Brophy was proud to celebrate Wear It Purple Day on Friday, August 28. Alongside lots of purple across our organisation, our people were invited to attend an online session with ACON focused on what it means to be an effective ally.
The engaging workshop explored how allyship goes beyond good intentions and requires meaningful action, helping participants build the confidence, skills and understanding to support inclusion both at work and beyond. The session covered how to respond to common questions and misconceptions, practical ways to intervene in non-inclusive situations, and the small actions that can help create meaningful change.
What is Wear It Purple Day?
Wear It Purple Day is an annual event held across Australia where people wear purple to show support for LGBTQIA+ young people. The day was founded in 2010 in response to global media coverage of LGBTQIA+ youth suicides linked to bullying and rejection, with the aim of showing young people that they are accepted, respected and celebrated for who they are.
The gesture is simple – wearing a single colour – but it functions as a visible, low-barrier way for schools, workplaces, sporting clubs and community organisations to signal support.
Why visibility matters
Research and lived experience both point to the same conclusion: LGBTQIA+ young people who feel supported by the adults and institutions around them have significantly better mental health outcomes than those who don’t. Visibility plays a direct role in that support. When a young person sees a teacher, coach, employer or local organisation openly backing a day like this, it signals that acceptance isn’t conditional or hidden, it’s present in their everyday environment.
This matters more in some settings than others. In larger cities, LGBTQIA+ young people often have access to dedicated communities, events and services where diversity is highly visible. In regional areas, that visibility can be harder to find. A young person may be the only openly LGBTQIA+ person in their school or sporting club, or may not know of anyone else in their community who shares their experience, even when that isn’t actually the case. Visible signs of support help counter that sense of isolation.
What support looks like in south-west Victoria
For young people in Warrnambool, Portland, Hamilton and surrounding towns, community connection tends to run deep, most people are known to their schools, workplaces and sporting clubs, sometimes across generations. This closeness is often a strength, but for a young person still working out their identity, it can also make standing out feel riskier than it might elsewhere.
Local organisations marking Wear It Purple Day, through a shirt, a sticker, a social media post, or a public statement of support, help extend that same sense of community to LGBTQIA+ young people specifically, showing that they don’t need to leave the region to find acceptance.
Beyond the day itself
Wear It Purple Day is intended as a starting point rather than an end point. Ongoing support looks like:
- Schools, workplaces and clubs where young people feel comfortable being themselves year-round, not just on one day
- Challenging homophobic, biphobic and transphobic language or behaviour when it occurs
- Using the names and pronouns a person has asked to be addressed by
- Not assuming a person’s gender or sexuality
- Listening to young people’s experiences without expecting them to explain or justify themselves
The responsibility for creating these environments sits with the adults, institutions and communities around young people, not with young people themselves.
Wear It Purple Day isn’t about asking LGBTQIA+ young people to be different, or to be visible or courageous on a daily basis. It’s a reminder — reinforced through a simple, visible gesture — that their community has a place for them as they are, regardless of the size of the town they grow up in.