Every June, the LGBT+ community and its allies come together for Pride to celebrate love and friendship, show how far LGBT+ rights have come, and raise awareness of the issues still affecting the community.
On this, the 50th anniversary of the Pride movement in the UK, we took the opportunity to celebrate with our LGBT+ members, recognise the tremendous contribution they make to their communities every day as magistrates, and acknowledge the progress that’s been made towards greater equality in the magistracy and the work that is still to be done to ensure that those who identify as LGBT+ feel able to become magistrates.
We also sought to raise awareness and expand the membership of our LGBT+ network and to encourage LGBT+ people to consider applying to join the magistracy.
To this end, among other activities, we:
- Visibly demonstrated our support for our LGBT+ members, the LGBT+ community and the Pride movement more broadly by amending our most central of brand assets, our logo, to feature the Progress Pride flag for the month of June.
- Launched a dedicated webpage for our LGBT+ network.
- Developed member-only content, including a list of top Pride events to attend and an article in our bimonthly magazine showcasing how our LGBT+ network is helping to ensure that sexuality and gender identity are not barriers to being a magistrate.
- Invited one of our newly-qualified members, Anthony Day, to blog about his experience of being an LGBT+ magistrate and outline why Pride remains as important today as it was 50 years ago.
- Ran a social media campaign that highlighted our commitment to diversity and inclusion in the magistracy, and signposted interested LGBT+ individuals to further information about the role, the application process and how the MA can support them in their journey. This included thanking our LGBT+ members for volunteering, emphasising why inclusion matters, and developing a GIF that explains what magistrates do.
- Encouraged our LGBT+ members and interested allies to join the network to help secure greater inclusivity and visibility of LGBT+ people in the MA and the magistracy more broadly.
While months like this are excellent occasions to recognise our LGBT+ members, we work hard every day to ensure that people of all backgrounds feel able to become and are supported and free from discrimination when sitting as magistrates. If you would like to join us in this endeavour, please consider joining one or more of our diversity and inclusion networks today.
