The overall aim was to raise awareness about barriers faced by LGBTIQA+ people, decipher cliches, provide educational information while increasing the level of knowledge and promoting diversity and inclusion. The implementation goals of the project were to develop and test workshop designs and contents that provide general information as well as support for specific, work-related issues; to develop a handbook with training material and recommendations on scope and setting of the workshops; to develop so-called "Spotlight Exercises" that can be easily implemented in schools, e.g., on human rights in history lessons. Specifically, we wanted to address employees from the three professional fields of health, education and counselling. The background to this approach was the fact that these are areas that affect everyone: Everyone must expect to need medical help at some point; everyone is anchored in the education system and potentially everyone needs support on various topics. Conversely, this means that employees in these three areas must be particularly sensitised and trained in dealing with LGBTIQA+ people if we want to break down barriers and strengthen the trust of queer people in staff of these professions.
Two surveys conducted by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA 2012 & 2019) on a sample of 140,000 people show that discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity is widespread in many areas of daily life, not only in leisure and housing, but also in education, access to social services and primary health care. Transgender and intersex people are most affected. And while respect for human rights is important in all areas of life, it is the latter areas of health, social services and education that are the most urgent, as these are the areas on which people are invariably dependent. Changing prejudicial or discriminatory attitudes and/or behaviour requires a lot of education and awareness raising. The Q-Learning project was dedicated to this important work.