Outer Spaces Youth Services

OuterSpaces works to celebrate the lives of young people with diverse genders and sexualities in the wider Wellington region through: - Advocacy - Education - Support and - Connecting Youth, families, government, schools and communities. OuterSpaces operates as the parent organisation for four LGBTIQ+ youth groups, based in Wellington:

• School's Out is a Wellington and Lower Hutt support and social group for LGBTIQ young people, for ages 12 - 18. The support group runs every week throughout the year. 30 students a week attend School’s Out
• Tranzform is a Wellington support and social group for gender diverse young people, for ages 15 to 30. The support group runs once every two weeks throughout the year, and holds social events throughout the year
• Naming NZ is an organisation to help transgender, gender diverse and intersex youth with updating their identity documents to correctly reflect their sex and gender. The group produces resources about the process, connects youth with organisations that can help, and can assist with the costs involved 
• The Wellington Binder Exchange is a new group formed to collect, purchase, create and share binders for gender diverse young people in the Wellington region. They provide chest binders free of charge for youth aged 18 and under who do not have the ability to access binders themselves

We could not have achieved our capacity building without the support of Digital Wings technical equipment. We needed to be digital to organise communication, events and support amongst the groups. Having a PC is vital for Google surveys and sheets, arranging training and managing a volunteer database.It has been supercool to have Digital Wings’ support to get digitally organised to run our operations and our outcomes are significant.We have doubled our solid volunteer and trainer base in the 5 months since we received our Digital Wings computers. We have organised and run 2 full training and induction days. We are now able to have a volunteer librarian and designer working alongside the coordinator on the laptop to organise our data systems.We have communications from an average 16 applicants per week. We have organised 10-16 volunteers and 40 youth who attend our other sessions regularly.