Our Work

Humanity in Need-Rainbow Refugees (HIN) builds relationships with LGBT+ people in Africa including those from Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, and Great Lakes countries. Queer African people and their families face violence, neglect, and persecution from neighbors, police, and others. HIN also works with not-for-profit organizations to provide funding for food, housing, medical supplies, and assistance in seeking refugee status in welcoming nations.

Meet Onyx

Onyx is one of the many LGBT+ African people Humanity in Need-Rainbow Refugees supports. His own father wanted to kill him because of his sexual identity. Onyx shares his story of survival as an LGBT+ person living under persecution in Uganda and Kenya in an interview on the "No Sex Please I'm Religious" podcast.

Meet Eric

Eric was living in Kenya where he came close to death due to a lack of food and abuse. With our support, he was able to come to Australia. Here he shows off his Fork Lift Licence, which will enable him to secure employment and a future.

Kakuma Refugee Camp

Kakuma Refugee Camp is a locus for LGBT+ refugees, presumably to allow

them to gather safely and collectively.

In reality, it provides a target for violent attacks and ongoing death threats, perpetrated by homophobic neighbors.

Here are people with incredible courage and resilience; having fled their homes for sanctuary in another land, being denied all but the most cursory subsistence levels of support from UNHCR and other agencies, at the behest of a largely uncaring world. Within our human family, they add fabulosity to a locale filled with scorpions and snakes, homophobes and hunger, malaria and machetes. They are rainbow people who live in a world that still largely fears difference.

Geoff Allshorn is a founding member of HIN-Rainbow Refugees. You can read more of his work at

You Must Needs Be Strangers… – Humanist Blog (humanist-world.net)