Thank you Lisa!

Lisa Vine, our Young Trans Centre of Excellence officer is leaving the Centre and we wanted to thank her for all her achievements and her great dedication. The Leicester LGBT Centre is committed to delivering the great work she started, but we will miss her a lot. Thank you Lisa for starting a project from scratch, supporting so many people and being a great colleague along the way. You will be missed!

Lisa has also told us how she feels about her time here and the project:

‘Leading the Young Transgender Centre of Excellence project has been an absolute honour, privilege and a real career highlight for me. If someone had told me over two and a half years ago that the project would go on to achieve all that we have achieved I’d have been very excited but perhaps a bit disbelieving.

I am so unbelievably proud of my young people and their families. Supporting them over the last few years has been empowering, humbling and so worthwhile and seeing how far they have come brings more than just one tear to my eye. There is no doubt that this project has changed lives and so many of my young people have said I have saved their life, but it wasn’t just me that has made this project what it is today.

If it wasn’t for the engagement of the young people, their families and also other organisations and professionals whose role is to support young people, this project wouldn’t have been as successful as it is today. It is a huge credit to them and I want to thank them from the bottom of my heart for trusting me with this role and for opening their hearts to me, so that I could support them with so many aspects of their lives. Both BBC Children in Need for funding and the Leicester LGBT Centre for hosting the project deserve a huge thank you and without them this project would never have got off the ground.

One of the young people once called me the ‘fairy trans mother’ and that is something I will never forget. All I ever wanted to do is make a difference, to even just one person, and hearing the wonderful comments over the last few weeks has shown me that this project has helped so many people.

I said at the formal launch event in April 2016, that we were at the beginning of something great, a flagship project. Now we are an award winning regionally embedded service. I wish the LGBT Centre all the best for the future and I know that this project will continue to change the lives of young transgender people across the East Midlands. And long may that continue!’