An application process, interview and a couple of revisions of my plans later, and I found out in June that I had been awarded a Churchill Fellowship for 2024. I received funding to visit FVD in Madrid, as well as organisations providing LGBTQ+ specific housing in Lyon, France and Berlin, Germany, and to carry out online study with organisations in Sweden and the USA, and I have recently started my Fellowship travels.
By meeting with organisations across Europe and the USA, I am learning about good practice, challenges, and innovative ideas for providing care and housing for older LGBTQ+ people. Due to variations in housing and care provision in different countries, I hope that these insights will help me to ‘think outside the box’ of what is possible when working outside of the funding, planning, and commissioning structures we have here in the UK. However, most of all, I want to speak with people with lived experience of these schemes, learn about why they chose to move to them and their advice for developing similar projects in the UK. The differences in LGBTQ+ rights and histories, in different societies in each of these countries, is also of huge interest to me.
As part of a Churchill Fellowship, Fellows are required to produce a report at the end of their learning period. My initial intention was to produce a guide to co-producing specialist schemes, but I am now leaning towards a guide improving the experience of all older LGBTQ+ older people in housing and care settings, as I feel this may have a wider impact.
A brilliant benefit of the Churchill Fellowship is that it is an investment in the individual Fellows as potential changemakers. The whole ethos is that by funding Fellows to travel and learn, they will bring that learning back to the UK and influence change here. I have already been lucky to connect with lots of other fellows from 2024 and previous years, and the wealth of knowledge and learning in a huge range of topics, many of which are relevant to other areas of housing, is incredible.