If a Transgender person moves out to escape their abusive family or their family that doesn’t accept them. And they want to join a training programme by Periferry, will there be temporary placement provided until they get their placement?
A place to live
Trishala affirms, “Yes, we have offered placement to people who are struggling to find a place to go. So in the past, we have given accommodation. So sometimes what happens is that people get employed and then they would request us to stay for a while until they get their first month’s salary. After that, they can sustain themselves. So to an extent, we do support them. And also depending on our availability and other infrastructural mechanisms, we have rooms available.”
Lack of resources
Periferry is a small organisation, so it is not able to help everyone. “We give the option to stay but only if they are experiencing a very distressing situation and there is actually no other option to do that because we also have a fair share of other people who are going through challenges but unfortunately we are not able to provide that space for everyone but to the ones who are most in need we do try and do our best as well. So yes we can do as much as we have the resources at that point in time, we definitely are open to help.”
Where is the accommodation located?
Trishala here explains the difficulties, “So one major challenge we face while running this programme is to find properties that are Trans inclusive and so we have had the luck of partnering with one of the property owners and we have been able to successfully run our training programmes for a year and a year and a half. But it has been very difficult for us to find spaces that are inclusive and accepting of the community itself and also because as a training programme, our entire process involves things.”
Needs have to be met
“We have needs in terms of infrastructure, so in order to conduct training we will need a training space and for the accommodation again we will need rooms for people who are coming in. Because it is a repetitive process, people keep coming in batch after batch so we need to ensure that we have accommodation for people who are reaching in early or reaching late.”
A partnership
She informs us about a partnership, “So it has been very challenging but right now we have partnered with an association called Indian Social Institute, where we have been able to get because there is a lot of acceptance for the community. There are also really good facilities that we are able to provide for the trainees in the community. So infrastructure is a huge challenge that we are facing till date as well. And that is something that we are constantly trying to look out for solutions for so that is definitely a challenge.”