Dear colleague or cooperation partner.

Since 1 June 2008 I have been working with great passion and pleasure as a specific social worker at COC Haaglanden. A rewarding position that is unique in its kind in the Netherlands.

In the past period I have been able to provide long-term psychosocial assistance to more than 450 clients, I was responsible for information and advice to an even larger group of LGBTs or people from their network, I gave several training courses to professionals in the field and I my colleague Marianne Steijn has described a methodology regarding LGBT specific assistance.

I met you during this work.

With these and other activities of the Specialized Social Work, I wanted to contribute, together with you, to the acceptance, integration and well-being of LGBT people in our region and beyond. I look back on this period with great satisfaction and pride.

My experiences and client contacts have strengthened my conviction that an association such as COC Haaglanden and Specialized Social Work in particular is and remains necessary for the future.

After a long thought process, however, I had to decide to end my employment at COC Haaglanden. This means that I will formally leave COC Haaglanden on 1 September 2016.

Together with my colleagues and the board, I will ensure a proper transfer of my tasks and make agreements about how the expertise built up in the field of LGBT-specific assistance can be guaranteed as best as possible for COC Haaglanden for now and in the future.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for the cooperation and express the hope that we will meet again.

This opportunity is great because I will certainly remain involved with the target group and the objective that COC Haaglanden stands for, promoting the emancipation, integration and well-being of LGBT people in the widest sense of the word.

See you soon!

Stephen van Veldhoven