Barcelona joins the board of the Rainbow Cities Network
Barcelona is a member of the Rainbow Cities Network and one of its founding cities. The network was set up in 2011, and the other founding cities were Amsterdam, Cologne and Turin. It currently has 55 member cities all around the world. Its purpose is to exchange good practices, actions and initiatives between member cities with the aim of increasing the impact of local LGBTI policies.
The twelfth annual meeting of the Rainbow Cities Network was held in Helsinki, Finland, from 25 to 27 September, with municipal representatives from various network cities taking part, including Barcelona City Council.
One of the goals of the meeting was the renewal of the managing board, for which Barcelona put itself forward and was selected alongside Hanover, Cork, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Copenhagen and Paris.
With the inclusion of cities such as Sao Paulo, Mexico City and Barcelona in the management board, the LGBTI cities network aims to expand further into Southern Europe and Latin America to gain greater diversity, thereby incorporating more perspectives, experience and knowledge.
Over the two days, representatives from Barcelona took part in three technical working groups: “Public policies and LGBTIQ+ statistics. Good practices in collecting data”; “Strategies for combating LGBTI-phobia at work”, and “BIPOC-LGBTIQ+ Intersectionality”.
They also took part in a guided tour of Helsinki and its central library from an LGBTI perspective, met with representatives from the city’s LGBTI organisations, and attended a talk by Kersti Juva, a pioneering writer in the fight for LGBTI rights in Finland.
Other strategic and logistics questions relating to the running of the network were addressed; the subject for the annual photography exhibition was chosen as “Sports and LGBTI” for 2025, and a vote was held resulting in the French city of Bordeaux being selected as the member city to host the annual meeting in 2026.
To round off the meeting, the city of Helsinki gave the intersectional LGBTI flag to the city of Mexico City as the next city to host the annual Rainbow Cities Network meeting in 2025.
