Employee network METRO Pride honored with BIG IMPACT Initiative Award

20 October 2020

METRO Pride received the BIG IMPACT Initiative Award 2020 by the PROUT AT WORK Foundation for the initiative "Too gay to donate blood? Amendment of the Haemotherapy Directive for non-discriminatory working environments required!"

METRO Pride receives Big Impact Award
Members of METRO Pride receive the award

On 15 October the Germany-wide LGBT*IQ Awards of the PROUT-AT-WORK Foundation were presented. Our employee network METRO Pride received the BIG IMPACT Initiative Award 2020 for the initiative "Too gay to donate blood? Amendment of the Haemotherapy Directive for non-discriminatory working environments required!" This approach was initiated by METRO Pride and METRO, together with 13 other companies in April 2020.

Since then the position paper has already activated a political discussion and caused a first movement towards non-discriminatory blood donations for homosexual, bisexual men and transgender persons. The German Federal Ministry of Health announced that it intends to propose in November 2020 that the previous regulation of the 12-month deferral period shall be reduced to 4 months.

The regulation is a first intermediate success, the demand of the position paper to take a risk-behaviour-oriented approach instead of assessing risk groups will remain and METRO Pride will certainly continue to work with other partners to achieve this goal.
Learn more about the initiative and the position paper: Digital Office Public Policy