates to the late ...

bisexual Bisexuality is romantic attraction, sexual attraction, or sexual behavior toward both males and females. It may also be defined as the attraction to more than one gender, to people of both the same and different gender, or the attraction t ...

transgender A transgender (often shortened to trans) person has a gender identity different from that typically associated with the sex they were sex assignment, assigned at birth. The opposite of ''transgender'' is ''cisgender'', which describes perso ...

, and

queer ''Queer'' is an umbrella term for people who are non-heterosexual or non- cisgender. Originally meaning or , ''queer'' came to be used pejoratively against LGBTQ people in the late 19th century. From the late 1980s, queer activists began to ...

/ questioning (

LGBTQ LGBTQ people are individuals who are lesbian, Gay men, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or questioning (sexuality and gender), questioning. Many variants of the initialism are used; LGBTQIA+ people incorporates intersex, Asexuality, asexual, ...

) people's social and political equality in education."Teens from Sussex School Go Public with Their GRIN Photo Campaign to Combat Bulling of Gays in Schools", ''UK Gay News'', December 31, 2010. It seeks to end

discrimination Discrimination is the process of making unfair or prejudicial distinctions between people based on the groups, classes, or other categories to which they belong or are perceived to belong, such as race, gender, age, class, religion, or sex ...

harassment Harassment covers a wide range of behaviors of an offensive nature. It is commonly understood as behavior that demeans, humiliates, and intimidates a person, and it is characteristically identified by its unlikelihood in terms of social and ...

, and

bullying Bullying is the use of force, coercion, Suffering, hurtful teasing, comments, or threats, in order to abuse, aggression, aggressively wikt:domination, dominate, or intimidate one or more others. The behavior is often repeated and habitual. On ...

based on

sexual orientation Sexual orientation is an enduring personal pattern of romantic attraction or sexual attraction (or a combination of these) to persons of the opposite sex or gender, the same sex or gender, or to both sexes or more than one gender. Patterns ar ...

gender identity Gender identity is the personal sense of one's own gender. Gender identity can correlate with a person's assigned sex or can differ from it. In most individuals, the various biological determinants of sex are congruent and consistent with the in ...

and

gender expression Gender expression (or gender presentation) is a person's behavior, mannerisms, interests, and appearance that are associated with gender in a particular cultural context, typically understood in terms of masculinity and femininity. Gender expr ...

in all educational institutes with an underlying message that "being different was 'cool'". It is one of the first campaigns of its kind to originate outside the United States, be run by students and intentionally international.Tom C. "Gaytalk Live", 4 December 2010, Episode 048/383, ''Queer Public Radio''.Jason Chu, B. Brian Topaz editor, "Put On a GRIN and Stand for Equality", ''SF Gam Newpower'', 9 December 2011. The campaign supports both direct action and a viral photographic protest, known as “RESPECT” to help "make respecting people in school a cool idea" and ignorance to be “uncool”.Bryan Moore, "Respect protest: Anti-bullying effort launches beyond the United States", ''San Diego Gay & Lesbian News'', December 24th, 2010. The photographs show people in front of a white backdrop wearing block rainbow colors with “RESPECT” painted on their face in the colors of the

pride flag A pride flag is any flag that represents a segment or part of the LGBTQ community. ''Pride'' in this case refers to the notion of LGBTQ pride. The terms ''LGBTQ flag'' and ''queer flag'' are often used interchangeably. Pride flags can represen ...

. The campaign was created on October 29, 2010, by

Bedales School Bedales School is a coeducational boarding and day public school, in the village of Steep, near the market town of Petersfield in Hampshire, England. It was founded in 1893 by Amy Garrett Badley and John Haden Badley in reaction to the li ...

student Claudia White. The RESPECT photographs are featured on the campaign's website, as well as

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

and

Flickr Flickr ( ) is an image hosting service, image and Online video platform, video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was previously a co ...

. The campaign also had over 1000 followers on

Twitter Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...

within a week of its website going live.

History

GRIN Campaign was initiated in response to a rash of widely publicized bullying-related suicides of juvenile, particularly, LGBTQ youth, including that of Tyler Clementi. It was established as a UK and US alternative to other, older LGBT civil rights advocacy organizations, which did not place as much emphasis on education, and focused only on the United States. The campaign hopes to build awareness in the same spirit as the Day of Silence,

It Gets Better Project It Gets Better is an Internet-based 501(c)3 nonprofit with a mission to uplift, empower, and connect lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) youth around the globe. It was founded in the United States by gay activist, author, m ...

, No on 8 campaigns and efforts to repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell. The campaign coordinated with Spirit Day (October 20) when people are encouraged to wear purple symbolic of spirit from the rainbow flag. In 2011 the campaign worked to add "amendments to the UK’s Educational White Paper, started developing anti-bullying and LGBT rights lesson plans, and wrote letters to corporations in the UK that they believed were being homophobic or transphobic." In the summer of 2012 the campaign received a grant to travel to

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

in the United States to teach their lesson plans about discrimination based bullying and utilize the RESPECT photographic campaign. In 2013 the campaign started a petition to add the word 'transphobia' to the

Oxford English Dictionary The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') is the principal historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP), a University of Oxford publishing house. The dictionary, which published its first editio ...

and the dictionary lexicon of

Microsoft Office Microsoft Office, MS Office, or simply Office, is an office suite and family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. The first version of the Office suite, announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at CO ...

. The petition was hosted on the website Change.org and gained nearly 10,000 signatures. By June, both Microsoft and the Oxford English Dictionary had added the word 'transphobia' to their dictionary lexicons.

References

External links

Official GRIN site
{{DEFAULTSORT:Grin Campaign International LGBTQ political advocacy groups Anti-bullying charities Anti-bullying campaigns LGBTQ and education

History

See also

References

External links