About the Collective
The Iraqi Social Progress Collective is a mutual aid network for queer Iraqis and people inside Iraq who are still figuring it out. We started this because the existing resources didn't speak to our reality, so we built our own.
The site is mostly health information, digital safety, and ways to find community. Everything sits on top of trust, privacy, and harm reduction.
Our Principles
- Mutual aid, not charity. Peers helping peers. Nobody here is above anybody. We share what we figured out so the next person doesn't have to figure it out alone.
- Privacy-first. No tracking, no cookies, no analytics, no personal information collected. Every choice we make starts from the safety of whoever is reading.
- Made by Iraqis, for Iraqis. The people writing this either live the Iraqi queer experience or have lived it. The guidance is written for the country we are actually in, not the country a Western LGBT org imagines.
- Not affiliated with any government or party. We are independent. No political ties, no government funding, no NGO oversight, no foreign organization pulling strings. Our community is the only constituency.
What We Are NOT
Being honest about our limits matters as much as the work itself.
- Not a charity. We don't hand out money or material aid. We are a peer network that shares information and offers community support.
- Not a media outlet. We aren't journalists. What we publish is community-written guidance and curated information, not original news reporting.
- Not asylum-seeking assistance. We can't help with asylum applications, legal cases, or relocation. For that you need organisations that actually specialise in refugee work; reach out to us via the community page and we can sometimes point you somewhere useful.
- Not a substitute for a doctor. The health guides are harm-reduction information. They aren't medical advice. See a qualified clinician when you can, especially for HRT or mental health.
How the Collective Is Structured
No headquarters, no president, no nonprofit form to fill out. The collective is loose, distributed, and held together by encrypted messaging.
Contributors stay anonymous or pseudonymous. The site itself is static and minimal on purpose: it loads quickly, it doesn't depend on third-party services, and it doesn't leave much of a trail on a reader's device.
We chose this shape deliberately. In a place where visibility can land you in prison or worse, being decentralised is part of the safety architecture, not just an aesthetic preference.
Built by queer Iraqis and friends of Iraq.