Outhouse East

Outhouse East provides vital support and guidance to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans or gender questioning (LGBTQ+) people in Essex,

Outhouse East started as the Colchester Gay Switch board that started 40 years ago. There is no other LGBTQ+ charity which serves the Essex community in the same way.

We also deliver Essex-wide LGBTQ+ awareness training to public, private, and non-profit agencies across the county. In 2018/19 we delivered 82 sessions to more than 1300 people, these focus on tackling conscious and unconscious bias and building awareness of the specific issues faced by community members both at work, in health and throughout their lives.

This work combined with strong partnerships with other organisations and individuals, has enabled us to build a strong, cohesive and influential voice for the LGBTQ+ in Essex

We currently offer a variety of service ourselves, which include a counselling service, which is overseen by a coordinator and a clinical supervisor and currently have 10 counsellors who volunteer their services to us ,all seeing between 2-4 clients each.

Two youth groups run weekly one in Colchester and one in Basildon ,with an average of 10-25 young people attending, however over 55 young people have registered with us accessing support when needed, we also offer a specific young people's counsellor service and offer 1-1 support too.

In addition to these services we offer :

Saturday social,(colchester base)

A support group for parents whose children are transitioning running (Colchester base).

We have two Trans support groups.

A women's craft group

We have agreements in place with Metro (HIV support), Next Chapter (a domestic abuse charity) and Cara (centre for action on rape and abuse) who are based in our centre supporting our community.

We would like to build on our current service delivery, to become all inclusive of any support needed, to ensure stability for our community and ourselves.